The trees are all coated with hoar-frost again. It may LOOK beautiful, but the roads and walkways are covered with the same slippery, treacherous condensation. Visibility is less than a kilometer. It cleared up yesterday about noon, and I'm hoping it clears up even sooner today.
Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Virden, Illinois; College Point, New York; Bors, Sweden; Davis, California; Jeffersonville, Ohio; City of London, UK, and Cinisi, Sicily, Italy.
Check out:
Theater X-Net
Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged day by the Seine.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley
Visit: Michael's Montana Web ArchiveTheater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
NEW UPDATES! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring:
1930's Rocketry,
Spitfires of the Spaceways and especially
Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in the Saturday Matinees and Sunday Comics.
Many thanks to Jim Keefe (
Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's FIRST illustrator of the 21st, for including my efforts on his
Flash Gordon Resources Page -- along with actual creators like Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, and others!
Charity Alert: Play the
FreeRice Game -- improve your vocabulary, and donate food to the United Nations. Check into
Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site. Keep that Resolution to click on
The Hunger Site every day. BTW --
AIDtoCHILDREN.com is a bit simpler than
FreeRice Game.
In The Community: The
Hockaday Museum of Art has
Seldom Seen, from the Permanent Collection,
First Nations Artists -- Contemporary / Traditional,
Crown of the Continent, and
Ace of Diamonds. Dan Fagre's new show about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park is a true labor of love by himself and other scientists from the USGS. Here's
another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and now.
Media Watch: Fifty years ago, a small plane crashed in Iowa, killing all aboard. Three of its passengers were Charles Hardin (Buddy) Holly, J.P. (Big Bopper) Richardson, and Richie (Valens) Valenzuela. Ex-DJ Richardson's songs were selling, and his career as a comedy act was beginning to go well. Valenzuela was the real star of their winter tour -- he had three major hit records at the time of his death at the age of seventeen. Holly had recently relocated to New York City after his marriage. The rest of the Crickets were back in New Mexico after an intense year or two on the road. Holly's new bass player, another DJ named Waylon Jennings, had given up his seat on the plane. Bobby Vee continued on the ill-fated tour with future Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keyes in tow.
Eddie Cochran recorded the syrupy, but sincere,
Three Stars, honoring his two friends Holly and Valenzuela, plus Richardson. It is chilling to realize that Cochran died on tour in the UK little more than a year later, in an auto accident which also shortened the life of fellow great Gene Vincent.
The shine of newness wore off of Rock and Roll after 1958 -- Elvis Presley went into the U.S. Army, Little Richard went into the church, the Payola scandals upset the balance of power in mass media, and Tin Pan Alley tried to assert its old control. Some very good Rock music was made during this transition between the decades, but its potential was in eclipse for a few years after that Iowa plane crash, for a host of reasons.
The Beatles (inspired by the Crickets) and the subsequent British Invasion was a whole new day for Rock in the winter of 1963. The music of Buddy Holly colored much of its first dawning. Holly's name was on a half-dozen albums released by producer Norman Petty, containing lots of fabulous songs. (I know because I heard them ALL when my friend Jon Ludwig collected them from cut-out bins in the late 60's.) Major and minor British musicians mined a motherload of sonic gold, and sold it back to an eager USA.
Valenzuela's story was told in the 80's movie
La Bamba. The earlier
Buddy Holly Story turned out to be an important movie, and became a musical stage play which is being performed somewhere RIGHT NOW, no matter when you read this essay. Nobody's made a movie about J.P. Richardson, though. A few years before he died from diabetes, Waylon Jennings told a story on television about trying to take a nap on his tour bus before a show:
This man sits next to me while I'm resting, and says:
"I'm the Big Bopper JUNIOR!" Tell me about my daddy!"
I say: "Your dad was a dice-shootin' son of a gun, and a good ole boy! Now how in the Hell did you get on this bus?"
The 50's -- Bright and Dark
(L to R) Beauties Joan Collins and Jayne Mansfield, preening at the makeup table before an event. Ms. Collins achieved a private life, a long career in filmmaking, and is still with us. Ms. Mansfield was an archetypal Face of the Fifties. She starred in The Girl Can't Help It, which also featured Eddie Cochran (see above) singing 20 Flight Rock. Mansfield eventually lost her private life to the voracious maw of publicity, made films of ever-decreasing quality, and died in a late-night car wreck halfway through the 60's.
Her daughter, Mariska Hargitay, is a modern TV star. I received a
long comment about this post which quotes a man named Johnny Hughes, telling vivid stories about early Rock and Roll, Buddy Holly, and Lubbock, Texas. He jumps to the mid-70's for more tales about other Texas musicians, but that's OK.
