Rage, Patrick rage. Rage against the dying of the light and the wilting
of my artistic ardor. O'Neil, inflamed and blustery, takes to his
keyboard in San Francisco. He is beyond frustration. Until recently, he
was pacing outside his South-of-Market abode -- shouting, tearing at
his hair, rending his clothing -- banging a metal cooking spoon against
a hub cap for anyone who might pay heed. But the now, Patrick's
streetwise muse seizes him, shakes him, and the words finally come
spilling out onto the sidewalk ...
This is Bellingham's blogg.
This is Bellingham's blogg on Crack.
This is Bellingham's blogg on an illiterate crime spree.
This is Bellingham's blogg doing a ten year bid in Folsom.
This is Bellingham's blogg making parole.
This is Bellingham's blogg struggling in a halfway house.
This is Bellingham's blogg in group therapy dealing with its issues.
This is Bellingham's blogg in denial blaming Bellingham for all its
woes.
This is Bellingham's blogg on a murderous rampage of payback.
This is Bellingham being forced to flee the country.
This is Bellingham forging a new life in Lithuania.
This is Bellingham left wondering how this all happened.
This is Bellingham wishing he had spent more quality time with his
little degenerate blogg.
Let Bellingham's pain be a lesson to you all. Don't let this happen to
your blogg! Nurture the little bastard, even when you don't feel like
it, even when you're busy, even when you got nothing to say! Or you're
blogg may go bad too!
(Signed) The Society for the Emancipation of Bloggs and other Bits of
Superannuated Verbiage.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Sunday, September 19, 2004
tyger, tyger, burning brightman
Did you see any of that Sarah Brightman in Las Vegas miasma on PBS the
other night? A harem motif? What is she thinking? It was so gauche, all
that was missing were Siegfried and Roy's tigers. But it was more
bungle than Bengal. The beasts can't be too busy these days. Their gigs
suddenly dried up. I heard they're desperately trying to cut a deal
with "America's Funniest Videos. Really, I wonder what the tigers are
doing these days. Racing around Roy's bed until they turn into butter?
Now that I have disgraced myself with that offensive diatribe ...
Doctors prepared to do face transplant (from louisville
courier-journal)
Even as ethicists and others raise concerns, a team of doctors from
Louisville and the Netherlands says it is ready to perform a face
transplant.
"There arrives a point in time when the procedure should simply be
done. We submit that that time is now," the researchers wrote in an
article scheduled for publication today in The American Journal of
Bioethics.
OK, where do I sign up??
other night? A harem motif? What is she thinking? It was so gauche, all
that was missing were Siegfried and Roy's tigers. But it was more
bungle than Bengal. The beasts can't be too busy these days. Their gigs
suddenly dried up. I heard they're desperately trying to cut a deal
with "America's Funniest Videos. Really, I wonder what the tigers are
doing these days. Racing around Roy's bed until they turn into butter?
Now that I have disgraced myself with that offensive diatribe ...
Doctors prepared to do face transplant (from louisville
courier-journal)
Even as ethicists and others raise concerns, a team of doctors from
Louisville and the Netherlands says it is ready to perform a face
transplant.
"There arrives a point in time when the procedure should simply be
done. We submit that that time is now," the researchers wrote in an
article scheduled for publication today in The American Journal of
Bioethics.
OK, where do I sign up??
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Our Man, Sir Godfrey
> Several years ago, Herb Caen, the late, great San Francisco columnist,
> asked me, "Bellingham, what is your university experience?" I was
> eager to tell him the truth: I went to music school but that was
> hardly an ardent excursion into scholarship. Between classes, I had to
> go on my own to San Francisco's City College to get a decent encounter
> with the German language. I went to New York University's Film School
> -- for about ten minutes. Not even long enough to complete a short
> subject. I dropped out to work at a movie house, the Bleecker Street
> Cinema. At least I could watch movies that way.
> "Gee, Herb," I told Caen, "I guess you might say I'm an autodidact."
> "Oh, I know what that means, " Caen shot back instantly. "That's when
> you drive yourself crazy."
> Herb was always very quick. When I spent time with him, I often felt
> like George Fenneman trying to keep up with Groucho Marx. But I did
> all right.
> I always take an interest when I hear successful stories about people
> who are largely self-taught. But few are as vivid as the biography of
> Britain's Sir Godfrey Hounsfield who never went to university but was
> the preeminent leader in computer technology and later developed the
> CAT scan. He claimed a Nobel Prize for the latter. It goes to show:
> who needs to do homework? There is more than one way to scan a CAT.
Perhaps a formal education might have gotten in the way of his
genius. And just imagine the lives he saved along the way. He just had
an understand of mathematics and physiology that defies explanation. He
got most of his inspiration while taking long, country walks. This is
one part of the Hounsfield psyche that I can understand. If the world
took more long walks, we would have a much more serene planet.
> Like most great inventors, Hounsfield had unlimited courage. When it
> was time to put the kosher cow brains aside in the laboratory and turn
> to human trials, he placed his own head in the device that would later
> be known as the CAT scan. God knows he risked having his own brains
> reduced to the intellect of a kosher bovine. Mezuzah done told me.
> And he was modest. Hounsfield was uncomfortable with the awards and
> accolades that he received over the years. He was even invited to join
> the Royal Society. It was unheard for this long-entrenched scientific
> community to accept a chap who did not accrue a panoply of academic
> credentials. But his genius was undeniable. It's unfortunate to note,
> however, that from time to time his fellow Royal Society members would
> gleefully and cruelly lock him in the bathroom as a lark. (Yes, I made
> that up for the hell of it.)
> Further proof of his humanity was found in his piano playing. Yes, he
> taught himself that, too. It's stunning to note what a human being can
> accomplish with drive and celestially-endowed talent.
> One subject, though, seemed to have escaped him: marriage. Perhaps it
> was too complex for the fellow. It defies formulas, equations and
> exact dimensions. Not to worry, Sir Godfrey. No one seems to be able
> to figure that one out. All the same, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
> apparently did not need a life partner in order to share a life
> well-lived with the world.
>
> Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
> bellsf@mac.com
>
>
>
> From the London Telegraph
> Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
> (Filed: 17/08/2004)
>
> Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, who died on August 12 aged 84, led the team
> which developed Britain's first big solid-state computer before
> inventing the computerised axial tomography (CAT) scanner for use in
> clinical diagnosis; in recognition of this latter achievement he was
> awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
>
> Hounsfield conceived the idea for a CAT scanner in 1967 during a
> weekend ramble in the country. Initially it had nothing to do with
> medicine, but was simply "a realisation that you could determine what
> was in a box by taking readings at all angles through it".
>
> On his return to EMI's research laboratories at Hayes, in Middlesex,
> he began working on a device that could process hundreds of X-ray
> beams to obtain a three-dimensional display of the inside of a living
> organism.
>
> Combining computer and X-ray technology, and practising "on a brain of
> a cow my colleague got from a kosher house on the other side of
> London" (he submitted his own head for the first human trials), by
> 1972 Hounsfield had evolved a machine that could produce detailed
> images of cross-sections of the brain in four and a half minutes.
>
> Introduced in 1973, early CAT scanners were used to overcome obstacles
> in the diagnosis of diseases of the brain, and Hounsfield subsequently
> modified his machine to enable it to scan the whole body.
>
> Unknown to Hounsfield, a South African nuclear physicist, Allan
> Cormack, had worked on essentially the same problems of CAT, and in a
> paper published in 1957 had suggested a reconstruction technique
> called the Radon transform. Although Cormack's work was not widely
> circulated, and he and Hounsfield did not collaborate or even meet, in
> 1979 both men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the
> development of computerised tomography.
>
> The invention of the CAT scanner was a remarkable achievement, not
> least because of the complex algebraic calculations involved in the
> computer programming. Other research teams with larger resources than
> EMI had already dismissed such a device as impossible to develop, and
> one prominent British scientist remarked that Hounsfield's machine
> used "mathematics I wouldn't pretend to understand now or at any stage
> of my career".
>
> Yet Hounsfield had never been to university and was largely
> self-taught.
>
> Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield, the youngest of five children of a farmer
> near Newark in Nottinghamshire, was born on August 28 1919. At an
> early age he became intrigued by the farm's mechanical and electrical
> machinery, and by the age of 11 he had begun to experiment,
> constructing electrical recording machines and launching himself off
> the top of haystacks with a home-made glider.
>
> At Magnus Grammar School in Newark, he confessed to responding "only
> to physics and mathematics with any ease and moderate enthusiasm". But
> as with so many of Britain's great post-war scientists, his
> opportunity came with the outbreak of the Second World War.
>
> Hounsfield joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist, hoping to become
> involved in radio. Having perused some RAF books on radio mechanics,
> he sat a test and was amazed when he was then taken on as a
> radar-mechanic instructor and moved to the then RAF-occupied Royal
> College of Science in South Kensington, and later to Cranwell Radar
> School.
>
> There, in his spare time, he passed the City and Guilds examination in
> Radio Communications. In 1945 he was awarded the RAF's Certificate of
> Merit. His work impressed Air Vice-Marshal J R Cassidy, who was
> responsible for obtaining a grant for Hounsfield after the war which
> enabled him to attend Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in
> London, where he received a diploma.
>
> In 1951 Hounsfield joined the research staff of EMI at Hayes. For a
> while he worked on radar and guided weapons, then ran a small design
> laboratory, where he soon became fascinated by the emerging field of
> computers. Starting in about 1958, he led a design team which built
> the first all-transistor computer to be constructed in Britain, the
> EMIDEC 1100.
>
> In those days the transistor was a relatively slow device - much
> slower than valves, which were then used in most computers. However,
> Hounsfield was able to overcome this problem by driving the transistor
> with a magnetic core. This increased the speed of the machine so that
> it compared with that of valve computers and brought about the use of
> transistors in computing earlier than had been anticipated.
>
> When this work finished, Hounsfield transferred to EMI Central
> Research Laboratories, also at Hayes, where he began his work on CAT
> scanners. This work, and the development of progressively more
> sophisticated prototypes of brain and whole body scanners, kept him
> occupied until 1976.
>
> He remained responsible for long-term thinking about medical systems
> at EMI's research laboratories while others managed the Research and
> Development effort supporting his scanners. In his later years with
> EMI, he broadened his interests into related fields of diagnostic
> imaging, such as nuclear magnetic resonance.
>
> After his official retirement in 1986, Hounsfield continued to work as
> a consultant for EMI, and also to various hospitals, including the
> National Heart and Chest Hospitals, Chelsea, the National Heart
> Hospital and the Brompton Hospital.
>
> True to the archetype of the shy, retiring bachelor boffin, Hounsfield
> found the public interest in his invention "most embarrassing". He won
> numerous awards and honours (35 in the 1970s alone), among them
> election to the Royal Society, a rare accolade for someone who did not
> possess a university degree.
>
> A frugal man, Hounsfield spent very little on himself and always
> refused EMI's offer to let him take a sabbatical. When presented with
> the 1972 MacRobert award from the Council of Engineering Institutions,
> he said he would keep his £25,000 prize in reserve "in case some new
> research idea turns up, in which case I can plough it back". He did,
> however, spend a little of his Nobel prize money on fitting out the
> living-room of his small semi-detached house in Middlesex with
> scientific equipment.
>
> Apart from his work, Hounsfield's greatest pleasures were walking in
> the mountains and leading country rambles. He enjoyed music and played
> the piano "in a self-taught way". In company, he confessed to enjoying
> "lively, way-out discussions".
>
> On the day he won the Nobel prize in 1979, Hounsfield had some
> home-spun words of advice for all would-be Nobel prizewinners: "Don't
> worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have
> understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability
> to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the
> basics of what is happening."
>
> Godfrey Hounsfield was appointed CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1981. He
> was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society in 1975.
>
> He was unmarried.
>
> asked me, "Bellingham, what is your university experience?" I was
> eager to tell him the truth: I went to music school but that was
> hardly an ardent excursion into scholarship. Between classes, I had to
> go on my own to San Francisco's City College to get a decent encounter
> with the German language. I went to New York University's Film School
> -- for about ten minutes. Not even long enough to complete a short
> subject. I dropped out to work at a movie house, the Bleecker Street
> Cinema. At least I could watch movies that way.
> "Gee, Herb," I told Caen, "I guess you might say I'm an autodidact."
> "Oh, I know what that means, " Caen shot back instantly. "That's when
> you drive yourself crazy."
> Herb was always very quick. When I spent time with him, I often felt
> like George Fenneman trying to keep up with Groucho Marx. But I did
> all right.
> I always take an interest when I hear successful stories about people
> who are largely self-taught. But few are as vivid as the biography of
> Britain's Sir Godfrey Hounsfield who never went to university but was
> the preeminent leader in computer technology and later developed the
> CAT scan. He claimed a Nobel Prize for the latter. It goes to show:
> who needs to do homework? There is more than one way to scan a CAT.
Perhaps a formal education might have gotten in the way of his
genius. And just imagine the lives he saved along the way. He just had
an understand of mathematics and physiology that defies explanation. He
got most of his inspiration while taking long, country walks. This is
one part of the Hounsfield psyche that I can understand. If the world
took more long walks, we would have a much more serene planet.
> Like most great inventors, Hounsfield had unlimited courage. When it
> was time to put the kosher cow brains aside in the laboratory and turn
> to human trials, he placed his own head in the device that would later
> be known as the CAT scan. God knows he risked having his own brains
> reduced to the intellect of a kosher bovine. Mezuzah done told me.
> And he was modest. Hounsfield was uncomfortable with the awards and
> accolades that he received over the years. He was even invited to join
> the Royal Society. It was unheard for this long-entrenched scientific
> community to accept a chap who did not accrue a panoply of academic
> credentials. But his genius was undeniable. It's unfortunate to note,
> however, that from time to time his fellow Royal Society members would
> gleefully and cruelly lock him in the bathroom as a lark. (Yes, I made
> that up for the hell of it.)
> Further proof of his humanity was found in his piano playing. Yes, he
> taught himself that, too. It's stunning to note what a human being can
> accomplish with drive and celestially-endowed talent.
> One subject, though, seemed to have escaped him: marriage. Perhaps it
> was too complex for the fellow. It defies formulas, equations and
> exact dimensions. Not to worry, Sir Godfrey. No one seems to be able
> to figure that one out. All the same, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
> apparently did not need a life partner in order to share a life
> well-lived with the world.
>
> Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
> bellsf@mac.com
>
>
>
> From the London Telegraph
> Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
> (Filed: 17/08/2004)
>
> Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, who died on August 12 aged 84, led the team
> which developed Britain's first big solid-state computer before
> inventing the computerised axial tomography (CAT) scanner for use in
> clinical diagnosis; in recognition of this latter achievement he was
> awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
>
> Hounsfield conceived the idea for a CAT scanner in 1967 during a
> weekend ramble in the country. Initially it had nothing to do with
> medicine, but was simply "a realisation that you could determine what
> was in a box by taking readings at all angles through it".
>
> On his return to EMI's research laboratories at Hayes, in Middlesex,
> he began working on a device that could process hundreds of X-ray
> beams to obtain a three-dimensional display of the inside of a living
> organism.
>
> Combining computer and X-ray technology, and practising "on a brain of
> a cow my colleague got from a kosher house on the other side of
> London" (he submitted his own head for the first human trials), by
> 1972 Hounsfield had evolved a machine that could produce detailed
> images of cross-sections of the brain in four and a half minutes.
>
> Introduced in 1973, early CAT scanners were used to overcome obstacles
> in the diagnosis of diseases of the brain, and Hounsfield subsequently
> modified his machine to enable it to scan the whole body.
>
> Unknown to Hounsfield, a South African nuclear physicist, Allan
> Cormack, had worked on essentially the same problems of CAT, and in a
> paper published in 1957 had suggested a reconstruction technique
> called the Radon transform. Although Cormack's work was not widely
> circulated, and he and Hounsfield did not collaborate or even meet, in
> 1979 both men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the
> development of computerised tomography.
>
> The invention of the CAT scanner was a remarkable achievement, not
> least because of the complex algebraic calculations involved in the
> computer programming. Other research teams with larger resources than
> EMI had already dismissed such a device as impossible to develop, and
> one prominent British scientist remarked that Hounsfield's machine
> used "mathematics I wouldn't pretend to understand now or at any stage
> of my career".
>
> Yet Hounsfield had never been to university and was largely
> self-taught.
>
> Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield, the youngest of five children of a farmer
> near Newark in Nottinghamshire, was born on August 28 1919. At an
> early age he became intrigued by the farm's mechanical and electrical
> machinery, and by the age of 11 he had begun to experiment,
> constructing electrical recording machines and launching himself off
> the top of haystacks with a home-made glider.
>
> At Magnus Grammar School in Newark, he confessed to responding "only
> to physics and mathematics with any ease and moderate enthusiasm". But
> as with so many of Britain's great post-war scientists, his
> opportunity came with the outbreak of the Second World War.
>
> Hounsfield joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist, hoping to become
> involved in radio. Having perused some RAF books on radio mechanics,
> he sat a test and was amazed when he was then taken on as a
> radar-mechanic instructor and moved to the then RAF-occupied Royal
> College of Science in South Kensington, and later to Cranwell Radar
> School.
>
> There, in his spare time, he passed the City and Guilds examination in
> Radio Communications. In 1945 he was awarded the RAF's Certificate of
> Merit. His work impressed Air Vice-Marshal J R Cassidy, who was
> responsible for obtaining a grant for Hounsfield after the war which
> enabled him to attend Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in
> London, where he received a diploma.
>
> In 1951 Hounsfield joined the research staff of EMI at Hayes. For a
> while he worked on radar and guided weapons, then ran a small design
> laboratory, where he soon became fascinated by the emerging field of
> computers. Starting in about 1958, he led a design team which built
> the first all-transistor computer to be constructed in Britain, the
> EMIDEC 1100.
>
> In those days the transistor was a relatively slow device - much
> slower than valves, which were then used in most computers. However,
> Hounsfield was able to overcome this problem by driving the transistor
> with a magnetic core. This increased the speed of the machine so that
> it compared with that of valve computers and brought about the use of
> transistors in computing earlier than had been anticipated.
>
> When this work finished, Hounsfield transferred to EMI Central
> Research Laboratories, also at Hayes, where he began his work on CAT
> scanners. This work, and the development of progressively more
> sophisticated prototypes of brain and whole body scanners, kept him
> occupied until 1976.
>
> He remained responsible for long-term thinking about medical systems
> at EMI's research laboratories while others managed the Research and
> Development effort supporting his scanners. In his later years with
> EMI, he broadened his interests into related fields of diagnostic
> imaging, such as nuclear magnetic resonance.
>
> After his official retirement in 1986, Hounsfield continued to work as
> a consultant for EMI, and also to various hospitals, including the
> National Heart and Chest Hospitals, Chelsea, the National Heart
> Hospital and the Brompton Hospital.
>
> True to the archetype of the shy, retiring bachelor boffin, Hounsfield
> found the public interest in his invention "most embarrassing". He won
> numerous awards and honours (35 in the 1970s alone), among them
> election to the Royal Society, a rare accolade for someone who did not
> possess a university degree.
>
> A frugal man, Hounsfield spent very little on himself and always
> refused EMI's offer to let him take a sabbatical. When presented with
> the 1972 MacRobert award from the Council of Engineering Institutions,
> he said he would keep his £25,000 prize in reserve "in case some new
> research idea turns up, in which case I can plough it back". He did,
> however, spend a little of his Nobel prize money on fitting out the
> living-room of his small semi-detached house in Middlesex with
> scientific equipment.
>
> Apart from his work, Hounsfield's greatest pleasures were walking in
> the mountains and leading country rambles. He enjoyed music and played
> the piano "in a self-taught way". In company, he confessed to enjoying
> "lively, way-out discussions".
>
> On the day he won the Nobel prize in 1979, Hounsfield had some
> home-spun words of advice for all would-be Nobel prizewinners: "Don't
> worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have
> understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability
> to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the
> basics of what is happening."
>
> Godfrey Hounsfield was appointed CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1981. He
> was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society in 1975.
>
> He was unmarried.
>
Monday, August 16, 2004
Celebrity Boxing Comes of Age
In the "all-is-lost" department, the programmers at Fox Television
recently broadcast "Celebrity Boxing II" -- for the second time. It
was, once again, an unmitigated ratings failure and further evidence
that we are even closer to the end of civilization as we once knew it.
Into the ring gleefully bounced long lost luminaries who give obscurity
new meaning. They included the "Welcome Back, Kotter's" Ron Palillo --
cadaverous and pale -- who duked it out with "Saved by the Bell's
Dustin Diamond. The thrilla in vanilla.
Apparently no one has considered shooting the cretinous Joey Buttafuoco
with silver bulllets yet. There he was, ungallantly beating the hell
out of a young woman in the ring. I did not catch her name. I don't
think Joey did, either. Perhaps she decided not to reveal it. Did you
know that "Buttafuoco" comes from the Latin, meaning, "botched
lobotomy"? Joey is a real piece of work. He makes John Wayne Bobbitt
look like Charles Boyer.
The high point -- or low point -- was a match between former gold
medalist Olga Korbut and Darva Conger, who once married a millionaire
on TV who turned out not to be what he seemed. Imagine: a man lying
about his finances in order to snare a young woman. What will they
think of next? Ms. Conger later had the marriage annulled. Too bad. The
bride had already registered at the New York Stock Exchange. The Fox
announcer went out of his way to mention Olga Korbut had been arrested
in Atlanta for shoplifting. Now, that's class.
Conger, towering over the demure Korbut, pummeled the former Olympic
star mercilessly. Exceedingly aggressive, Conger must have had a
picture of that faux millionaire in her mind. I'm reminded of High Hat,
the heroic horse in the Marx Brother's "A Day At The Races," who goes
berserk when he hears the voice of the villain.
This "television event" was such a sad sight. "Television event": how's
that for a contradiction in terms?
On Monday morning, Fox executives met in New York for their regular
programming post-mortem. The question on the table: "Where do we go
from here?"
Here's the news. "Celebrity Boxing" will get a third chapter. But it
will take a new, imaginative direction -- into the world of politics.
There are plans to invite members of the House Armed Services Committee
to get into the ring with the Senate Committee on Intelligence. But
that's tentative. Besides, the term "intelligence" is repugnant to the
Fox marketing department. Meanwhile, some of the fallen stars on the
American political scene might soon through their protective headgear
into the ring. For example, Dick Morris might take on New Jersey
Governor Jim McGreevey. Fox management is particularly excited about
stationing a dominatrix in Morris' corner. Nice touch. McGreevey's
insisting on fresh cut flowers in his.
Another engaging match would be Al Gore versus Governor Howard Dean.
Gore could effectively use his turgid, stone face on his opponent while
Dean could employ that unnerving technique of shrieking like a peacock.
That rattles his challengers every time. In the event Dean backs out,
Michael Huffington is waiting in the wings. He might even wear them,
for all I know. Huffington all dolled up like an angel. I might even
pay money to see that.
Ralph Nader could use some publicity. He couldn't get on the California
ballot because he couldn't garner enough signatures. But if he went on
"Celebrity Boxing Three," it might be a different story. A matchup with
the CEO of General Motors might be fun. Or a bit of sparring with Ross
Perot, who intimidates adversaries with a terribly loud sucking sound.
A natural choice for the next round of "Celebrity Boxing" is Jesse
Ventura, who's been looking for a gig. It will be tough to find someone
who might go up against a pro. Schwarzenegger is too busy. Maybe the
Rev. Al Sharpton will go three rounds. They wouldn't have to fight. One
could try to force the other to submit through a steady stream of
invective and rhetoric. I know that sounds brutal but there are few
rules in the world of celebrity boxing.
Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay." His e-mail
is bellsf@mac.com
recently broadcast "Celebrity Boxing II" -- for the second time. It
was, once again, an unmitigated ratings failure and further evidence
that we are even closer to the end of civilization as we once knew it.
Into the ring gleefully bounced long lost luminaries who give obscurity
new meaning. They included the "Welcome Back, Kotter's" Ron Palillo --
cadaverous and pale -- who duked it out with "Saved by the Bell's
Dustin Diamond. The thrilla in vanilla.
Apparently no one has considered shooting the cretinous Joey Buttafuoco
with silver bulllets yet. There he was, ungallantly beating the hell
out of a young woman in the ring. I did not catch her name. I don't
think Joey did, either. Perhaps she decided not to reveal it. Did you
know that "Buttafuoco" comes from the Latin, meaning, "botched
lobotomy"? Joey is a real piece of work. He makes John Wayne Bobbitt
look like Charles Boyer.
The high point -- or low point -- was a match between former gold
medalist Olga Korbut and Darva Conger, who once married a millionaire
on TV who turned out not to be what he seemed. Imagine: a man lying
about his finances in order to snare a young woman. What will they
think of next? Ms. Conger later had the marriage annulled. Too bad. The
bride had already registered at the New York Stock Exchange. The Fox
announcer went out of his way to mention Olga Korbut had been arrested
in Atlanta for shoplifting. Now, that's class.
Conger, towering over the demure Korbut, pummeled the former Olympic
star mercilessly. Exceedingly aggressive, Conger must have had a
picture of that faux millionaire in her mind. I'm reminded of High Hat,
the heroic horse in the Marx Brother's "A Day At The Races," who goes
berserk when he hears the voice of the villain.
This "television event" was such a sad sight. "Television event": how's
that for a contradiction in terms?
On Monday morning, Fox executives met in New York for their regular
programming post-mortem. The question on the table: "Where do we go
from here?"
Here's the news. "Celebrity Boxing" will get a third chapter. But it
will take a new, imaginative direction -- into the world of politics.
There are plans to invite members of the House Armed Services Committee
to get into the ring with the Senate Committee on Intelligence. But
that's tentative. Besides, the term "intelligence" is repugnant to the
Fox marketing department. Meanwhile, some of the fallen stars on the
American political scene might soon through their protective headgear
into the ring. For example, Dick Morris might take on New Jersey
Governor Jim McGreevey. Fox management is particularly excited about
stationing a dominatrix in Morris' corner. Nice touch. McGreevey's
insisting on fresh cut flowers in his.
Another engaging match would be Al Gore versus Governor Howard Dean.
Gore could effectively use his turgid, stone face on his opponent while
Dean could employ that unnerving technique of shrieking like a peacock.
That rattles his challengers every time. In the event Dean backs out,
Michael Huffington is waiting in the wings. He might even wear them,
for all I know. Huffington all dolled up like an angel. I might even
pay money to see that.
Ralph Nader could use some publicity. He couldn't get on the California
ballot because he couldn't garner enough signatures. But if he went on
"Celebrity Boxing Three," it might be a different story. A matchup with
the CEO of General Motors might be fun. Or a bit of sparring with Ross
Perot, who intimidates adversaries with a terribly loud sucking sound.
A natural choice for the next round of "Celebrity Boxing" is Jesse
Ventura, who's been looking for a gig. It will be tough to find someone
who might go up against a pro. Schwarzenegger is too busy. Maybe the
Rev. Al Sharpton will go three rounds. They wouldn't have to fight. One
could try to force the other to submit through a steady stream of
invective and rhetoric. I know that sounds brutal but there are few
rules in the world of celebrity boxing.
Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay." His e-mail
is bellsf@mac.com
Friday, August 13, 2004
The Little Terrors
I have often said that terror is the mother of invention.
I don't mean the sort of terror that saturates the news these days and penetrates the consciousness of the American people and countless others around the world.
I mean the little terrors; the deadlines, the bills that are due, maintaining the romance, the things that bring us to the threshold of humiliation. Most of us would do practically anything not to look foolish. This is a driving force, another aspect of the so-called work ethic. Shame is a terrific commodity.
The other day scientists announced they are having great success in getting monkeys -- like most humans, quite lazy by nature -- to stay busy and work hard without the inducement of a reward. The researchers employed gene therapy to block dopamine in the monkey's minds. Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that lures us into listening to reggae music and watching Dr. Phil on television instead of attending to our responsibilities. Dopamine is the daydreaming drug. The monkeys suddenly set about their activities with a non-stop fury.
It is sobering to think that corporate managers could get their hands on this genetic technology -- another blow to labor unions. But most of us don't need this sort of thing these days, with a deteriorating economy and shrinking paychecks. We are willing to accept all sorts of assignments. More terror.
Ah, but prosperity -- or recovery -- is just around the corner. Which corner, no one is saying. It is unsettling to hear George W. Bush use the same language as Herbert Hoover did.
But I digress.
Mankind's desire for stimulants is as old as mankind itself. The big theme at the Athens Olympics was "doping." That seems like an odd term for the use of illegal steroids and other body-bolstering substances that would enhance an athlete's performance for that extra edge. There were no dopes in the doping pas de deux between the cheating athletes and the ever-vigilant officials from the International Olympic Committee. The slick cheaters constantly found ways to outfox the officials with test-proof steroids and the officials kept coming up with more sophisticated testing methods. This drama should have been a separate competitive category at the games -- cops and robbers on a Olympian scale.
The manic drive to win produces a terror of it own. The fear of failure. The nightmare of humiliation. The agony of defeat.
I was amazed to learn a boxer from Kenya was kicked out of the competition after a test revealed that he had been using – get this - caffeine. Caffeine? Boy, are they serious. Athensis no place for Starbucks.
I am not going to knock Starbucks. I might have to go to work there.
Some of us are lucky enough not to be driven by terror but by the sheer pleasure of doing something we enjoy. Thirty years ago, while watching the Academy Awards of television, I saw the great actor Raymond Massey accept the Oscar for a colleague who was "away in Europe working." Massey paused for a moment -- a wonderful theatrical hesitation-- and said, "Work, isn't that a beautiful word?"
I'm not so sure the research monkeys would agree with him. After the gene therapy wore off -- that took about ten weeks -- the dopamine kicked back in and the monkeys resumed their lazy, layabout behavior. But one could get a lot done in ten weeks. I could write the Great American Resume. Monkeys seem impervious to the little terrors. We could learn from that.
Terror? What terror? What, me worry?
Bruce Bellingham is the author of Bellingham By The Bay. His e-mail is bellsf@mac.com
Blogsite by kimberly kubalek, www.kubalek.com
I don't mean the sort of terror that saturates the news these days and penetrates the consciousness of the American people and countless others around the world.
I mean the little terrors; the deadlines, the bills that are due, maintaining the romance, the things that bring us to the threshold of humiliation. Most of us would do practically anything not to look foolish. This is a driving force, another aspect of the so-called work ethic. Shame is a terrific commodity.
The other day scientists announced they are having great success in getting monkeys -- like most humans, quite lazy by nature -- to stay busy and work hard without the inducement of a reward. The researchers employed gene therapy to block dopamine in the monkey's minds. Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that lures us into listening to reggae music and watching Dr. Phil on television instead of attending to our responsibilities. Dopamine is the daydreaming drug. The monkeys suddenly set about their activities with a non-stop fury.
It is sobering to think that corporate managers could get their hands on this genetic technology -- another blow to labor unions. But most of us don't need this sort of thing these days, with a deteriorating economy and shrinking paychecks. We are willing to accept all sorts of assignments. More terror.
Ah, but prosperity -- or recovery -- is just around the corner. Which corner, no one is saying. It is unsettling to hear George W. Bush use the same language as Herbert Hoover did.
But I digress.
Mankind's desire for stimulants is as old as mankind itself. The big theme at the Athens Olympics was "doping." That seems like an odd term for the use of illegal steroids and other body-bolstering substances that would enhance an athlete's performance for that extra edge. There were no dopes in the doping pas de deux between the cheating athletes and the ever-vigilant officials from the International Olympic Committee. The slick cheaters constantly found ways to outfox the officials with test-proof steroids and the officials kept coming up with more sophisticated testing methods. This drama should have been a separate competitive category at the games -- cops and robbers on a Olympian scale.
The manic drive to win produces a terror of it own. The fear of failure. The nightmare of humiliation. The agony of defeat.
I was amazed to learn a boxer from Kenya was kicked out of the competition after a test revealed that he had been using – get this - caffeine. Caffeine? Boy, are they serious. Athensis no place for Starbucks.
I am not going to knock Starbucks. I might have to go to work there.
Some of us are lucky enough not to be driven by terror but by the sheer pleasure of doing something we enjoy. Thirty years ago, while watching the Academy Awards of television, I saw the great actor Raymond Massey accept the Oscar for a colleague who was "away in Europe working." Massey paused for a moment -- a wonderful theatrical hesitation-- and said, "Work, isn't that a beautiful word?"
I'm not so sure the research monkeys would agree with him. After the gene therapy wore off -- that took about ten weeks -- the dopamine kicked back in and the monkeys resumed their lazy, layabout behavior. But one could get a lot done in ten weeks. I could write the Great American Resume. Monkeys seem impervious to the little terrors. We could learn from that.
Terror? What terror? What, me worry?
Bruce Bellingham is the author of Bellingham By The Bay. His e-mail is bellsf@mac.com
Blogsite by kimberly kubalek, www.kubalek.com
Monday, August 09, 2004
Fay Wray, Beautiful Screamer
When I read about the splashy characters of a not-so-far bygone age -- such as Fay Wray, who died this week -- she and her contemporaries seem to have lived their lives in a much larger way than most of us do. They had color and panache. They seemed to have had unreluctantly attached their tongues to the marrow of life. And sometimes just as unreluctantly to each other.
Ms. Wray, her pals and her paramours appear fearless to face things, much like the character she portrayed in the immortal "King Kong," an off-beat romance with primal overtones. In the film she is introduced as "Ann Darrow, the bravest girl I have ever known." By comparison, all seems so mundane today; derivative as it is deliriously dull.
In the following piece from the London Telegraph, we learn that Ms. Wray was saddened by what she described the death of romance in the movies. The nuances and style had been replaced by clumsy vulgarity. She was wryly (or is that wrayly?) funny on the topic of on-screen kissing: "You would never see Ronald Coleman take a bite out of someone."
In "King Kong," Fay Wray set the standard for on-screen screaming -- loud enough to set off the car alarms, if they had been around then.
The girl with the "Nefertiti eyes" took several famous actors for lovers but she also attracted the literati, such as Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets. They must have adored her wit, as well as her pulchritude. (Speaking of wit, do you recall that George S. Kaufman line, "Odets, where is thy sting?") But for all the films she made, she is inextricably linked to "King Kong." Who does not have affection for the movie and for the dangerous, giant primate who becomes a little boy lost in the big city looking for love? As a kid, I would watch the film on TV out of New York dozens of times. When the big ape faces the fusillades from the planes atop the Empire State Building, I, like everyone else was pulling for him -- even though he had destroyed the Third Avenue El. I think WOR-TV got a kick out of broadcasting it because the transmitter was atop the Empire State.
This week Fay Wray received a grand accolade. The lights on the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in honor of the actress. New York has class. So did Fay Wray. Hers was a life well-lived. And remember: "It was beauty who killed the beast."
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Fay Wray
(Filed: 11/08/2004)
Fay Wray, who died on Sunday aged 96, made more than 70 films throughout Hollywood's best period, but was irrevocably identified with her most famous role - the screaming girl in King Kong's enormous paw.
Very pretty and sweet-natured, she played opposite such major stars as Gary Cooper, Fredric March and William Powell, and was not only loved by Cary Grant and made love to by Howard Hughes, but won the hearts of the playwright Clifford Odets and the novelist Sinclair Lewis.
She survived more than one tragedy in her private life, emerging with her optimism and charm untarnished, to write in old age a singularly graceful autobiography. With wry humour, she acknowledged her debt to "the tallest, darkest leading man", who bestowed on her a place among the Hollywood immortals. Whenever she saw the Empire State Building, the scene of King Kong's pitiful death for Beauty's sake, she felt a kind of proprietorial affection.
Vina Fay Wray, the fourth child in a family of six, was born at a ranch-house in Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on September 15 1907. Her mother, Vina Marguerite Jones, had married when very young a man who proved impotent, and fled north across the border with Joseph Herber Wray, an ingenious, feckless rolling stone who had been born in Hull.
Wray established a saw-mill, which failed, and they moved back to America, first to Arizona, where a small farm was equally unsuccessful, then to Salt Lake City. He invented a can-opener for condensed milk, but the factory making it went out of business. Meanwhile, Fay made her first theatrical appearance as Mrs Santa Claus in the school play.
Following another move, to the small Mormon town of Lark, Joseph Wary drifted off, looking for work elsewhere. Nobody seems to have minded much, and the Mormon community was supportive. Fay's mother, having already introduced her daughter to the enchantment of silent films, entered Fay for a newspaper competition, in which she won a screen test.
Fay's eldest sister died in the influenza epidemic of 1918; and, because Fay's own health was considered frail, she was somewhat recklessly sent, at the age of 14, to live in Los Angeles with a young photographer named William Mortensen, who was a friend of her second sister, Willow.
At the local junior high school, and afterwards at Hollywood High, she did well academically and performed in school productions at the Hollywood Bowl. Her mother, hearing that Mortensen had taken photographs of Fay, drew the wrong conclusion, stormed to Los Angeles, broke his glass negatives and whisked her daughter off to a boarding house. "My mother was ridiculously oppressive without meaning to be," Fay recalled. "She wanted me to have a career, but she wanted me to be untouched by it in any way."
One of the film people to whom Mortensen had introduced her gave Fay the leading role in a small film. This was followed by a series of bit parts in which she appeared simply as a pretty girl.
When she left school, she applied to the Hal Roach studio, and was given a six-month contract. She appeared in two-reel Western’s, sharing a dressing-room with Janet Gaynor; she played opposite Stan Laurel, who was not yet teamed with Oliver Hardy.
In 1928 Fay Wray starred in what she always thought her best film, Erich von Stroheim's hugely expensive and uncompleted masterpiece, The Wedding March. She resisted the director's sexual advances without too much difficulty or subsequent ill-will, and she learned a great deal from him.
In the same year she made Legion of the Condemned, starring Gary Cooper, whom she liked but remembered as "very stiff, rather like part of the furniture". The script of the film had been written by John Monk
Saunders, a handsome, charming, former Rhodes Scholar who had been a flying instructor during the war and had wept when he heard of the armistice, because he would never now see action. Captivated by Fay Wray's "Nefertiti eyes", he had a failed marriage behind him and was a much more disturbed person than Fay realized when she embarked on a relationship with him.
While she was on location in Maryland, filming The First Kiss with Gary Cooper, Fay Wray heard that her brother Vivien had died, ostensibly by accident, probably by suicide. Saunders arrived to comfort her, and, with Cooper as witness, they were married. For the first time she felt independent of her mother.
Saunders himself won an Oscar for his script for The Dawn Patrol (1930). Fay Wray went to New York to star in his musical play Nikki, which flopped but which introduced her to Cary Grant, who was still called Archie Leach ("Cary" was the name of his character in the play). She had already discovered that Saunders was a compulsive womanizer and a periodic drunk.
In 1929 Fay Wray made The Four Feathers; in 1930 The Texan; in 1931 Dirigible. Although late in life she was to refer to the coming of talkies as "a kind of rudeness" which led to her being "tossed on to the commercial heap", she appeared to take the development in her stride. She made 10 films in Hollywood, one of which was King Kong, which had a 10-week shooting schedule spread over most of the year. It saved RKO from bankruptcy, although nobody then, including Fay Wray, had any idea of its potential impact.
For the rest of her life, she was asked about the special effects. King Kong himself was just 18 inches high, but the arm which lifted her was six feet long and, when she felt that she was slipping from his paw, it was genuinely frightening. It is said that Fay Wray had been one of a dozen actresses auditioned for the part of Ann Darrow, and that she had been selected because she produced the loudest scream.
Throughout 1933 and 1934 she started a new film every fourth Friday, which was how Hollywood worked in those days. Among the best was The Bowery with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper.
Reflecting on her career in 1996, Fay Wray lamented what she saw as the death of romance in cinema. Of screen-kissing, she remarked: "These days, they just chew each other. Today there is no such thing as a really wonderful embrace . . . You never saw Ronald Coleman taking a great big bite out of someone." She herself, when kissing on screen, always kept her mouth closed.
Of silent movies, she said: "Every little movement by Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford was compelling and wonderful. They held us close to their hearts. Every time we saw a silent film, we were drawn by the fact that the caring was inherent."
As for modern pictures, Fay Wray seldom watched them: "I get put off by the previews I see on television. You seem to see nothing but gasoline explosions."
Life with the vulnerable, volatile, Saunders became desperately erratic: sometimes sweet, sometimes tormenting. In 1935 they traveled to England ("I really came to get away from horror films," Fay Wray said), and she appeared with Jack Hulbert and Ralph Richardson in Bulldog Jack and with Claude Rains in The Clairvoyant. Saunders showed her Oxford and took her to the Boat Race.
She returned to Hollywood for the birth of her daughter, Susan; but in 1938 she and Saunders separated.
Fay Wray busied herself with films and also with summer stock theatrical productions in New England. On one occasion while she was away, Saunders took Susan away with him. Fay traced and recovered her daughter with the powerful assistance of Colonel William Donovan, who was soon to create the Office of Strategic Services, which begat the CIA.
Theatrical work improved her skill and introduced her to intelligent new people. Sinclair Lewis fell for her heavily, and pursued her relentlessly; Howard Hughes courted her briefly. She had a protracted affair with Clifford Odets, which ended for reasons she never quite understood. In 1939 she heard that John Monk Saunders had hanged himself.
Her second, and much happier, marriage was to the distinguished screenwriter Robert Riskin, whose credits included It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and You Can't Take It With You. "Be good to her," she overheard Cary Grant say to Riskin. "I was so in love with her." She and Riskin had a son, Bobby, and a daughter, Vicki.
During the Second World War, while Fay found new openings in radio drama, Riskin was in Europe working for the Office of War Information. The tranquil post-war years ended when Riskin suffered a debilitating stroke in 1951. Fay Wray tended him devotedly until his death five years later.
In 1971 she married Dr Sanford Rothenburg, whom she had met in the hospital where Riskin was being treated. Her last film was Summer Love in 1958, but in the mid-1980s she wrote a play about her parents, which was produced in New Hampshire with her daughter Susan playing the role of Fay's mother.
Her autobiography, On The Other Hand, was published in 1989. Combining candor with discretion, it showed a woman serenely and compassionately meditating on all that had happened to her.
Ms. Wray, her pals and her paramours appear fearless to face things, much like the character she portrayed in the immortal "King Kong," an off-beat romance with primal overtones. In the film she is introduced as "Ann Darrow, the bravest girl I have ever known." By comparison, all seems so mundane today; derivative as it is deliriously dull.
In the following piece from the London Telegraph, we learn that Ms. Wray was saddened by what she described the death of romance in the movies. The nuances and style had been replaced by clumsy vulgarity. She was wryly (or is that wrayly?) funny on the topic of on-screen kissing: "You would never see Ronald Coleman take a bite out of someone."
In "King Kong," Fay Wray set the standard for on-screen screaming -- loud enough to set off the car alarms, if they had been around then.
The girl with the "Nefertiti eyes" took several famous actors for lovers but she also attracted the literati, such as Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets. They must have adored her wit, as well as her pulchritude. (Speaking of wit, do you recall that George S. Kaufman line, "Odets, where is thy sting?") But for all the films she made, she is inextricably linked to "King Kong." Who does not have affection for the movie and for the dangerous, giant primate who becomes a little boy lost in the big city looking for love? As a kid, I would watch the film on TV out of New York dozens of times. When the big ape faces the fusillades from the planes atop the Empire State Building, I, like everyone else was pulling for him -- even though he had destroyed the Third Avenue El. I think WOR-TV got a kick out of broadcasting it because the transmitter was atop the Empire State.
This week Fay Wray received a grand accolade. The lights on the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in honor of the actress. New York has class. So did Fay Wray. Hers was a life well-lived. And remember: "It was beauty who killed the beast."
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Fay Wray
(Filed: 11/08/2004)
Fay Wray, who died on Sunday aged 96, made more than 70 films throughout Hollywood's best period, but was irrevocably identified with her most famous role - the screaming girl in King Kong's enormous paw.
Very pretty and sweet-natured, she played opposite such major stars as Gary Cooper, Fredric March and William Powell, and was not only loved by Cary Grant and made love to by Howard Hughes, but won the hearts of the playwright Clifford Odets and the novelist Sinclair Lewis.
She survived more than one tragedy in her private life, emerging with her optimism and charm untarnished, to write in old age a singularly graceful autobiography. With wry humour, she acknowledged her debt to "the tallest, darkest leading man", who bestowed on her a place among the Hollywood immortals. Whenever she saw the Empire State Building, the scene of King Kong's pitiful death for Beauty's sake, she felt a kind of proprietorial affection.
Vina Fay Wray, the fourth child in a family of six, was born at a ranch-house in Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on September 15 1907. Her mother, Vina Marguerite Jones, had married when very young a man who proved impotent, and fled north across the border with Joseph Herber Wray, an ingenious, feckless rolling stone who had been born in Hull.
Wray established a saw-mill, which failed, and they moved back to America, first to Arizona, where a small farm was equally unsuccessful, then to Salt Lake City. He invented a can-opener for condensed milk, but the factory making it went out of business. Meanwhile, Fay made her first theatrical appearance as Mrs Santa Claus in the school play.
Following another move, to the small Mormon town of Lark, Joseph Wary drifted off, looking for work elsewhere. Nobody seems to have minded much, and the Mormon community was supportive. Fay's mother, having already introduced her daughter to the enchantment of silent films, entered Fay for a newspaper competition, in which she won a screen test.
Fay's eldest sister died in the influenza epidemic of 1918; and, because Fay's own health was considered frail, she was somewhat recklessly sent, at the age of 14, to live in Los Angeles with a young photographer named William Mortensen, who was a friend of her second sister, Willow.
At the local junior high school, and afterwards at Hollywood High, she did well academically and performed in school productions at the Hollywood Bowl. Her mother, hearing that Mortensen had taken photographs of Fay, drew the wrong conclusion, stormed to Los Angeles, broke his glass negatives and whisked her daughter off to a boarding house. "My mother was ridiculously oppressive without meaning to be," Fay recalled. "She wanted me to have a career, but she wanted me to be untouched by it in any way."
One of the film people to whom Mortensen had introduced her gave Fay the leading role in a small film. This was followed by a series of bit parts in which she appeared simply as a pretty girl.
When she left school, she applied to the Hal Roach studio, and was given a six-month contract. She appeared in two-reel Western’s, sharing a dressing-room with Janet Gaynor; she played opposite Stan Laurel, who was not yet teamed with Oliver Hardy.
In 1928 Fay Wray starred in what she always thought her best film, Erich von Stroheim's hugely expensive and uncompleted masterpiece, The Wedding March. She resisted the director's sexual advances without too much difficulty or subsequent ill-will, and she learned a great deal from him.
In the same year she made Legion of the Condemned, starring Gary Cooper, whom she liked but remembered as "very stiff, rather like part of the furniture". The script of the film had been written by John Monk
Saunders, a handsome, charming, former Rhodes Scholar who had been a flying instructor during the war and had wept when he heard of the armistice, because he would never now see action. Captivated by Fay Wray's "Nefertiti eyes", he had a failed marriage behind him and was a much more disturbed person than Fay realized when she embarked on a relationship with him.
While she was on location in Maryland, filming The First Kiss with Gary Cooper, Fay Wray heard that her brother Vivien had died, ostensibly by accident, probably by suicide. Saunders arrived to comfort her, and, with Cooper as witness, they were married. For the first time she felt independent of her mother.
Saunders himself won an Oscar for his script for The Dawn Patrol (1930). Fay Wray went to New York to star in his musical play Nikki, which flopped but which introduced her to Cary Grant, who was still called Archie Leach ("Cary" was the name of his character in the play). She had already discovered that Saunders was a compulsive womanizer and a periodic drunk.
In 1929 Fay Wray made The Four Feathers; in 1930 The Texan; in 1931 Dirigible. Although late in life she was to refer to the coming of talkies as "a kind of rudeness" which led to her being "tossed on to the commercial heap", she appeared to take the development in her stride. She made 10 films in Hollywood, one of which was King Kong, which had a 10-week shooting schedule spread over most of the year. It saved RKO from bankruptcy, although nobody then, including Fay Wray, had any idea of its potential impact.
For the rest of her life, she was asked about the special effects. King Kong himself was just 18 inches high, but the arm which lifted her was six feet long and, when she felt that she was slipping from his paw, it was genuinely frightening. It is said that Fay Wray had been one of a dozen actresses auditioned for the part of Ann Darrow, and that she had been selected because she produced the loudest scream.
Throughout 1933 and 1934 she started a new film every fourth Friday, which was how Hollywood worked in those days. Among the best was The Bowery with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper.
Reflecting on her career in 1996, Fay Wray lamented what she saw as the death of romance in cinema. Of screen-kissing, she remarked: "These days, they just chew each other. Today there is no such thing as a really wonderful embrace . . . You never saw Ronald Coleman taking a great big bite out of someone." She herself, when kissing on screen, always kept her mouth closed.
Of silent movies, she said: "Every little movement by Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford was compelling and wonderful. They held us close to their hearts. Every time we saw a silent film, we were drawn by the fact that the caring was inherent."
As for modern pictures, Fay Wray seldom watched them: "I get put off by the previews I see on television. You seem to see nothing but gasoline explosions."
Life with the vulnerable, volatile, Saunders became desperately erratic: sometimes sweet, sometimes tormenting. In 1935 they traveled to England ("I really came to get away from horror films," Fay Wray said), and she appeared with Jack Hulbert and Ralph Richardson in Bulldog Jack and with Claude Rains in The Clairvoyant. Saunders showed her Oxford and took her to the Boat Race.
She returned to Hollywood for the birth of her daughter, Susan; but in 1938 she and Saunders separated.
Fay Wray busied herself with films and also with summer stock theatrical productions in New England. On one occasion while she was away, Saunders took Susan away with him. Fay traced and recovered her daughter with the powerful assistance of Colonel William Donovan, who was soon to create the Office of Strategic Services, which begat the CIA.
Theatrical work improved her skill and introduced her to intelligent new people. Sinclair Lewis fell for her heavily, and pursued her relentlessly; Howard Hughes courted her briefly. She had a protracted affair with Clifford Odets, which ended for reasons she never quite understood. In 1939 she heard that John Monk Saunders had hanged himself.
Her second, and much happier, marriage was to the distinguished screenwriter Robert Riskin, whose credits included It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and You Can't Take It With You. "Be good to her," she overheard Cary Grant say to Riskin. "I was so in love with her." She and Riskin had a son, Bobby, and a daughter, Vicki.
During the Second World War, while Fay found new openings in radio drama, Riskin was in Europe working for the Office of War Information. The tranquil post-war years ended when Riskin suffered a debilitating stroke in 1951. Fay Wray tended him devotedly until his death five years later.
In 1971 she married Dr Sanford Rothenburg, whom she had met in the hospital where Riskin was being treated. Her last film was Summer Love in 1958, but in the mid-1980s she wrote a play about her parents, which was produced in New Hampshire with her daughter Susan playing the role of Fay's mother.
Her autobiography, On The Other Hand, was published in 1989. Combining candor with discretion, it showed a woman serenely and compassionately meditating on all that had happened to her.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Albania Mania
This headline simply grabbed me. "Queen Susan of the Albanians." It sounds like the title of a Marx Brothers film or maybe one of those Crosby and Hope road pictures. My faves. "The Road To Morocco" is the best. Catch the tunes. Johnny Burke was the personal lyricist to Bing Crosby. You know you are a star when you have a personal lyricist. I'm
counting on it. But I am afraid I will have to be it. I will have to serve until the end of my days. A court jester; an in-house smarster. In short. someone who might serve in the purview of Queen Susan of Albania.
Johnny Burke would have a lot of fun with, "Susan, Queen of the Albanians."
Perhaps we have to serve someone all the time. We had better pick right mistress.
Perhaps not. Maybe we should call the whole thing off.
How exotic or obscure is this? Albania must be the most arcane of European countries. You know that British intelligence would lose more agents there than anywhere else? I still wish I could have been there in" the Toledo roadhouse" that's what is mentioned below. Sinatra used to play roadhouses in New Jersey.My mother would tell me about this. That's when she dated my father. I don't think this roadhouse would have been all that similar. Sinatra also had a personal lyricist. That was Sammy Cahn, who was a lovely fellow.
We are off on the "The Road to Tirana."
A graziers daughter? It is so much fun to read between the lines. An inherent putdown. What the heck is a grazier? I am a city boy. A grazier is someone, I surmise, who grazes for his cattle feed. Of for fodder for a column. You don't see them around much anymore. I guess I am a grazier in an urban sense -- but we are off the topic. I am sure a
grazier's daughter is as wholesome and sweet as a farmer's daughter. Then again, how are you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Albania?
Who could resist this obit? Back in Atlanta, Sherilyn Bottoms was berating me this afternoon. She said I did not include enough women in this column.
Now I include a woman who surpasses all women: Susan, the "Queen of Albania." It reminds me of the old Dorothy Parker joke, "And I am Marie of Romania." I did not know there were queens in Romania. What that the hell am I saying? We have plenty of them here in San Francisco, though perhaps they losty a little regality over the years.
In the old days, royalty was a living; a treasured artifact. Monarchy is specious, for sure --- but inexplicably attractive.
Above all, this piece is wonderfully written. What is a level-headed wife anyway. I never had one. I lis this is the second graph: "not unusual for middle-class girls to marry into the fading respectability of the of dispossessed monarchs."
Ever have a bad day?
I really hate being a dispossessed monarch.
Or queen for a day.
Consort to a gun-toting giant? I've seen enough of those in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. And some of them were queens, as well.
Sherilyn is right: they might be dangerous. There are so many elements to this story that are so bizarre, it makes
me wonder. Friends of the CIA, Richard Nixon? Well, I guess that doesn't surprise me at all. But this "level-headed queen," I have to tax my imagination what it was all about. The chaos, the crime, the lunacy --- the state of simply trying to stay alive.
The writer describes her as "Young Sue." She must have been. She was only 63 when she died the other day. And she taught art. What kind, I haven't a clue. We would like to dismiss people who align themselves with the wrong persons. But perhaps we should not castigate them automatically.
I don't know. Judging people is always a bad premise. This is such a weirdly ornate story, I don't know what to make of it. Did she align herself with racist and creepy people? Yes. Do I condemn her? I don't know.
Sue's life is one well-lived because she made hard, determined choices. We may decide how we would like to live our own. That will give me pause. I am sure you will catch the stab from the London Telegraph reporter: "buried in a grave next to her mother-in-lay and bridge parter."
I don't know which is worse: having a mother-in-law or bridge partner.
Meanwhile, let's keep up our practicing to curtsey ...
Level-headed Bruce Bellingham, in San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Queen Susan of the Albanians
(Filed: 22/07/2004)
Queen Susan of the Albanians, who has died in Tirana aged 63, was the level-headed Australian wife of King Leka I, claimant to the Albanian throne.
It is unusual, though not unknown, for middle-class girls to marry into the fading respectability of dispossessed monarchs. But when in 1975 the petite Susan Cullen-Ward married Leka, son of King Zog I, she became consort to a 6ft 9in tall, six-gun-toting giant who has never shaken off the aura of his country's bandit culture.
Leka was born at Tirana just before the Second World War and left with his family two days later when Mussolini invaded Albania. After his father's death in 1961, he was crowned in Paris, from which he was expelled because of the ill-effects he was having on French relations with Albania's Communist regime; he was once arrested on suspicion of
arms smuggling in Thailand. In the course of his restless travels, he met Susan Cullen-Ward at a dinner party in Sydney.
They discovered that they both had claims of royal lineage; she was descended from King Edward I and he was a ninth cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II. When later she was on holiday in London, a courtier suggested that she visit the King in Madrid.
Leka's mother, Queen Geraldine, realised that the couple's friendship was turning into love, and proceeded to groom the Australian girl as her royal successor. This involved teaching her to speak Albanian and steeping her in the history and customs of the country.
Leka and Susan were married in a civil ceremony at Biarritz, then held a reception at a five-star Toledo roadhouse, which was attended by members of other exiled royal families, loyal Albanians and Spanish friends. An Anglican clergyman flew from Australia to give the couple a blessing. Queen Elizabeth II sent a telegram of congratulations. Queen Susan looked suitably regal in a 200-year-old gold embroidered Royal Albanian shawl and the guests cried "Long live the King".
A grazier's daughter, Susan Cullen-Ward was born at Waverly, a suburb of Sydney, on January 28 1941 (Australia Day). She was brought up on a New South Wales sheep station, where she remembered practising to curtsey to Her Majesty The Queen before a royal visit, but also being taken with the achievements of Colonel Harry Llewellyn and his
showjumper Foxhunter, which won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics.
Young Sue went to the Presbyterian Ladies' College at Orange, then Sydney Technical College, before teaching art at a private studio and contracting a brief marriage.
After returning with her husband to Spain, she told the press at the reception, "I don't feel like a queen. I feel a happy bride. Nothing has changed except I have the responsibility of helping His Majesty back on to the throne of his country."
The couple returned to Madrid, where they were befriended by King Juan Carlos and continued to enjoy the attentions of Albanians while awaiting what they knew must be the fall of Communism. But when it was discovered that Leka not only retained some Thai bodyguards but had what was described as an arms cache in their home, the Spanish government asked him to leave.
That Leka had some reason for his fears was proved when he arrived at Gabon to find his plane surrounded by local troops, who were said to have been hired to capture him by the Albanian government; he saw them off by appearing at the plane's door with a bazooka in his hand. The couple went on to Rhodesia. But after Mugabe took power they settled in a large compound at Johannesburg, where they were given diplomatic status by the apartheid regime.
There were always questions about how Leka lived. Such good friends as the Shah of Persia, President Richard Nixon (a distant cousin) and the CIA are thought to have helped.
The royal couple enjoyed a close personal relationship. They both had a keen liking for smoking. He affectionately called her "Roo", and showed some signs of allowing her to check some of his more outlandish instincts. For more than a decade she tried to lead as ordinary a life as her roles of housewife, mother and queen permitted.
Out shopping, she often called herself Mrs Smith or Mrs Jones because shop assistants were so bamboozled by her title that they would ask "Queen? That's a funny name, Mrs Susan." When her son, also called Leka, was born, her hospital room was declared part of Albania for an hour. The boy used another name at school, though she once heard him tell a friend: "You can't say that to me, because I'm a prince." Entering the room, she said: "Well, I am queen, so I outrank you. Bend over."
But as Communism looked increasingly shaky in Eastern Europe, she felt lonely with Leka so frequently away; and she was always delighted to receive visits from old Australian friends, replete with gossip. Her relationship with the dominion's government proved a problem when she wanted a passport.
The Australian authorities declined to recognise her as a queen, and eventually, after a friend had a word with the Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock, the document described her as "Susan Cullen-Ward, known as Queen Susan". There was also trouble when her son, aged four, had wanted to visit a dying grandfather whom he had never met. He was asked to sign an undertaking not to address any dissident groups.
By the time it was clear that Leka's dream of returning to his country was to be fulfilled, she showed signs of preferring the simple life, saying she had no desire to live in a castle and was sometimes tempted to laugh when grown men, in their confusion, had curtseyed to her.
But she duly went to Albania where a referendum was held on his offer to become king in 1997; it was lost. But he was invited to return by 74 members of parliament in 2002; and it is thought that the royalist party could join a government after next year's general election, thanks to proportional representation.
After her death in July of this year, Queen Sue lay in state at the royal palace outside Tirana. Hundreds paid their last respects before she was buried in a grave next to her mother-in-law and bridge partner Queen Geraldine.
Who wants to live in a castle anyway? Right.
counting on it. But I am afraid I will have to be it. I will have to serve until the end of my days. A court jester; an in-house smarster. In short. someone who might serve in the purview of Queen Susan of Albania.
Johnny Burke would have a lot of fun with, "Susan, Queen of the Albanians."
Perhaps we have to serve someone all the time. We had better pick right mistress.
Perhaps not. Maybe we should call the whole thing off.
How exotic or obscure is this? Albania must be the most arcane of European countries. You know that British intelligence would lose more agents there than anywhere else? I still wish I could have been there in" the Toledo roadhouse" that's what is mentioned below. Sinatra used to play roadhouses in New Jersey.My mother would tell me about this. That's when she dated my father. I don't think this roadhouse would have been all that similar. Sinatra also had a personal lyricist. That was Sammy Cahn, who was a lovely fellow.
We are off on the "The Road to Tirana."
A graziers daughter? It is so much fun to read between the lines. An inherent putdown. What the heck is a grazier? I am a city boy. A grazier is someone, I surmise, who grazes for his cattle feed. Of for fodder for a column. You don't see them around much anymore. I guess I am a grazier in an urban sense -- but we are off the topic. I am sure a
grazier's daughter is as wholesome and sweet as a farmer's daughter. Then again, how are you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Albania?
Who could resist this obit? Back in Atlanta, Sherilyn Bottoms was berating me this afternoon. She said I did not include enough women in this column.
Now I include a woman who surpasses all women: Susan, the "Queen of Albania." It reminds me of the old Dorothy Parker joke, "And I am Marie of Romania." I did not know there were queens in Romania. What that the hell am I saying? We have plenty of them here in San Francisco, though perhaps they losty a little regality over the years.
In the old days, royalty was a living; a treasured artifact. Monarchy is specious, for sure --- but inexplicably attractive.
Above all, this piece is wonderfully written. What is a level-headed wife anyway. I never had one. I lis this is the second graph: "not unusual for middle-class girls to marry into the fading respectability of the of dispossessed monarchs."
Ever have a bad day?
I really hate being a dispossessed monarch.
Or queen for a day.
Consort to a gun-toting giant? I've seen enough of those in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. And some of them were queens, as well.
Sherilyn is right: they might be dangerous. There are so many elements to this story that are so bizarre, it makes
me wonder. Friends of the CIA, Richard Nixon? Well, I guess that doesn't surprise me at all. But this "level-headed queen," I have to tax my imagination what it was all about. The chaos, the crime, the lunacy --- the state of simply trying to stay alive.
The writer describes her as "Young Sue." She must have been. She was only 63 when she died the other day. And she taught art. What kind, I haven't a clue. We would like to dismiss people who align themselves with the wrong persons. But perhaps we should not castigate them automatically.
I don't know. Judging people is always a bad premise. This is such a weirdly ornate story, I don't know what to make of it. Did she align herself with racist and creepy people? Yes. Do I condemn her? I don't know.
Sue's life is one well-lived because she made hard, determined choices. We may decide how we would like to live our own. That will give me pause. I am sure you will catch the stab from the London Telegraph reporter: "buried in a grave next to her mother-in-lay and bridge parter."
I don't know which is worse: having a mother-in-law or bridge partner.
Meanwhile, let's keep up our practicing to curtsey ...
Level-headed Bruce Bellingham, in San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Queen Susan of the Albanians
(Filed: 22/07/2004)
Queen Susan of the Albanians, who has died in Tirana aged 63, was the level-headed Australian wife of King Leka I, claimant to the Albanian throne.
It is unusual, though not unknown, for middle-class girls to marry into the fading respectability of dispossessed monarchs. But when in 1975 the petite Susan Cullen-Ward married Leka, son of King Zog I, she became consort to a 6ft 9in tall, six-gun-toting giant who has never shaken off the aura of his country's bandit culture.
Leka was born at Tirana just before the Second World War and left with his family two days later when Mussolini invaded Albania. After his father's death in 1961, he was crowned in Paris, from which he was expelled because of the ill-effects he was having on French relations with Albania's Communist regime; he was once arrested on suspicion of
arms smuggling in Thailand. In the course of his restless travels, he met Susan Cullen-Ward at a dinner party in Sydney.
They discovered that they both had claims of royal lineage; she was descended from King Edward I and he was a ninth cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II. When later she was on holiday in London, a courtier suggested that she visit the King in Madrid.
Leka's mother, Queen Geraldine, realised that the couple's friendship was turning into love, and proceeded to groom the Australian girl as her royal successor. This involved teaching her to speak Albanian and steeping her in the history and customs of the country.
Leka and Susan were married in a civil ceremony at Biarritz, then held a reception at a five-star Toledo roadhouse, which was attended by members of other exiled royal families, loyal Albanians and Spanish friends. An Anglican clergyman flew from Australia to give the couple a blessing. Queen Elizabeth II sent a telegram of congratulations. Queen Susan looked suitably regal in a 200-year-old gold embroidered Royal Albanian shawl and the guests cried "Long live the King".
A grazier's daughter, Susan Cullen-Ward was born at Waverly, a suburb of Sydney, on January 28 1941 (Australia Day). She was brought up on a New South Wales sheep station, where she remembered practising to curtsey to Her Majesty The Queen before a royal visit, but also being taken with the achievements of Colonel Harry Llewellyn and his
showjumper Foxhunter, which won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics.
Young Sue went to the Presbyterian Ladies' College at Orange, then Sydney Technical College, before teaching art at a private studio and contracting a brief marriage.
After returning with her husband to Spain, she told the press at the reception, "I don't feel like a queen. I feel a happy bride. Nothing has changed except I have the responsibility of helping His Majesty back on to the throne of his country."
The couple returned to Madrid, where they were befriended by King Juan Carlos and continued to enjoy the attentions of Albanians while awaiting what they knew must be the fall of Communism. But when it was discovered that Leka not only retained some Thai bodyguards but had what was described as an arms cache in their home, the Spanish government asked him to leave.
That Leka had some reason for his fears was proved when he arrived at Gabon to find his plane surrounded by local troops, who were said to have been hired to capture him by the Albanian government; he saw them off by appearing at the plane's door with a bazooka in his hand. The couple went on to Rhodesia. But after Mugabe took power they settled in a large compound at Johannesburg, where they were given diplomatic status by the apartheid regime.
There were always questions about how Leka lived. Such good friends as the Shah of Persia, President Richard Nixon (a distant cousin) and the CIA are thought to have helped.
The royal couple enjoyed a close personal relationship. They both had a keen liking for smoking. He affectionately called her "Roo", and showed some signs of allowing her to check some of his more outlandish instincts. For more than a decade she tried to lead as ordinary a life as her roles of housewife, mother and queen permitted.
Out shopping, she often called herself Mrs Smith or Mrs Jones because shop assistants were so bamboozled by her title that they would ask "Queen? That's a funny name, Mrs Susan." When her son, also called Leka, was born, her hospital room was declared part of Albania for an hour. The boy used another name at school, though she once heard him tell a friend: "You can't say that to me, because I'm a prince." Entering the room, she said: "Well, I am queen, so I outrank you. Bend over."
But as Communism looked increasingly shaky in Eastern Europe, she felt lonely with Leka so frequently away; and she was always delighted to receive visits from old Australian friends, replete with gossip. Her relationship with the dominion's government proved a problem when she wanted a passport.
The Australian authorities declined to recognise her as a queen, and eventually, after a friend had a word with the Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock, the document described her as "Susan Cullen-Ward, known as Queen Susan". There was also trouble when her son, aged four, had wanted to visit a dying grandfather whom he had never met. He was asked to sign an undertaking not to address any dissident groups.
By the time it was clear that Leka's dream of returning to his country was to be fulfilled, she showed signs of preferring the simple life, saying she had no desire to live in a castle and was sometimes tempted to laugh when grown men, in their confusion, had curtseyed to her.
But she duly went to Albania where a referendum was held on his offer to become king in 1997; it was lost. But he was invited to return by 74 members of parliament in 2002; and it is thought that the royalist party could join a government after next year's general election, thanks to proportional representation.
After her death in July of this year, Queen Sue lay in state at the royal palace outside Tirana. Hundreds paid their last respects before she was buried in a grave next to her mother-in-law and bridge partner Queen Geraldine.
Who wants to live in a castle anyway? Right.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
A Life Well-Lived
Hollywood has decided to remake the classic 1962 film, "The Manchurian Candidate." It is a painful reminder that we no longer have Lawrence Harvey around anymore. Through his twitchy performance and the film, we learn solitaire is the only game in town. Nor do we have Sinatra, who, like the rest of the cast, was amazingly good in the film. It includes John McGiver, James Gregory and yes ... Whit Bissell. Let's thank God for Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury. There are moments in cinema that allow such talented elements tumble together and create a truly wonderful movie. Not to mention that, I, as a horror film fan, found this to be one of the scariest of all. Why? Because it is plausible.
In the original "Manchurian Candidate", the presidential candidate is secretly undermined by the man running on the second spot through the most nefarious techniques -- one is manipulating the media. The other might be described as the intelligence community on steroids. Sound familiar?
How about this line from Sinatra's character, Major Marco: "Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it. Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it."
Perhaps the real genius beyond the first "Manchurian Candidate" is John Frankenheimer, who learned his craft by making training films for the Air Force and then became a television director during the 1950s. He used both experiences to give the film more starkness and credibility. No wonder Frankenheimer understood how manipulative sound bites would eventually replace critical analysis. The original story comes from novelist Richard Condon, who also wrote "Prizzi's Honor."
I watched the original "Manchurian Candidate" the other night. I was riveted by David Amram's sophisticated score. Not the soupy stuff they tend to inflict on us in movie houses today. (David is a former San Francisco jazzer who performed a show last year at the Caffe Trieste in North Beach.) His strident soundtrack makes the story all the more terrifying.
Amazing to think Angela Lansbury was only a year older than Lawrence Harvey when they made the film. She played his incestuous, conniving mother in the film. Therein lies the lovely and sordid Greek tragedy theme. Lansbury's youthful beauty makes their relationship in the movie all the more lurid. Inexplicably, she still does not look all that different today.
Most of us know that in the 1960s Sinatra obtained the rights to the movie and pulled it from circulation after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It came a little too close to home. In 1988 it was rereleased on video where Frankenheimer, Sinatra and screenwriter George Axelrod reminisce a little. Sinatra said he had
never been so excited about a project in his movie career as he was about "Manchurian..."
The difference between then and now is the soldiers were brainwashed. Now the American public is. The soldiers, then and now, will tell the story.
But this column is about John Frankenhiemer, who died in July two years ago. I pull it from this archive (and from the Associated Press). Rosemary Clooney -- one of my favorite singers in the whole, wide world
-- used to talk about how the death of Robert Kennedy pushed her over the edge to addiction. That night in Los Angeles in 1968 also changed Frankenheimer. Years later he would openly admit he had trouble with addiction. Such a euphemism: an addiction is nothing but trouble. But he came to grips with it, acknowledging that it had cost him plenty. That is, he had stopped working -- the worst thing that could happen to an artist. I like the way he dealt with his subsequent depression: he went to France to become a chef. But, of course, he came back home to movies --- and to television -- crepe pans in hand, no doubt.
Frankenheimer represents to me what an artist is all about: someone who has the courage to be honest with himself and then share it with the world. His was a life well-lived.
So, meanwhile, why don't we pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
LOS ANGELES, July 6, 2002 -- John Frankenheimer, one of the foremost directors of the 1960's with classic films like "The Manchurian Candidate," "Seven Days in May," "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Train,"
died of a massive stroke from complications after spinal surgery. He was 72.
Mr. Frankenheimer, whose career stumbled badly in the late 1970's and 1980's because of personal problems and alcoholism, came back in the 1990's with significant television work that was flourishing at the time of his death. "It's a town with a short memory: it grinds people up and throws them away," Mr. Frankenheimer told a reporter in 1998, shortly before the release of an action film, "Ronin," with Robert De Niro.
More recently, Mr. Frankenheimer won four consecutive Emmys for best director for the television movies "Against the Wall," "The Burning Season," "Andersonville," and "George Wallace." His last film, "Path to
War," an ambitious HBO drama about the Johnson administration's decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam, was shown in May to strong reviews.
On the set of the film, veteran actors like Donald Sutherland, who played Clark Clifford, and Michael Gambon, who played President Lyndon B. Johnson, said that Mr. Frankenheimer's enthusiasm and energy amazed
them. "He has more energy than someone half his age," Mr. Gambon remarked.
The director Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a longtime friend of Mr. Frankenheimer, said: "John revolutionized everybody's way of looking at films. He had such a highly charged visual style, so full of energy; he brought us close up to things. Movies began to look different after John came along."
The actor Gary Sinise, who played the title role in "George Wallace" and worked with Mr. Frankenheimer on two other films, called him "a giant."
"He had directing in his blood," Mr. Sinise said. "He loved filmmaking. It gave him a great source of energy and passion. I met him later in his career, but never did I feel that I was working with someone whose best years were over. He just had this great passion and great vision and great love for making movies."
A tall, rangy figure with a craggy face and a surprisingly open and blunt style, Mr. Frankenheimer sometimes looked back on his career without bitterness or rancor.
He attributed his bleak years in part to a drinking problem that sometimes led to disastrous decisions in the 1970's. He said he stopped drinking in 1980.
"I had a drinking problem — it took a toll on me," he told The New York Times in 1998. "And the state of mind you're in when you have a problem like that, even when you're not drunk, is the most dangerous time.
Because you make decisions that are not totally in your best interest about your life, about your career choices and everything."
Of his decision to stop drinking, he recalled, "I said, `I can't go on like this — I figured I'd better do something about it, because otherwise I was going to die.' "
Compounding his personal difficulties was the assassination in 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy. Mr. Frankenheimer and Senator Kennedy had developed a close friendship, and the filmmaker spent that year traveling with
him during his presidential campaign. In fact, on the last day of his life, Senator Kennedy was staying at Mr. Frankenheimer's home in Malibu. Mr. Frankenheimer drove him to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown
Los Angeles to celebrate his triumph in the California primary. It was there that Senator Kennedy was killed.
Decades after the assassination, Mr. Frankenheimer spoke of it in halting terms. "If you want to date a moment when things started to turn, it was after that night," Mr. Frankenheimer said. "I went through sheer hell. I went to Europe, and I just lost interest. I got burned out. I was really left very disillusioned and went through a period of
deep depression. It took a long time to get it back." Mr. Frankenheimer spent five years in France, taking cooking classes and directing sporadically.
Movie offers dwindled in the 1980's after several failures and a decline in his work. But his career revived in 1994, when he won an Emmy for HBO's searing prison drama "Against the Wall," about the bloody 1971 riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
Mr. Frankenheimer was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1930, the son of a stockbroker. "I came from a half-Irish, half-German-Jewish background, a very volatile mix," he once said with a laugh. He was active in theater at Williams College. During the Korean War, while he was in the Air Force making training films, he decided he wanted to direct movies. Soon afterward he was hired as an assistant director at CBS in New York, where he worked on weather and news broadcasts as well as shows like "Person to Person" and "You Are There."
Yes, we are there.
In the original "Manchurian Candidate", the presidential candidate is secretly undermined by the man running on the second spot through the most nefarious techniques -- one is manipulating the media. The other might be described as the intelligence community on steroids. Sound familiar?
How about this line from Sinatra's character, Major Marco: "Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it. Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it."
Perhaps the real genius beyond the first "Manchurian Candidate" is John Frankenheimer, who learned his craft by making training films for the Air Force and then became a television director during the 1950s. He used both experiences to give the film more starkness and credibility. No wonder Frankenheimer understood how manipulative sound bites would eventually replace critical analysis. The original story comes from novelist Richard Condon, who also wrote "Prizzi's Honor."
I watched the original "Manchurian Candidate" the other night. I was riveted by David Amram's sophisticated score. Not the soupy stuff they tend to inflict on us in movie houses today. (David is a former San Francisco jazzer who performed a show last year at the Caffe Trieste in North Beach.) His strident soundtrack makes the story all the more terrifying.
Amazing to think Angela Lansbury was only a year older than Lawrence Harvey when they made the film. She played his incestuous, conniving mother in the film. Therein lies the lovely and sordid Greek tragedy theme. Lansbury's youthful beauty makes their relationship in the movie all the more lurid. Inexplicably, she still does not look all that different today.
Most of us know that in the 1960s Sinatra obtained the rights to the movie and pulled it from circulation after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It came a little too close to home. In 1988 it was rereleased on video where Frankenheimer, Sinatra and screenwriter George Axelrod reminisce a little. Sinatra said he had
never been so excited about a project in his movie career as he was about "Manchurian..."
The difference between then and now is the soldiers were brainwashed. Now the American public is. The soldiers, then and now, will tell the story.
But this column is about John Frankenhiemer, who died in July two years ago. I pull it from this archive (and from the Associated Press). Rosemary Clooney -- one of my favorite singers in the whole, wide world
-- used to talk about how the death of Robert Kennedy pushed her over the edge to addiction. That night in Los Angeles in 1968 also changed Frankenheimer. Years later he would openly admit he had trouble with addiction. Such a euphemism: an addiction is nothing but trouble. But he came to grips with it, acknowledging that it had cost him plenty. That is, he had stopped working -- the worst thing that could happen to an artist. I like the way he dealt with his subsequent depression: he went to France to become a chef. But, of course, he came back home to movies --- and to television -- crepe pans in hand, no doubt.
Frankenheimer represents to me what an artist is all about: someone who has the courage to be honest with himself and then share it with the world. His was a life well-lived.
So, meanwhile, why don't we pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
LOS ANGELES, July 6, 2002 -- John Frankenheimer, one of the foremost directors of the 1960's with classic films like "The Manchurian Candidate," "Seven Days in May," "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Train,"
died of a massive stroke from complications after spinal surgery. He was 72.
Mr. Frankenheimer, whose career stumbled badly in the late 1970's and 1980's because of personal problems and alcoholism, came back in the 1990's with significant television work that was flourishing at the time of his death. "It's a town with a short memory: it grinds people up and throws them away," Mr. Frankenheimer told a reporter in 1998, shortly before the release of an action film, "Ronin," with Robert De Niro.
More recently, Mr. Frankenheimer won four consecutive Emmys for best director for the television movies "Against the Wall," "The Burning Season," "Andersonville," and "George Wallace." His last film, "Path to
War," an ambitious HBO drama about the Johnson administration's decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam, was shown in May to strong reviews.
On the set of the film, veteran actors like Donald Sutherland, who played Clark Clifford, and Michael Gambon, who played President Lyndon B. Johnson, said that Mr. Frankenheimer's enthusiasm and energy amazed
them. "He has more energy than someone half his age," Mr. Gambon remarked.
The director Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a longtime friend of Mr. Frankenheimer, said: "John revolutionized everybody's way of looking at films. He had such a highly charged visual style, so full of energy; he brought us close up to things. Movies began to look different after John came along."
The actor Gary Sinise, who played the title role in "George Wallace" and worked with Mr. Frankenheimer on two other films, called him "a giant."
"He had directing in his blood," Mr. Sinise said. "He loved filmmaking. It gave him a great source of energy and passion. I met him later in his career, but never did I feel that I was working with someone whose best years were over. He just had this great passion and great vision and great love for making movies."
A tall, rangy figure with a craggy face and a surprisingly open and blunt style, Mr. Frankenheimer sometimes looked back on his career without bitterness or rancor.
He attributed his bleak years in part to a drinking problem that sometimes led to disastrous decisions in the 1970's. He said he stopped drinking in 1980.
"I had a drinking problem — it took a toll on me," he told The New York Times in 1998. "And the state of mind you're in when you have a problem like that, even when you're not drunk, is the most dangerous time.
Because you make decisions that are not totally in your best interest about your life, about your career choices and everything."
Of his decision to stop drinking, he recalled, "I said, `I can't go on like this — I figured I'd better do something about it, because otherwise I was going to die.' "
Compounding his personal difficulties was the assassination in 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy. Mr. Frankenheimer and Senator Kennedy had developed a close friendship, and the filmmaker spent that year traveling with
him during his presidential campaign. In fact, on the last day of his life, Senator Kennedy was staying at Mr. Frankenheimer's home in Malibu. Mr. Frankenheimer drove him to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown
Los Angeles to celebrate his triumph in the California primary. It was there that Senator Kennedy was killed.
Decades after the assassination, Mr. Frankenheimer spoke of it in halting terms. "If you want to date a moment when things started to turn, it was after that night," Mr. Frankenheimer said. "I went through sheer hell. I went to Europe, and I just lost interest. I got burned out. I was really left very disillusioned and went through a period of
deep depression. It took a long time to get it back." Mr. Frankenheimer spent five years in France, taking cooking classes and directing sporadically.
Movie offers dwindled in the 1980's after several failures and a decline in his work. But his career revived in 1994, when he won an Emmy for HBO's searing prison drama "Against the Wall," about the bloody 1971 riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
Mr. Frankenheimer was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1930, the son of a stockbroker. "I came from a half-Irish, half-German-Jewish background, a very volatile mix," he once said with a laugh. He was active in theater at Williams College. During the Korean War, while he was in the Air Force making training films, he decided he wanted to direct movies. Soon afterward he was hired as an assistant director at CBS in New York, where he worked on weather and news broadcasts as well as shows like "Person to Person" and "You Are There."
Yes, we are there.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
A Life Well-Lived for Rod McKuen's "Flight Plan"
Rod and I have a common and not-so-secret addiction.
That is, words. So it will not surprise you fellow travelers on Flight
Plan that this obit in the London Telegraph caught my attention. Not
just for Robert Burchfield's unrepentant and exquisite lust for
language -- but for his purity of conviction that would get him into
trouble. He battled political correctness before anyone had coined the
awful phrase. PC has damaged the freedom of language usage more than
anything --- even the California state school system. But I imagine
that is a dead heat.
Burchfield, the linguist, used language in a way that H.L. Mencken did
with journalism: fearlessly, directly and yes, compassionately. How
many reporters today recall Mencken's admonition, that the job of a
journalist is "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"?
Burchfield was a kiwi, I word I think he had included in the Oxford
English Dictionary. It is slang for a New Zealander. He loved Tolkien.
Ironic that because a much younger fellow kiwi, Peter Jackson -- the
brilliant director of the "Lord Of The Rings" film trilogy -- now sits
at the top of the cinema world. Words and images have always been the
hallmark of imagination.
You will discover that Burchfield once hired the terrific writer Julian
Barnes at the OED to be an expert on "sports and dirty words." Wouldn't
you love to have a gig like that? Of course, I would likely never get
around to the sports stuff.
Burchfield described language as "a monster accordion." Probably the
greatest tribute to the accordion that's ever been uttered.
He wasn't beyond going to court over copyright matters -- even taking
on Weight Watchers for the right to use the term.
Let's face it: no one knew the weight of words than Robert Burchfield.
He watched them better than anyone. He was always paying attention.
This is a life truly well-lived.
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
That is, words. So it will not surprise you fellow travelers on Flight
Plan that this obit in the London Telegraph caught my attention. Not
just for Robert Burchfield's unrepentant and exquisite lust for
language -- but for his purity of conviction that would get him into
trouble. He battled political correctness before anyone had coined the
awful phrase. PC has damaged the freedom of language usage more than
anything --- even the California state school system. But I imagine
that is a dead heat.
Burchfield, the linguist, used language in a way that H.L. Mencken did
with journalism: fearlessly, directly and yes, compassionately. How
many reporters today recall Mencken's admonition, that the job of a
journalist is "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"?
Burchfield was a kiwi, I word I think he had included in the Oxford
English Dictionary. It is slang for a New Zealander. He loved Tolkien.
Ironic that because a much younger fellow kiwi, Peter Jackson -- the
brilliant director of the "Lord Of The Rings" film trilogy -- now sits
at the top of the cinema world. Words and images have always been the
hallmark of imagination.
You will discover that Burchfield once hired the terrific writer Julian
Barnes at the OED to be an expert on "sports and dirty words." Wouldn't
you love to have a gig like that? Of course, I would likely never get
around to the sports stuff.
Burchfield described language as "a monster accordion." Probably the
greatest tribute to the accordion that's ever been uttered.
He wasn't beyond going to court over copyright matters -- even taking
on Weight Watchers for the right to use the term.
Let's face it: no one knew the weight of words than Robert Burchfield.
He watched them better than anyone. He was always paying attention.
This is a life truly well-lived.
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Monday, July 05, 2004
Robert Burchfield
Robert Burchfield, who has died aged 81, was the editor of the
four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972-86), and
chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries from 1971 to 1984; he
played a crucial role in the study of the sources and development of
the English language, but his enthusiasm for the new sometimes enraged
traditionalists.
A New-Zealander by birth, Burchfield revelled in the flexibility of the
language, once describing it as "a monster accordion, stretchable at
the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib". He saw "standard English"
and "received pronunciation" as only a local, if once dominant, form of
a language which had become global and embraced many different strands,
each of which he regarded as democratically equal.
Burchfield broadened the scope of the OED to include words from many
Anglophone countries including North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. He also increased
coverage of demotic slang, colloquialisms and scientific and technical
terms.
The first fruits of his appointment as editor of the Oxford English
Dictionaries appeared during the 1970s when, to the dismay of lexical
purists, Maori terms (for example, kete and pakeha) began to appear in
the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
He soon discovered that nothing has the power to arouse people's
passions so much as words. He received anonymous death threats from
groups wishing to suppress racial vocabulary or to remove male
chauvinism from the language. One letter read: "You won't know where or
when, but you'll be dead."
He had to go to court to defend the OED's right to include pejorative
definitions of the word "Jew", on the ground that the function of a
dictionary is to describe language as it is, not as we may like it to
be. He had to fight legal battles over the right to include trademarks
and names, from Yale locks to WeightWatchers. He kept a file for what
he called the lunatic fringe: this included a letter from a man
imploring him to find a word for "a collector of fire helmets from all
over the world".
But the controversy over entries in the OED Supplement was as nothing
compared with the outcry over his revision of the grammatical bible
Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1996. Burchfield himself
admitted that he had "largely rewritten" Fowler, whom he described as
"a fossil". Yet even he must have been taken aback by the critical flak
which greeted his revision. One reviewer ventured that "Burchfield's
wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist
masterpiece have assured him a definite place in Hell".
Although Burchfield's Fowler contained much good advice (Richard
Ingrams and Jeanette Winterson were among a number of writers taken to
task for their dangling participles), and some reviewers applauded the
welcome he gave to non-standard constructions, others took exception to
what they saw as excessively permissive statements and lack of firm
guidance compared with earlier editions. Whereas the schoolmasterly
Fowler had defended standard English against invasion by the foreign
hordes, Burchfield saw it as merely the "language of the chattering
classes" and cited as many examples of American usage.
Robert William Burchfield was born on January 27 1923 at Wanganui on
the North Island of New Zealand, where his father ran the local power
station. There was only one book in the family home - a Socialist
tract. He was educated at Wanganui Technical College and at Victoria
University College, Wellington, where his studies were interrupted by
the outbreak of the Second World War.
It was the war, in which Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand
Artillery, that changed his life. While serving in Trieste, he
discovered a copy of Lancelot Hogben's Loom of Language, and was
captivated. After the war, he returned to complete his studies in
Wellington, then, in 1949, went on a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen
College, Oxford, to study English Language under J R R Tolkien and C S
Lewis.
Through their common interest in medieval literature he developed a
close friendship with Tolkien, whom he later described as "the
puckering fisherman who drew me into his philological net".
Immediately after graduation in 1952, Burchfield became a college
lecturer in English Language, first at Magdalen, then at Christ Church,
and later at St Peter's College, while studying for a doctorate on the
Ormulum, a 13th-century 20,000-line poem based on the Gospels.
While teaching at Oxford, he was encouraged by C T Onions, a former
editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to become involved in
lexicography, and he assisted Onions on his Dictionary of English
Etymology (1966). When, in 1957, he was appointed editor of the
Supplement to the OED, the University Press reckoned he would need
seven years and 1,275 pages to do the job. It took him 29 years, and
the four-volume supplement covered 6,000 pages.
Burchfield's team, in hallowed OED tradition, contained a fair number
of oddballs and eccentrics. One outside contributor worked from
Broadmoor and another from Parkhurst, where he had fetched up after
being arrested in the Bodleian Library. The novelist Julian Barnes was
employed for a time, as an "expert in sports and dirty words". He
recalled Burchfield's doubtful response to his efforts to include a
slang word for a supposedly popular form of sexual congress: "I'm
afraid, you know," Burchfield told him, "there isn't as much of this
about as you seem to think."
Burchfield's official retirement brought no slackening of pace, since
he was soon engrossed in Fowler. Among several other works, he wrote a
brief but informative history of The English Language (1985), published
a collection of essays, Unlocking the English Language (1991), and was
co-author of a report in 1979 on the quality of spoken English on BBC
radio.
Burchfield also wrote the preface for Caught in the Web of Words, a
biography of James A H Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary, contributed to the Cambridge History of the English
Language, and published numerous scholarly essays. In the 1980s he
wrote a series on language, Sixth Sense, for The Daily Telegraph.
At Oxford, Burchfield became a tutorial fellow at Magdalen in 1963,
then a senior research fellow at St Peter's from 1979 to 1990. He was a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was appointed
CBE in 1975.
He married first, in 1949 (dissolved 1976), Ethel Yates; they had a son
and two daughters. He married secondly, in 1976, Elizabeth Austen
Knight.
four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972-86), and
chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries from 1971 to 1984; he
played a crucial role in the study of the sources and development of
the English language, but his enthusiasm for the new sometimes enraged
traditionalists.
A New-Zealander by birth, Burchfield revelled in the flexibility of the
language, once describing it as "a monster accordion, stretchable at
the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib". He saw "standard English"
and "received pronunciation" as only a local, if once dominant, form of
a language which had become global and embraced many different strands,
each of which he regarded as democratically equal.
Burchfield broadened the scope of the OED to include words from many
Anglophone countries including North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. He also increased
coverage of demotic slang, colloquialisms and scientific and technical
terms.
The first fruits of his appointment as editor of the Oxford English
Dictionaries appeared during the 1970s when, to the dismay of lexical
purists, Maori terms (for example, kete and pakeha) began to appear in
the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
He soon discovered that nothing has the power to arouse people's
passions so much as words. He received anonymous death threats from
groups wishing to suppress racial vocabulary or to remove male
chauvinism from the language. One letter read: "You won't know where or
when, but you'll be dead."
He had to go to court to defend the OED's right to include pejorative
definitions of the word "Jew", on the ground that the function of a
dictionary is to describe language as it is, not as we may like it to
be. He had to fight legal battles over the right to include trademarks
and names, from Yale locks to WeightWatchers. He kept a file for what
he called the lunatic fringe: this included a letter from a man
imploring him to find a word for "a collector of fire helmets from all
over the world".
But the controversy over entries in the OED Supplement was as nothing
compared with the outcry over his revision of the grammatical bible
Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1996. Burchfield himself
admitted that he had "largely rewritten" Fowler, whom he described as
"a fossil". Yet even he must have been taken aback by the critical flak
which greeted his revision. One reviewer ventured that "Burchfield's
wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist
masterpiece have assured him a definite place in Hell".
Although Burchfield's Fowler contained much good advice (Richard
Ingrams and Jeanette Winterson were among a number of writers taken to
task for their dangling participles), and some reviewers applauded the
welcome he gave to non-standard constructions, others took exception to
what they saw as excessively permissive statements and lack of firm
guidance compared with earlier editions. Whereas the schoolmasterly
Fowler had defended standard English against invasion by the foreign
hordes, Burchfield saw it as merely the "language of the chattering
classes" and cited as many examples of American usage.
Robert William Burchfield was born on January 27 1923 at Wanganui on
the North Island of New Zealand, where his father ran the local power
station. There was only one book in the family home - a Socialist
tract. He was educated at Wanganui Technical College and at Victoria
University College, Wellington, where his studies were interrupted by
the outbreak of the Second World War.
It was the war, in which Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand
Artillery, that changed his life. While serving in Trieste, he
discovered a copy of Lancelot Hogben's Loom of Language, and was
captivated. After the war, he returned to complete his studies in
Wellington, then, in 1949, went on a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen
College, Oxford, to study English Language under J R R Tolkien and C S
Lewis.
Through their common interest in medieval literature he developed a
close friendship with Tolkien, whom he later described as "the
puckering fisherman who drew me into his philological net".
Immediately after graduation in 1952, Burchfield became a college
lecturer in English Language, first at Magdalen, then at Christ Church,
and later at St Peter's College, while studying for a doctorate on the
Ormulum, a 13th-century 20,000-line poem based on the Gospels.
While teaching at Oxford, he was encouraged by C T Onions, a former
editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to become involved in
lexicography, and he assisted Onions on his Dictionary of English
Etymology (1966). When, in 1957, he was appointed editor of the
Supplement to the OED, the University Press reckoned he would need
seven years and 1,275 pages to do the job. It took him 29 years, and
the four-volume supplement covered 6,000 pages.
Burchfield's team, in hallowed OED tradition, contained a fair number
of oddballs and eccentrics. One outside contributor worked from
Broadmoor and another from Parkhurst, where he had fetched up after
being arrested in the Bodleian Library. The novelist Julian Barnes was
employed for a time, as an "expert in sports and dirty words". He
recalled Burchfield's doubtful response to his efforts to include a
slang word for a supposedly popular form of sexual congress: "I'm
afraid, you know," Burchfield told him, "there isn't as much of this
about as you seem to think."
Burchfield's official retirement brought no slackening of pace, since
he was soon engrossed in Fowler. Among several other works, he wrote a
brief but informative history of The English Language (1985), published
a collection of essays, Unlocking the English Language (1991), and was
co-author of a report in 1979 on the quality of spoken English on BBC
radio.
Burchfield also wrote the preface for Caught in the Web of Words, a
biography of James A H Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary, contributed to the Cambridge History of the English
Language, and published numerous scholarly essays. In the 1980s he
wrote a series on language, Sixth Sense, for The Daily Telegraph.
At Oxford, Burchfield became a tutorial fellow at Magdalen in 1963,
then a senior research fellow at St Peter's from 1979 to 1990. He was a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was appointed
CBE in 1975.
He married first, in 1949 (dissolved 1976), Ethel Yates; they had a son
and two daughters. He married secondly, in 1976, Elizabeth Austen
Knight.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
An unfair advantage
IF I KNEW STEROIDS WERE GOOD for writers, I would have taken them a long time ago. ... Ah, yes, you're right. It would not have helped. ... Here in Polk Street's Crepe House, the chit chat over the home fries is all about how Barry Bonds might be implicated in this drug-taking mess. "It's an unfair advantage for sure," said Dan Langley, who is a land surveyor by profession. He's also surveying the cultural scene. ... "Reading the news reports about the owner of Balco, I think it's cool that Victor Conte was the bass player in Tower of Power." ...
Oh, THAT Victor Conte. ... I think that's cool, too. I would be happy to appear as a character witness. But I don't think characters get called as character witnesses. Someone would object. ... I am already off the topic -- likely because of the steroids. ... Tower of Power is a treasure from Oakland -- a swell horn section. Great arrangements. I am not suggesting steroids are involved -- just brass. ...
This reminds me. There's a really terrific song by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. It's called "Little Jeannie." The horn section is, of course, Tower of Power. ... Here's my favorite part of the tune: "You stepped into my life from a bad dream/ making the life that I had seem suddenly shiny and new." ... That's sweet, redemptive stuff. ... Once in a while we go back to that cardiac thump that attaches us to tunes. And I am reminded again that I am alive. Thanks, lads. ...
As I was last night at Anú, while the rain came down at 6th and Market at midnight. ... There is nothing like a soft San Francisco rain. It reminds me that this city is, at heart, kind, but simply fearful of showing its compassion sometimes -- as if we are in competition with the big leagues of other cities. ...
But we are in the big leagues. This city of San Francisco is not only defined by its charm and wonderment -- it's defined by its desire to find excellence. ... Beyond that, we're happy to be here. If San Francisco isn't that great, why then is it such an annoyance to the rest of the country?
Here at the Crepe House on Polk Street, where the owner, Philip Issa --who is from Jordan -- plays Turkish music on the house system, I asked for Tower of Power. Philip is still rifling through the archives at my behest. ... At the table next to me yesterday, an Irishman said to me, "The most amazing thing about America is its honest people. For example, you just entrusted me to watch your laptop computer. Are you kidding? In Europe, they'd steal it in a minute." ... There are days when you have to sit still in a Polk Street bistro to learn a little about the world. ...
Here's one of the great things about San Francisco: A sense of honesty. It's enhanced by our young mayor, who has the courage to take a stand. Even -- imagine this -- to have an opinion. ... Gavin Newsom must be tired. Doing the right thing has got to be wearying. ... As Bob Dylan said, "To live outside the law you must be honest." ...
"Gay marriages?" asks Karen Warner. "Why not? Straight people have made such a mess of them already." ... Karen was at Opi's restaurant on Market, where the serene, cool owner, Max Benghazi, watches over the Tenderloin landscape. ... "I love the changes I see here," he said, glancing at the astonishing circus act that revolves around Market and 6th. ... It's Cirque de Soleil without the sunlight. ...
The times are indeed a'changing around here, thanks to Max. I suspect that Max had never thought about the notion of an unfair advantage. Impresario Max does what he does and he does it well. ... He has a goodness about him, and an infectiously good time when he works. And Max works. He pays attention, and he has chops. Not the kind that are on the menu. ... I should take lessons from him. ... Iranian-born, and a cheerful cat, Max embodies the immigrant passion that compels all to do well. I know these things. ... After all, I'm an immigrant from New Jersey ...
Speaking of lessons, George Michalski -- the debonair chap who is often in the company of a dazzling person from some province or another -- calls to say he has no good regard for Bob Dylan. Except perhaps for the line about living outside the law. George wants to revitalize San Francisco's music history. He's already working with Mayor Newsom on a San Francisco Music Commission. ... "I've never had a piano student before," says George, who wrote songs for Barbra Streisand. "But he's arriving in five minutes."
You know what's so great about that? George is still willing to give lessons. And I'm still willing to take them. ... The piano is still a difficult instrument to carry -- but, after all, this is San Francisco. I've got plenty of people to lend me a hand.
Oh, THAT Victor Conte. ... I think that's cool, too. I would be happy to appear as a character witness. But I don't think characters get called as character witnesses. Someone would object. ... I am already off the topic -- likely because of the steroids. ... Tower of Power is a treasure from Oakland -- a swell horn section. Great arrangements. I am not suggesting steroids are involved -- just brass. ...
This reminds me. There's a really terrific song by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. It's called "Little Jeannie." The horn section is, of course, Tower of Power. ... Here's my favorite part of the tune: "You stepped into my life from a bad dream/ making the life that I had seem suddenly shiny and new." ... That's sweet, redemptive stuff. ... Once in a while we go back to that cardiac thump that attaches us to tunes. And I am reminded again that I am alive. Thanks, lads. ...
As I was last night at Anú, while the rain came down at 6th and Market at midnight. ... There is nothing like a soft San Francisco rain. It reminds me that this city is, at heart, kind, but simply fearful of showing its compassion sometimes -- as if we are in competition with the big leagues of other cities. ...
But we are in the big leagues. This city of San Francisco is not only defined by its charm and wonderment -- it's defined by its desire to find excellence. ... Beyond that, we're happy to be here. If San Francisco isn't that great, why then is it such an annoyance to the rest of the country?
Here at the Crepe House on Polk Street, where the owner, Philip Issa --who is from Jordan -- plays Turkish music on the house system, I asked for Tower of Power. Philip is still rifling through the archives at my behest. ... At the table next to me yesterday, an Irishman said to me, "The most amazing thing about America is its honest people. For example, you just entrusted me to watch your laptop computer. Are you kidding? In Europe, they'd steal it in a minute." ... There are days when you have to sit still in a Polk Street bistro to learn a little about the world. ...
Here's one of the great things about San Francisco: A sense of honesty. It's enhanced by our young mayor, who has the courage to take a stand. Even -- imagine this -- to have an opinion. ... Gavin Newsom must be tired. Doing the right thing has got to be wearying. ... As Bob Dylan said, "To live outside the law you must be honest." ...
"Gay marriages?" asks Karen Warner. "Why not? Straight people have made such a mess of them already." ... Karen was at Opi's restaurant on Market, where the serene, cool owner, Max Benghazi, watches over the Tenderloin landscape. ... "I love the changes I see here," he said, glancing at the astonishing circus act that revolves around Market and 6th. ... It's Cirque de Soleil without the sunlight. ...
The times are indeed a'changing around here, thanks to Max. I suspect that Max had never thought about the notion of an unfair advantage. Impresario Max does what he does and he does it well. ... He has a goodness about him, and an infectiously good time when he works. And Max works. He pays attention, and he has chops. Not the kind that are on the menu. ... I should take lessons from him. ... Iranian-born, and a cheerful cat, Max embodies the immigrant passion that compels all to do well. I know these things. ... After all, I'm an immigrant from New Jersey ...
Speaking of lessons, George Michalski -- the debonair chap who is often in the company of a dazzling person from some province or another -- calls to say he has no good regard for Bob Dylan. Except perhaps for the line about living outside the law. George wants to revitalize San Francisco's music history. He's already working with Mayor Newsom on a San Francisco Music Commission. ... "I've never had a piano student before," says George, who wrote songs for Barbra Streisand. "But he's arriving in five minutes."
You know what's so great about that? George is still willing to give lessons. And I'm still willing to take them. ... The piano is still a difficult instrument to carry -- but, after all, this is San Francisco. I've got plenty of people to lend me a hand.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Once in a while
ONCE IN WHILE I HAVE TO BE reminded about about why I love living in San Francisco. Silly isn't it? It ... happened while I was I on the Stockton bus yesterday along North Point and noticed there was greenery on Alcatraz ... Can you imagine? ... After the rain, it was all green on The Rock.... Green on the Rock? ....Sure, there is life on the water....
Yesterday, when Examiner columnist Jan Wahl said that Steve Silver was devoted to a transformative notion of performance, it all came together at Club Fugazi in North Beach. In case you don't know, Steve Silver invented "Beach Blanket Babylon" -- San Francisco Steve's widow -- Jo Schuman Silver, who has kept the Silver legacy going. "We've decided to give some money other arts agencies."... And she did ...
'It's amazing." exclaimed Pamela Rosenberg. Pam runs then S.F. Opera. She looked a little stunned as she got a check. Yes, money. Who gives money to the Opera? To ACT? To the the San Francisco Symphony? ... Jo does -- and so the legacy of of Steve Silver endures.
Charlotte Shultz was very funny -- and she held one of those famous, heavy hats from the show -- you know, the one hat depicts the ever-changing cityscape ... Charlotte said, Mayor Gavin was not here today." ...
Of course not. He had larger things looming over his head. Yesterday morning, I could not help but feel I am am one lucky chap. Lucky to be living here in San Francisco. Shameless but true. ...
Here is another reason I believe in San Francisco: Tony Dingman threw a surprise 82nd birthday party for Enrico Banducci at the Washington Square Bar & Grill yesterday. ... Enrico did not show. If it were my 82nd birthday, I would not show up either ...
In Enrico's absence, everyone told him how much they loved him -- I was equaully effusive. ...too. -- Tony Dingman was particularly on point when he said, "Enrico was generous and a terrifcally lovable person." ... It's all true. Enrico gave a few breaks to people, Rod McKuen ... Phyillis Diller ...
It all reminds me how much I do love this town. ....
Here's the Baney day ... Mike Greensill is another reason to love this town. He and Wesla Witfield splash beauty all over the landscape. ... The great sultry jazz singer, Lisa Baney, says, 'Mike Greensill is my hero. He is so supportive of singers ... He is the greatest..."
I got back from Dallas the other morning ... put on Mike Greensill's new album, "Live At The Plush Room" ... and heard that more than supportive version of Sammy Cahn's "I Can't Stop Loving You."
Gosh, I was grateful to be home..
Jo Schuman asked a gathering of media people yesterday at Club Fugazi in North Beach if anyone had been there at the opening night of "Beach Blanket Babylon" in 1974. I was the only one who responded in the affirmative. I didn't know hether to be proud or embarassed. But what is the diffference?
Gosh, I was grateful to be home..
Jan Wahl is right. Art is transformative. And it's right here in our own Beach Blanket Babylon backyard ... When I see the "Beach Blanket Bablyon" experience, where they hang together, love together and swing together again -- again -- I'm reminded that I am home. What I did not tell Jo Schuman is that I once auditioned for Beach Blanket Babylon. That was back in the 1970s. I stood on that same stage with a 12-string guitar and a song in my heart.
I didn't get the part.
Gosh, I was grateful to be home..
And to San Francisco,"I can't stop lovin you."
Yesterday, when Examiner columnist Jan Wahl said that Steve Silver was devoted to a transformative notion of performance, it all came together at Club Fugazi in North Beach. In case you don't know, Steve Silver invented "Beach Blanket Babylon" -- San Francisco Steve's widow -- Jo Schuman Silver, who has kept the Silver legacy going. "We've decided to give some money other arts agencies."... And she did ...
'It's amazing." exclaimed Pamela Rosenberg. Pam runs then S.F. Opera. She looked a little stunned as she got a check. Yes, money. Who gives money to the Opera? To ACT? To the the San Francisco Symphony? ... Jo does -- and so the legacy of of Steve Silver endures.
Charlotte Shultz was very funny -- and she held one of those famous, heavy hats from the show -- you know, the one hat depicts the ever-changing cityscape ... Charlotte said, Mayor Gavin was not here today." ...
Of course not. He had larger things looming over his head. Yesterday morning, I could not help but feel I am am one lucky chap. Lucky to be living here in San Francisco. Shameless but true. ...
Here is another reason I believe in San Francisco: Tony Dingman threw a surprise 82nd birthday party for Enrico Banducci at the Washington Square Bar & Grill yesterday. ... Enrico did not show. If it were my 82nd birthday, I would not show up either ...
In Enrico's absence, everyone told him how much they loved him -- I was equaully effusive. ...too. -- Tony Dingman was particularly on point when he said, "Enrico was generous and a terrifcally lovable person." ... It's all true. Enrico gave a few breaks to people, Rod McKuen ... Phyillis Diller ...
It all reminds me how much I do love this town. ....
Here's the Baney day ... Mike Greensill is another reason to love this town. He and Wesla Witfield splash beauty all over the landscape. ... The great sultry jazz singer, Lisa Baney, says, 'Mike Greensill is my hero. He is so supportive of singers ... He is the greatest..."
I got back from Dallas the other morning ... put on Mike Greensill's new album, "Live At The Plush Room" ... and heard that more than supportive version of Sammy Cahn's "I Can't Stop Loving You."
Gosh, I was grateful to be home..
Jo Schuman asked a gathering of media people yesterday at Club Fugazi in North Beach if anyone had been there at the opening night of "Beach Blanket Babylon" in 1974. I was the only one who responded in the affirmative. I didn't know hether to be proud or embarassed. But what is the diffference?
Gosh, I was grateful to be home..
Jan Wahl is right. Art is transformative. And it's right here in our own Beach Blanket Babylon backyard ... When I see the "Beach Blanket Bablyon" experience, where they hang together, love together and swing together again -- again -- I'm reminded that I am home. What I did not tell Jo Schuman is that I once auditioned for Beach Blanket Babylon. That was back in the 1970s. I stood on that same stage with a 12-string guitar and a song in my heart.
I didn't get the part.
Gosh, I was grateful to be home..
And to San Francisco,"I can't stop lovin you."
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Why not believe?
WE WERE MARRIED ON A rainy day," goes the Paul Simon song. The tune is called "I Do It For Your Love." ... What a great reason to do anything -- it's the best justification of all. ...
Despite the rain, hopeful folks lined the block around the blocks that encircled San Francisco City Hall all through the weekend. Let's face it: Getting married at City Hall will never be the same. But that's the point, isn't it? This weekend was different for every giddy couple who was sure that this is the right thing to do. Gavin Newsom is convinced that this is the right thing to do. Many agree. Even his occasional detractors agree. ...
A new syndrome might have surfaced in a major American city over this Valentine's Day weekend. It's called "wedding fatigue." No, not lassitude from the honeymoon -- or Reno-style remorse -- but for the ones who perform the weddings under national media scrutiny. Particularly when it all goes on for more than 72 hours. ...
On Sunday, Mayor Gavin shuffled into the Balboa Cafe -- which he used to own -- and whispered to Pat Kelley, the doyenne of the Marina, "Am I under the radar?" ... She discreetly sat him at a discreet table in an indiscreet location. ... Gavin's eyes were glassy with weariness. He noshed while his dad, Judge Bill Newsom, is recovering well from serious surgery ... State Sen. John Burton ... and Jim Halligan sat at the bar. ... Then Gavin raced back to City Hall for more of this matrimonial melange. ...
"I find it hard to believe that anyone would take issue with these marriages," said Linda Fimrite. ... Ah, but they will. ... "Why not believe?" ask Rod McKuen. "The cost is negligible."...
"It's all about being an American," says Allen White. "What I mean by that is it is the meaning of having choice." ... Allen is not completely comfortable with the cascade of same-sex marriages at City Hall this weekend: "It puts many of us on a new par with straight people." Then Allen explained his point of view, "I'm not the marrying kind." ...
That's an old song by Elvis Presley. Rod McKuen recalls Elvis: "It was at a stop light in L.A. Elvis pulled up in a Cadillac, rolled down the window, and said, 'Hey, Rod when are you going to write a song for me?'" ... I saw Rod in Dallas this weekend. He was celebrating the launch of his new book of poetry -- his 47th -- called "Rusting In The Rain." ...
Rod said about the deluge of S.F. marriages, "It's so great. It's about the heart. Who could deny it?" ... And it is about redemption -- as all good stories are. Rod McKuen has the ability to turn little stories into memorable songs. Sinatra also said, "Rod, when are you going to write a song for me?" Rod did. He actually wrote an album for him, called, "A Man Alone." ...
Rod McKuen is the Oakland-born, San Francisco-seasoned troubadour who has lived in Beverly Hills since 1969. He made San Francisco even more famous as a literary mecca by the success of "Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows" during the 1960s. ... Like all famous poets, he needs no home address. ...
In the restaurant in the Marriott near the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, Joann Grisanti, who lives in Houston, saw Rod and exclaimed, "I can't believe you're here. You are my hero." ... It amazes me how many times I have seen this sort of recognition around Rod. I don't think it's groupie stuff. I think it's the way people are attracted to an authentic and loving spirit. ...
There is a precision and simplicity to McKuen's words and lyrics. It hits the mark. "Rod is the best of all Valentine's Day poets," observed his manager, the wonderful Chuck Ashman. "He gets it. Then Rod puts it out there and we all get it. It creates happiness." ...
All right. I'm happy about this. Rod wrote a poem for me. Honest, I did not ask. Yes, he dedicated the last poem in his new book to me. It's called "Caveat," which I guess, is a tribute to my ambivalence. But the message this Valentine's weekend is about taking a chance -- about diving in. ... As Rod writes to me in his verse: "It's all part of the ride." ...
McKuen and I are also having a show at the Commonwealth Club here in S.F. on March 30. ... I will chat him up -- and maybe we'll bring those ukuleles that we bought in Maui last August. ... Please come along and be part of the ride.
Despite the rain, hopeful folks lined the block around the blocks that encircled San Francisco City Hall all through the weekend. Let's face it: Getting married at City Hall will never be the same. But that's the point, isn't it? This weekend was different for every giddy couple who was sure that this is the right thing to do. Gavin Newsom is convinced that this is the right thing to do. Many agree. Even his occasional detractors agree. ...
A new syndrome might have surfaced in a major American city over this Valentine's Day weekend. It's called "wedding fatigue." No, not lassitude from the honeymoon -- or Reno-style remorse -- but for the ones who perform the weddings under national media scrutiny. Particularly when it all goes on for more than 72 hours. ...
On Sunday, Mayor Gavin shuffled into the Balboa Cafe -- which he used to own -- and whispered to Pat Kelley, the doyenne of the Marina, "Am I under the radar?" ... She discreetly sat him at a discreet table in an indiscreet location. ... Gavin's eyes were glassy with weariness. He noshed while his dad, Judge Bill Newsom, is recovering well from serious surgery ... State Sen. John Burton ... and Jim Halligan sat at the bar. ... Then Gavin raced back to City Hall for more of this matrimonial melange. ...
"I find it hard to believe that anyone would take issue with these marriages," said Linda Fimrite. ... Ah, but they will. ... "Why not believe?" ask Rod McKuen. "The cost is negligible."...
"It's all about being an American," says Allen White. "What I mean by that is it is the meaning of having choice." ... Allen is not completely comfortable with the cascade of same-sex marriages at City Hall this weekend: "It puts many of us on a new par with straight people." Then Allen explained his point of view, "I'm not the marrying kind." ...
That's an old song by Elvis Presley. Rod McKuen recalls Elvis: "It was at a stop light in L.A. Elvis pulled up in a Cadillac, rolled down the window, and said, 'Hey, Rod when are you going to write a song for me?'" ... I saw Rod in Dallas this weekend. He was celebrating the launch of his new book of poetry -- his 47th -- called "Rusting In The Rain." ...
Rod said about the deluge of S.F. marriages, "It's so great. It's about the heart. Who could deny it?" ... And it is about redemption -- as all good stories are. Rod McKuen has the ability to turn little stories into memorable songs. Sinatra also said, "Rod, when are you going to write a song for me?" Rod did. He actually wrote an album for him, called, "A Man Alone." ...
Rod McKuen is the Oakland-born, San Francisco-seasoned troubadour who has lived in Beverly Hills since 1969. He made San Francisco even more famous as a literary mecca by the success of "Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows" during the 1960s. ... Like all famous poets, he needs no home address. ...
In the restaurant in the Marriott near the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, Joann Grisanti, who lives in Houston, saw Rod and exclaimed, "I can't believe you're here. You are my hero." ... It amazes me how many times I have seen this sort of recognition around Rod. I don't think it's groupie stuff. I think it's the way people are attracted to an authentic and loving spirit. ...
There is a precision and simplicity to McKuen's words and lyrics. It hits the mark. "Rod is the best of all Valentine's Day poets," observed his manager, the wonderful Chuck Ashman. "He gets it. Then Rod puts it out there and we all get it. It creates happiness." ...
All right. I'm happy about this. Rod wrote a poem for me. Honest, I did not ask. Yes, he dedicated the last poem in his new book to me. It's called "Caveat," which I guess, is a tribute to my ambivalence. But the message this Valentine's weekend is about taking a chance -- about diving in. ... As Rod writes to me in his verse: "It's all part of the ride." ...
McKuen and I are also having a show at the Commonwealth Club here in S.F. on March 30. ... I will chat him up -- and maybe we'll bring those ukuleles that we bought in Maui last August. ... Please come along and be part of the ride.
Monday, February 16, 2004
With Malice Toward...None?
Today is President's Day. Many businesses are closed. In this economic climate, it's unclear if all of these businesses will open again tomorrow. And if the firms open again, who knows how many of their jobs went to India overnight? ... Banks are closed. The workers at my bank hurriedly take the ketchup off the table when they see me coming these days anyway ... There's no regular mail delivery today -- as if there is any such thing. ...
Oh, yes, the courts are also closed today. That gives Mayor Gavin Newsom and all the City Hall staffers another day to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples while opponents of such magnanimity have the whole day to wring their hands. They can file their injunctions tomorrow. ...
Mayor Newsom says he was moved to legalize same-sex marriages after he heard President Bush make a reference in his State of The Union about supporting a constitutional amendment to ensure marriage remains a contract between a man and woman. I can't help but wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say about such a lurid scheme to corrode the Constitution. And I can't be precisely sure what Jefferson meant when he said in his first inaugural address on March, 4, 1801, "Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion ..."
That has become such an odd term is recent years, "persuasion." Sort of a creepy code word for bigotry. For example, "My good friend, Cuthbert, is of the Jewish persuasion" or "Cuthbert is of the gay persuasion."... Who persuaded him to be Jewish? Or gay, for that matter? Was anyone ever persuaded to be gay and Jewish? But I digress. ...
The phrase of Jefferson, "equal and exact justice," is what Mayor Newsom is talking about when he rejects the notion of "civil union" as a substitute for marriage. "It's a case of separate and not equal," says Gavin. Jefferson might be inclined to agree, though it's silly to speculate. Would Jefferson condone same-sex marriage? He was a man of the world. It might have been just fine with him -- as long as it didn't frighten the horses or get in the way of him sleeping with the slaves. ...
The President's Day holiday was signed into law in 1971 by Richard Nixon. Doesn't it sound just like Nixon to come up something so vague, colorless and bureaucratic? To combine the birthdays of Washington & Lincoln, and "honor all the presidents of the past." All of them? Even Nixon? I'm sure that's what he had in mind. He certainly didn't do it to give bank employees a day off. He didn't have any use for banks. Nixon had his money delivered to him in battered suitcases by burly men in bulging jackets while he was on the golf course. ...
As we honor the presidents of the past, it's a good time to honor those who should have been president. Anyone who might have seen what Viet Nam was doing to the nation. That could have been Robert Kennedy. It might have been Barry Goldwater. Or Eugene McCarthy. Or George McGovern. Or Pat Paulsen. ... America got hornswoggled by Nixon, who had "a secret plan to end the war -- I'll tell you about it after I'm elected." ... I wish the Democratic candidate might have the guts to say, "I've got a plan: I'll end this thing in Iraq before it becomes a Viet Nam." ...
As for the birthday boys: I grew up in a part of the country that was surrounded by Revolutionary War history. All sorts of inns and hotels displayed signs that read, "George Washington Slept Here." There were so many of these places that one began to believe Washington got more than plenty of sleep while fighting the British. This is unlikely. He didn't sleep around all that much. That's the rap they're trying to hang on John Kerry. ...
On the other hand, Lincoln looked like he never got any sleep. That was one tuckered-out looking man. He had guided the Union through the Civil War and he was ready for nap. But Mrs. Lincoln insisted he go to the theater that last night. ... "There are two things that scare the tarnation out of me," Ulysses S. Grant might have muttered. "Running out of Tennessee whisky and running into Lincoln's wife." ... She had a terrific temper. "Emancipation Proclamation?" she once shrieked at the president. "I'll show you Emancipation Proclamation. Go take out the garbage!" ...
All jokes aside, Washington and Lincoln were remarkable men who seemed truly committed to doing the right thing for the nation as a whole -- not for pragmatism, nor the polls nor for their personal aggrandizement. ... We might not be able to remember the exact dates of their birthdays anymore but on this day, I can recall enough to stop and sigh, "Why can't we find anyone like them?
Oh, yes, the courts are also closed today. That gives Mayor Gavin Newsom and all the City Hall staffers another day to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples while opponents of such magnanimity have the whole day to wring their hands. They can file their injunctions tomorrow. ...
Mayor Newsom says he was moved to legalize same-sex marriages after he heard President Bush make a reference in his State of The Union about supporting a constitutional amendment to ensure marriage remains a contract between a man and woman. I can't help but wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say about such a lurid scheme to corrode the Constitution. And I can't be precisely sure what Jefferson meant when he said in his first inaugural address on March, 4, 1801, "Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion ..."
That has become such an odd term is recent years, "persuasion." Sort of a creepy code word for bigotry. For example, "My good friend, Cuthbert, is of the Jewish persuasion" or "Cuthbert is of the gay persuasion."... Who persuaded him to be Jewish? Or gay, for that matter? Was anyone ever persuaded to be gay and Jewish? But I digress. ...
The phrase of Jefferson, "equal and exact justice," is what Mayor Newsom is talking about when he rejects the notion of "civil union" as a substitute for marriage. "It's a case of separate and not equal," says Gavin. Jefferson might be inclined to agree, though it's silly to speculate. Would Jefferson condone same-sex marriage? He was a man of the world. It might have been just fine with him -- as long as it didn't frighten the horses or get in the way of him sleeping with the slaves. ...
The President's Day holiday was signed into law in 1971 by Richard Nixon. Doesn't it sound just like Nixon to come up something so vague, colorless and bureaucratic? To combine the birthdays of Washington & Lincoln, and "honor all the presidents of the past." All of them? Even Nixon? I'm sure that's what he had in mind. He certainly didn't do it to give bank employees a day off. He didn't have any use for banks. Nixon had his money delivered to him in battered suitcases by burly men in bulging jackets while he was on the golf course. ...
As we honor the presidents of the past, it's a good time to honor those who should have been president. Anyone who might have seen what Viet Nam was doing to the nation. That could have been Robert Kennedy. It might have been Barry Goldwater. Or Eugene McCarthy. Or George McGovern. Or Pat Paulsen. ... America got hornswoggled by Nixon, who had "a secret plan to end the war -- I'll tell you about it after I'm elected." ... I wish the Democratic candidate might have the guts to say, "I've got a plan: I'll end this thing in Iraq before it becomes a Viet Nam." ...
As for the birthday boys: I grew up in a part of the country that was surrounded by Revolutionary War history. All sorts of inns and hotels displayed signs that read, "George Washington Slept Here." There were so many of these places that one began to believe Washington got more than plenty of sleep while fighting the British. This is unlikely. He didn't sleep around all that much. That's the rap they're trying to hang on John Kerry. ...
On the other hand, Lincoln looked like he never got any sleep. That was one tuckered-out looking man. He had guided the Union through the Civil War and he was ready for nap. But Mrs. Lincoln insisted he go to the theater that last night. ... "There are two things that scare the tarnation out of me," Ulysses S. Grant might have muttered. "Running out of Tennessee whisky and running into Lincoln's wife." ... She had a terrific temper. "Emancipation Proclamation?" she once shrieked at the president. "I'll show you Emancipation Proclamation. Go take out the garbage!" ...
All jokes aside, Washington and Lincoln were remarkable men who seemed truly committed to doing the right thing for the nation as a whole -- not for pragmatism, nor the polls nor for their personal aggrandizement. ... We might not be able to remember the exact dates of their birthdays anymore but on this day, I can recall enough to stop and sigh, "Why can't we find anyone like them?
With malice toward ... none?
TODAY IS PRESIDENT'S DAY. Many businesses are closed. In this economic climate, it's unclear if all of these businesses will open again tomorrow. And if the firms open again, who knows how many of their jobs went to India overnight? ... Banks are closed. The workers at my bank hurriedly take the ketchup off the table when they see me coming these days anyway ... There's no regular mail delivery today -- as if there is any such thing. ...
Oh, yes, the courts are also closed today. That gives Mayor Gavin Newsom and all the City Hall staffers another day to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples while opponents of such magnanimity have the whole day to wring their hands. They can file their injunctions tomorrow. ...
Mayor Newsom says he was moved to legalize same-sex marriages after he heard President Bush make a reference in his State of The Union about supporting a constitutional amendment to ensure marriage remains a contract between a man and woman. I can't help but wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say about such a lurid scheme to corrode the Constitution. And I can't be precisely sure what Jefferson meant when he said in his first inaugural address on March, 4, 1801, "Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion ..."
That has become such an odd term in recent years, "persuasion." Sort of a creepy code word for bigotry. For example, "My good friend, Cuthbert, is of the Jewish persuasion" or "Cuthbert is of the gay persuasion." ... Who persuaded him to be Jewish? Or gay, for that matter? Was anyone ever persuaded to be gay and Jewish? But I digress. ...
The phrase of Jefferson, "equal and exact justice," is what Mayor Newsom is talking about when he rejects the notion of "civil union" as a substitute for marriage. "It's a case of separate and not equal," says Gavin. Jefferson might be inclined to agree, though it's silly to speculate. Would Jefferson condone same-sex marriage? He was a man of the world. It might have been just fine with him -- as long as it didn't frighten the horses or get in the way of him sleeping with the slaves. ...
The President's Day holiday was signed into law in 1971 by Richard Nixon. Doesn't it sound just like Nixon to come up with something so vague, colorless and bureaucratic? To combine the birthdays of Washington & Lincoln, and "honor all the presidents of the past." All of them? Even Nixon? I'm sure that's what he had in mind. He certainly didn't do it to give bank employees a day off. He didn't have any use for banks. Nixon had his money delivered to him in battered suitcases by burly men in bulging jackets while he was on the golf course. ...
As we honor the presidents of the past, it's a good time to honor those who should have been president. Anyone who might have seen what Vietnam was doing to the nation. That could have been Robert Kennedy. It might have been Barry Goldwater. Or Eugene McCarthy. Or George McGovern. Or Pat Paulsen. ... America got hornswoggled by Nixon, who had "a secret plan to end the war -- I'll tell you about it after I'm elected." ... I wish the Democratic candidate might have the guts to say, "I've got a plan: I'll end this thing in Iraq before it becomes a Vietnam." ...
As for the birthday boys: I grew up in a part of the country that was surrounded by Revolutionary War history. All sorts of inns and hotels displayed signs that read, "George Washington Slept Here." There were so many of these places that one began to believe Washington got more than plenty of sleep while fighting the British. This is unlikely. He didn't sleep around all that much. That's the rap they're trying to hang on presidential hopeful John Kerry. ...
On the other hand, Lincoln looked like he never got any sleep. That was one tuckered-out looking man. He had guided the Union through the Civil War and he was ready for a nap. But Mrs. Lincoln insisted he go to the theater that last night. ... "There are two things that scare the tarnation out of me," Ulysses S. Grant might have muttered. "Running out of Tennessee whisky and running into Lincoln's wife." ... She had a terrific temper. "Emancipation Proclamation?" she once shrieked at the president. "I'll show you Emancipation Proclamation. Go take out the garbage!" ...
All jokes aside, Washington and Lincoln were remarkable men who seemed truly committed to doing the right thing for the nation as a whole -- not for pragmatism, nor the polls nor for their personal aggrandizement. ... We might not be able to remember the exact dates of their birthdays anymore but on this day, I can recall enough to stop and sigh, "Why can't we find anybody like them? ...
Oh, yes, the courts are also closed today. That gives Mayor Gavin Newsom and all the City Hall staffers another day to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples while opponents of such magnanimity have the whole day to wring their hands. They can file their injunctions tomorrow. ...
Mayor Newsom says he was moved to legalize same-sex marriages after he heard President Bush make a reference in his State of The Union about supporting a constitutional amendment to ensure marriage remains a contract between a man and woman. I can't help but wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say about such a lurid scheme to corrode the Constitution. And I can't be precisely sure what Jefferson meant when he said in his first inaugural address on March, 4, 1801, "Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion ..."
That has become such an odd term in recent years, "persuasion." Sort of a creepy code word for bigotry. For example, "My good friend, Cuthbert, is of the Jewish persuasion" or "Cuthbert is of the gay persuasion." ... Who persuaded him to be Jewish? Or gay, for that matter? Was anyone ever persuaded to be gay and Jewish? But I digress. ...
The phrase of Jefferson, "equal and exact justice," is what Mayor Newsom is talking about when he rejects the notion of "civil union" as a substitute for marriage. "It's a case of separate and not equal," says Gavin. Jefferson might be inclined to agree, though it's silly to speculate. Would Jefferson condone same-sex marriage? He was a man of the world. It might have been just fine with him -- as long as it didn't frighten the horses or get in the way of him sleeping with the slaves. ...
The President's Day holiday was signed into law in 1971 by Richard Nixon. Doesn't it sound just like Nixon to come up with something so vague, colorless and bureaucratic? To combine the birthdays of Washington & Lincoln, and "honor all the presidents of the past." All of them? Even Nixon? I'm sure that's what he had in mind. He certainly didn't do it to give bank employees a day off. He didn't have any use for banks. Nixon had his money delivered to him in battered suitcases by burly men in bulging jackets while he was on the golf course. ...
As we honor the presidents of the past, it's a good time to honor those who should have been president. Anyone who might have seen what Vietnam was doing to the nation. That could have been Robert Kennedy. It might have been Barry Goldwater. Or Eugene McCarthy. Or George McGovern. Or Pat Paulsen. ... America got hornswoggled by Nixon, who had "a secret plan to end the war -- I'll tell you about it after I'm elected." ... I wish the Democratic candidate might have the guts to say, "I've got a plan: I'll end this thing in Iraq before it becomes a Vietnam." ...
As for the birthday boys: I grew up in a part of the country that was surrounded by Revolutionary War history. All sorts of inns and hotels displayed signs that read, "George Washington Slept Here." There were so many of these places that one began to believe Washington got more than plenty of sleep while fighting the British. This is unlikely. He didn't sleep around all that much. That's the rap they're trying to hang on presidential hopeful John Kerry. ...
On the other hand, Lincoln looked like he never got any sleep. That was one tuckered-out looking man. He had guided the Union through the Civil War and he was ready for a nap. But Mrs. Lincoln insisted he go to the theater that last night. ... "There are two things that scare the tarnation out of me," Ulysses S. Grant might have muttered. "Running out of Tennessee whisky and running into Lincoln's wife." ... She had a terrific temper. "Emancipation Proclamation?" she once shrieked at the president. "I'll show you Emancipation Proclamation. Go take out the garbage!" ...
All jokes aside, Washington and Lincoln were remarkable men who seemed truly committed to doing the right thing for the nation as a whole -- not for pragmatism, nor the polls nor for their personal aggrandizement. ... We might not be able to remember the exact dates of their birthdays anymore but on this day, I can recall enough to stop and sigh, "Why can't we find anybody like them? ...
Friday, February 13, 2004
Sadie, Sadie, married lady
This month marks Leap Year, which means we'll have an extra day, Feb. 29. Sometimes this extra calendar day -- which appears every four years -- is called Sadie Hawkins Day. You might recall its an old-fashioned tradition that permitted single women to propose marriage to recalcitrant men. ... At City Hall, it was a Sadie Hawkins Day of sorts, all done San Francisco-style. ... And tradition be damned. ...
Assemblyman Mark Leno stood in the middle of the City Hall rotunda as he officiated over dozens of same-sex marriages. Assessor Mabel Teng was busy at the same task on the steps. Mayor Newsom had been there earlier. It was a tornado of gleeful energy. Ninety-five same-sex couples tied the knot. ... "I keep tearing up as I do this, and I've been doing this for hours," Leno said, as he filled out yet another marriage certificate. "I didn't think it would get to me. What's happening here is so humane. Our opponents will come to learn that." ...
Some are calling Mayor Gavin Newsom courageous for this defiant act of allowing same-sex marriages. Some say he's reckless. ... Down in the City Hall dining area, Molly McKay was dressed in a traditional white wedding gown and was posing for pictures with her friends and her new spouse, Davina Kotulski. ... "Why am I dressed as a bride?" asked Molly. "Because today is the day I could finally marry my wife." ...
At a Union Street bistro, one chap muttered, "The word 'marriage' means a union of a man and a woman -- that's what the dictionary says." ... In Massachusetts, Justice Martha Sosman of the state's high court wrote, "We have a pitched battle over who gets to use the 'm' word." ... To newlywed Molly McKay, there is no argument. "The meanings of words in the dictionary are always changing," she said. "There was a time when marriage could not exist between different races either." ...
I don't really understand how men marrying men and women marrying women undermines society. But then again, I don't live in San Francisco for nothing. ... Certain styles of living may not be my cup of tea -- but that doesn't mean we have to outlaw tea parties. ... Dictating how people should or should not live is far more dangerous than demanding what straight people already have. ... Thursday was a grand day for San Francisco, a great day for Mayor Newsom, and for those who finally got official recognition for what seems to be rather innocuous. But I wouldn't count on a honeymoon outside the county just yet. S.F. is like no other place in the world. ...
"Funny how February, the month of love, is the shortest month," notes Andrea Froncillo, who is "The Love Chef." ... Perhaps not so coincidentally, the people at Mattel announced the break-up of Barbie and Ken, the famously eternal boyfriend & girlfriend dolls. Perhaps Ken had no intention of marrying Barbie after all these years. ... No, Ken was not married to Chuck on Thursday. ... The quick-witted Brian Copeland might have something to say about all this. He appears with Clinton Jackson ... Diane Amos ... Steve Kimbrough and other comics at the 4th annual Bay Area Comedy Benefit for the San Mateo Chapter of the NAACP at the Punch Line, 555 Battery, on Monday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. It's only 15 bucks at the door. ...
Big things are happening for LUCE these days. The group's song, "Good Day," will be featured in "13 Going On 30," a new movie with Jennifer Garner, star of TV's "Alias." Founder Tom Luce called to say he's thrilled. San Francisco is a tough town for musicians. "It's so expensive," he says. "It's hard to find a way to survive and work at your craft to get good enough. It takes hard work -- yes, I've busted my butt -- but it takes luck. But I'm glad I've always had a good work ethic." ...
Tom doesn't think he's related to the Luce publishing family, as in Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine. "Lots of people these days claim they're related to me," says Tom. ... Now, that's success. ... I mentioned this to Clare Boothe Luce, the granddaughter of Henry and the playwright/congresswoman. Clare wasn't quite sure who Tom is, either. But maybe she could sit in and play the maracas or the tambourine with the group one night. ...
Father William Myers of St. Anne of the Sunset Church is off to Nicaragua this weekend with eight others. They plan to get their hands dirty by helping out at the Hogar de los Niños, the orphanage that Father William and his parish support. There are 183 children at Hogar. "This is their last stop before prostitution, drug addiction and death," says Myers. "We are hoping to complete a well that we started digging last year so the orphanage can have fresh water for the crops and for the kids. The well is very deep. Then again, so is the human spirit." ... Like to help? Call Father William at St. Anne's, 850 Judah St., 94122 ... 665-1600.
Assemblyman Mark Leno stood in the middle of the City Hall rotunda as he officiated over dozens of same-sex marriages. Assessor Mabel Teng was busy at the same task on the steps. Mayor Newsom had been there earlier. It was a tornado of gleeful energy. Ninety-five same-sex couples tied the knot. ... "I keep tearing up as I do this, and I've been doing this for hours," Leno said, as he filled out yet another marriage certificate. "I didn't think it would get to me. What's happening here is so humane. Our opponents will come to learn that." ...
Some are calling Mayor Gavin Newsom courageous for this defiant act of allowing same-sex marriages. Some say he's reckless. ... Down in the City Hall dining area, Molly McKay was dressed in a traditional white wedding gown and was posing for pictures with her friends and her new spouse, Davina Kotulski. ... "Why am I dressed as a bride?" asked Molly. "Because today is the day I could finally marry my wife." ...
At a Union Street bistro, one chap muttered, "The word 'marriage' means a union of a man and a woman -- that's what the dictionary says." ... In Massachusetts, Justice Martha Sosman of the state's high court wrote, "We have a pitched battle over who gets to use the 'm' word." ... To newlywed Molly McKay, there is no argument. "The meanings of words in the dictionary are always changing," she said. "There was a time when marriage could not exist between different races either." ...
I don't really understand how men marrying men and women marrying women undermines society. But then again, I don't live in San Francisco for nothing. ... Certain styles of living may not be my cup of tea -- but that doesn't mean we have to outlaw tea parties. ... Dictating how people should or should not live is far more dangerous than demanding what straight people already have. ... Thursday was a grand day for San Francisco, a great day for Mayor Newsom, and for those who finally got official recognition for what seems to be rather innocuous. But I wouldn't count on a honeymoon outside the county just yet. S.F. is like no other place in the world. ...
"Funny how February, the month of love, is the shortest month," notes Andrea Froncillo, who is "The Love Chef." ... Perhaps not so coincidentally, the people at Mattel announced the break-up of Barbie and Ken, the famously eternal boyfriend & girlfriend dolls. Perhaps Ken had no intention of marrying Barbie after all these years. ... No, Ken was not married to Chuck on Thursday. ... The quick-witted Brian Copeland might have something to say about all this. He appears with Clinton Jackson ... Diane Amos ... Steve Kimbrough and other comics at the 4th annual Bay Area Comedy Benefit for the San Mateo Chapter of the NAACP at the Punch Line, 555 Battery, on Monday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. It's only 15 bucks at the door. ...
Big things are happening for LUCE these days. The group's song, "Good Day," will be featured in "13 Going On 30," a new movie with Jennifer Garner, star of TV's "Alias." Founder Tom Luce called to say he's thrilled. San Francisco is a tough town for musicians. "It's so expensive," he says. "It's hard to find a way to survive and work at your craft to get good enough. It takes hard work -- yes, I've busted my butt -- but it takes luck. But I'm glad I've always had a good work ethic." ...
Tom doesn't think he's related to the Luce publishing family, as in Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine. "Lots of people these days claim they're related to me," says Tom. ... Now, that's success. ... I mentioned this to Clare Boothe Luce, the granddaughter of Henry and the playwright/congresswoman. Clare wasn't quite sure who Tom is, either. But maybe she could sit in and play the maracas or the tambourine with the group one night. ...
Father William Myers of St. Anne of the Sunset Church is off to Nicaragua this weekend with eight others. They plan to get their hands dirty by helping out at the Hogar de los Niños, the orphanage that Father William and his parish support. There are 183 children at Hogar. "This is their last stop before prostitution, drug addiction and death," says Myers. "We are hoping to complete a well that we started digging last year so the orphanage can have fresh water for the crops and for the kids. The well is very deep. Then again, so is the human spirit." ... Like to help? Call Father William at St. Anne's, 850 Judah St., 94122 ... 665-1600.
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Once more, with feeling
THERE WAS A HUMAN BE-IN OF sorts outside the Warfield Theatre on Market & 6th on Monday, as The Dead appeared for one night only. "People were lining up at four o'clock this morning," said the Warfield's Dwion Gates. ... Here today, ganja tomorrow. ... Jewelry and brownies of specious nature were being proffered on the grimy sidewalk -- along with clay pipes ... glass pipes ... and porcelain pipes. ... All this street theater was accompanied, of course, by the obligatory obligato of a lone conga drummer. ...By nightfall, it was a full-fledged, noisy, tribal gathering under a low-lying, hazy, pungent cloud that wafted over the block between Taylor & Mason ...
The Dead's music -- as well as the scent of herbs -- was coming up through the floors here at The Examiner. The Dead sound is vibrant and, well, lively. The remaining Dead are a testament to being alive. With Grateful Dead originals Bill Kreutzmann ... Bob Weir ... Mickey Hart ... and Phil Lesh, now 62, and with a new liver -- this merry band represents the triumph of flesh over pharmaceuticals. ...
John Creighton Murray, the Marina violin virtuoso, and Dr. Harvey Caplan, the Green Street psychiatrist, attended Friday night's concert at the Herbst by Midori, the Japanese-born violinist. ... John, just as famous as Midori in his day, studied with the great Bronislaw Huberman, who actually knew Brahms. (Funny how we think history is always so separate and distant.) ... The program indicated that Midori's violin is the 1734 Guarnarius del Gesu "ex-Huberman" -- once owned by John's venerable teacher. ... John was stunned. "I possessed that very violin for a number of years!" And John recently discovered an old photo of him and Huberman with that very violin. ... It gets better: John had the photo in his pocket. ...
John Murray believed this priceless instrument wound up in the hands of another great violinist, Ruggiero Ricci. ... After the concert, Harvey and John went backstage to greet Midori. John told her the story and showed her the picture. An amazed Midori explained she indeed got the violin from Ricci. It's on a lifetime loan from the Hayashibara Foundation. ... It's startling to see how these connections are made through the ages in an endless continuum of attempts to express beauty. ...
Midori, by the way, lives in New York with her two dogs, Franzie (after Franz Joseph Haydn) and Willa (after Willa Cather, one of Midori's favorite writers). Really, Midori? ... Dr. Caplan was amused to learn Midori has a psychology degree from NYU. Harvey is an amateur violinist. ... In the 1940s, broadcast pioneer Lowell Thomas described John Creighton Murray as the world's greatest violinist. ... Jane Riley, now retired from KCBS, introduced me to Lowell Thomas more than a few years ago. Thank you, Jane. ... Jane, who created the radio show, "Bay Area Woman," was spotted having a spot of lunch with the great Al Hart at Moose's the other day. ... Three courses and six degrees of separation. ...
This Sunday, Feb. 15, marks the last day for jazz at Marlena's in Hayes Valley. "It's the same, old sad story with small jazz venues," laments Barry Kinder, who's been singing there. "It's money. We did enjoy a three-month run. I guess that's rather good for today's standards." ... Let's show up on Sunday; maybe Marlena will change her mind. ...
Kevin Keating, the witty travel writer and raconteur, died Saturday at his Sausalito home. He was 71 and had been suffering from prostate cancer. Kevin, a sweet, funny man, was a fixture at the Washington Square Bar & Grill over the years. He worked with the legendary Chronicle columnist Stanton Delaplane. ... On occasion, he'd do the international legwork for Delaplane. Keating was a disc jockey for the old KSFO -- "when it was a real radio station," said Kevin's friend, Mike Thurston -- and a promoter for the Ice Capades. He became a regular writer for Hemispheres, the magazine for United Airlines. "The magazine is sending me on assignment," Kevin once said to me, "to drive the whole length of Baja in a Hummer. I can tell you one thing, Bruce. Everything in Mexico will stab you." ...
When Diane Weissmuller saw the special section of the Sunday Honolulu Star-Bulletin devoted to the life of the late columnist Dave Donnelly, she remarked wistfully, "He was a legend in his spare time." ... Bill Babbitt wasn't exactly wistful when he saw Sunday's editions of the Sacramento Bee. The paper ran photos on the front page of those who had been executed at San Quentin, including Bill's brother, Manny Babbitt, who died in 1999. "It was my brother's name all right," says Bill, "but it's my picture that's in the paper. I'm afraid to go out of the house." ...
The Dead's music -- as well as the scent of herbs -- was coming up through the floors here at The Examiner. The Dead sound is vibrant and, well, lively. The remaining Dead are a testament to being alive. With Grateful Dead originals Bill Kreutzmann ... Bob Weir ... Mickey Hart ... and Phil Lesh, now 62, and with a new liver -- this merry band represents the triumph of flesh over pharmaceuticals. ...
John Creighton Murray, the Marina violin virtuoso, and Dr. Harvey Caplan, the Green Street psychiatrist, attended Friday night's concert at the Herbst by Midori, the Japanese-born violinist. ... John, just as famous as Midori in his day, studied with the great Bronislaw Huberman, who actually knew Brahms. (Funny how we think history is always so separate and distant.) ... The program indicated that Midori's violin is the 1734 Guarnarius del Gesu "ex-Huberman" -- once owned by John's venerable teacher. ... John was stunned. "I possessed that very violin for a number of years!" And John recently discovered an old photo of him and Huberman with that very violin. ... It gets better: John had the photo in his pocket. ...
John Murray believed this priceless instrument wound up in the hands of another great violinist, Ruggiero Ricci. ... After the concert, Harvey and John went backstage to greet Midori. John told her the story and showed her the picture. An amazed Midori explained she indeed got the violin from Ricci. It's on a lifetime loan from the Hayashibara Foundation. ... It's startling to see how these connections are made through the ages in an endless continuum of attempts to express beauty. ...
Midori, by the way, lives in New York with her two dogs, Franzie (after Franz Joseph Haydn) and Willa (after Willa Cather, one of Midori's favorite writers). Really, Midori? ... Dr. Caplan was amused to learn Midori has a psychology degree from NYU. Harvey is an amateur violinist. ... In the 1940s, broadcast pioneer Lowell Thomas described John Creighton Murray as the world's greatest violinist. ... Jane Riley, now retired from KCBS, introduced me to Lowell Thomas more than a few years ago. Thank you, Jane. ... Jane, who created the radio show, "Bay Area Woman," was spotted having a spot of lunch with the great Al Hart at Moose's the other day. ... Three courses and six degrees of separation. ...
This Sunday, Feb. 15, marks the last day for jazz at Marlena's in Hayes Valley. "It's the same, old sad story with small jazz venues," laments Barry Kinder, who's been singing there. "It's money. We did enjoy a three-month run. I guess that's rather good for today's standards." ... Let's show up on Sunday; maybe Marlena will change her mind. ...
Kevin Keating, the witty travel writer and raconteur, died Saturday at his Sausalito home. He was 71 and had been suffering from prostate cancer. Kevin, a sweet, funny man, was a fixture at the Washington Square Bar & Grill over the years. He worked with the legendary Chronicle columnist Stanton Delaplane. ... On occasion, he'd do the international legwork for Delaplane. Keating was a disc jockey for the old KSFO -- "when it was a real radio station," said Kevin's friend, Mike Thurston -- and a promoter for the Ice Capades. He became a regular writer for Hemispheres, the magazine for United Airlines. "The magazine is sending me on assignment," Kevin once said to me, "to drive the whole length of Baja in a Hummer. I can tell you one thing, Bruce. Everything in Mexico will stab you." ...
When Diane Weissmuller saw the special section of the Sunday Honolulu Star-Bulletin devoted to the life of the late columnist Dave Donnelly, she remarked wistfully, "He was a legend in his spare time." ... Bill Babbitt wasn't exactly wistful when he saw Sunday's editions of the Sacramento Bee. The paper ran photos on the front page of those who had been executed at San Quentin, including Bill's brother, Manny Babbitt, who died in 1999. "It was my brother's name all right," says Bill, "but it's my picture that's in the paper. I'm afraid to go out of the house." ...
Monday, February 09, 2004
Parade's gone by
SATURDAY'S CHINESE NEW YEAR Parade was a blast. Union Square was flooded with light like the set of a Hollywood spectacle. ... The clear, crisp, cool weather marked an auspicious beginning to the Year of the Monkey -- all under a yellow, yet waning, Full Hunger Moon -- if you can be hungry and full at the same time. ... The traffic cops -- gracious and patient during the parade on Saturday -- were helpful to those who had to get to work downtown amid the crush of spectators. ... On Post Street, I fell in behind the parade -- with its explosions of color and fusillades of firecrackers -- just barely tickling the dragon's tail. ...
Strange de Jim, no stranger to the more enjoyable things in life, checks in with "Happy Year of the Monkey" greetings. "Although," Strange adds, "I'm still writing 'Year of the Fruit Bat' on my checks." ... Janet Jackson's absence from last night's Grammys compels Strange to advise: "Remember, if we let the nation be traumatized by Janet Jackson's right breast, the terrorists have won." ...
"I think PG&E has something against North Beach," Ed Moose griped after another power outage hit the neighborhood on Friday night. It started at 7 p.m. and lasted for nearly three hours. "We lost 150 reservations," muttered Moose. "And they haven't compensated us for that big one just before Christmas." Friday's outage also hit the area unevenly; the lights went out at the Washington Square B&G but all was calm and bright at Tony Nik's. ... On Sunday, serenity had clearly been restored to Moose's. Pianist Don Asher & the wonderful Waldo Carter, horn in hand, provided a sweet version of "Here's That Rainy Day" on a beautiful afternoon. ... The great Billy Philadelphia has joined Moose's lineup on Tuesday nights. ....
There was a gaggle of charming gals at Moose's on Wednesday night. It was a send-off party -- orchestrated by S.F.'s pre-eminent hostess, Donna Ewald Huggins -- for Doris Raymond, who is moving her business and herself to Los Angeles. ... Doris has a wonderful vintage clothing house called The Way We Wore. ... Pat Yankee sang a couple of spirited songs with Mike Greensill at the piano and Ruth Davies on bass. ... Chuck Huggins called into Moose's pay phone to serenade Doris with "Ace In The Hole." ...
I'll miss Doris and her great clothes. ... I'm fond of vintage neckties. I have a very short and loud one that still has the coffee stains that Broderick Crawford left on it while filming "All The King's Men." ...
Some took care of that yearning caused by the Full Hunger Moon this weekend by stopping at Opi's on Market & Golden Gate for a dish of Max Benghazi's homemade rice pudding. ... The employees of Jossey-Bass, the publishing house on Market & 6th, have made Opi's, open only a month or so, their regular hangout. ... Meanwhile, Tariq Alarzraie is moving his Dot Com Cafe -- a longtime center for mid-Market social life -- around the corner to 120 Mason, next to the Olympic Hotel. ...
Last week I reported that Anna's Danish Cookies, in the Mission, had closed. It turns out that Anna's has moved -- to San Mateo. ... Michael Pulizzano writes: "Anna's re-opened last month at 1007 Howard Ave. and it still has its 'Classic Original and Chocolate Enrobed' Danish cookies!" ... Chocolate enrobed? ... Tom Carroll reports that Tartine, the bakery at 18th & Guerrero, near the former site of Anna's, is going strong. Tom says Tartine is terrific. ... A fave of Boz Scaggs, too, it seems. ... Speaking of the Peninsula, that was Dana Carvey -- once enrobed at Belmont's Carlmont High and S.F. State -- behind the Warriors bench last night in The Arena. ...
Chestnut Street's Lucca's Deli, one of the old mainstays of the Marina, is celebrating its 75th year in business. Owners Paul Bosco and his sister, Linda Fioretti, will be making a display of Marina memorabilia and family photos for the front window. ... Meanwhile, I'll continue to leer at the artichoke frittata through the glass. ... Phil Kaplan still finds it hard to believe that he's been operating his Bond Cleaners at Fillmore & Jackson for 52 years. ...
Janet Jackson was banned from the Grammys for not apologizing for her Super Bowl antics. Justin Timberlake got on the Grammy broadcast because he did apologize. ... I'll apologize for my transgressions -- but I'm not appearing anywhere. ... Kat Luciano, a lucky lass, no doubt, points out that I referred to the main character in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" as "Cat." ... S.F.'s Kat says, "Bruce, I think you mean Ashley Judd is getting rave reviews for her portrayal of Maggie, in 'Cat,' not Cat in 'Cat.' I should know: I've been getting rave reviews for being Kat for many years now." ... Thanks, Kat, for not being too catty about it. ...
In Russia, one of Vladimir Putin's challengers in next month's elections has suddenly disappeared. Notes Sebastian Melmoth: "At this point, that must give George W. a few ideas." ...
Strange de Jim, no stranger to the more enjoyable things in life, checks in with "Happy Year of the Monkey" greetings. "Although," Strange adds, "I'm still writing 'Year of the Fruit Bat' on my checks." ... Janet Jackson's absence from last night's Grammys compels Strange to advise: "Remember, if we let the nation be traumatized by Janet Jackson's right breast, the terrorists have won." ...
"I think PG&E has something against North Beach," Ed Moose griped after another power outage hit the neighborhood on Friday night. It started at 7 p.m. and lasted for nearly three hours. "We lost 150 reservations," muttered Moose. "And they haven't compensated us for that big one just before Christmas." Friday's outage also hit the area unevenly; the lights went out at the Washington Square B&G but all was calm and bright at Tony Nik's. ... On Sunday, serenity had clearly been restored to Moose's. Pianist Don Asher & the wonderful Waldo Carter, horn in hand, provided a sweet version of "Here's That Rainy Day" on a beautiful afternoon. ... The great Billy Philadelphia has joined Moose's lineup on Tuesday nights. ....
There was a gaggle of charming gals at Moose's on Wednesday night. It was a send-off party -- orchestrated by S.F.'s pre-eminent hostess, Donna Ewald Huggins -- for Doris Raymond, who is moving her business and herself to Los Angeles. ... Doris has a wonderful vintage clothing house called The Way We Wore. ... Pat Yankee sang a couple of spirited songs with Mike Greensill at the piano and Ruth Davies on bass. ... Chuck Huggins called into Moose's pay phone to serenade Doris with "Ace In The Hole." ...
I'll miss Doris and her great clothes. ... I'm fond of vintage neckties. I have a very short and loud one that still has the coffee stains that Broderick Crawford left on it while filming "All The King's Men." ...
Some took care of that yearning caused by the Full Hunger Moon this weekend by stopping at Opi's on Market & Golden Gate for a dish of Max Benghazi's homemade rice pudding. ... The employees of Jossey-Bass, the publishing house on Market & 6th, have made Opi's, open only a month or so, their regular hangout. ... Meanwhile, Tariq Alarzraie is moving his Dot Com Cafe -- a longtime center for mid-Market social life -- around the corner to 120 Mason, next to the Olympic Hotel. ...
Last week I reported that Anna's Danish Cookies, in the Mission, had closed. It turns out that Anna's has moved -- to San Mateo. ... Michael Pulizzano writes: "Anna's re-opened last month at 1007 Howard Ave. and it still has its 'Classic Original and Chocolate Enrobed' Danish cookies!" ... Chocolate enrobed? ... Tom Carroll reports that Tartine, the bakery at 18th & Guerrero, near the former site of Anna's, is going strong. Tom says Tartine is terrific. ... A fave of Boz Scaggs, too, it seems. ... Speaking of the Peninsula, that was Dana Carvey -- once enrobed at Belmont's Carlmont High and S.F. State -- behind the Warriors bench last night in The Arena. ...
Chestnut Street's Lucca's Deli, one of the old mainstays of the Marina, is celebrating its 75th year in business. Owners Paul Bosco and his sister, Linda Fioretti, will be making a display of Marina memorabilia and family photos for the front window. ... Meanwhile, I'll continue to leer at the artichoke frittata through the glass. ... Phil Kaplan still finds it hard to believe that he's been operating his Bond Cleaners at Fillmore & Jackson for 52 years. ...
Janet Jackson was banned from the Grammys for not apologizing for her Super Bowl antics. Justin Timberlake got on the Grammy broadcast because he did apologize. ... I'll apologize for my transgressions -- but I'm not appearing anywhere. ... Kat Luciano, a lucky lass, no doubt, points out that I referred to the main character in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" as "Cat." ... S.F.'s Kat says, "Bruce, I think you mean Ashley Judd is getting rave reviews for her portrayal of Maggie, in 'Cat,' not Cat in 'Cat.' I should know: I've been getting rave reviews for being Kat for many years now." ... Thanks, Kat, for not being too catty about it. ...
In Russia, one of Vladimir Putin's challengers in next month's elections has suddenly disappeared. Notes Sebastian Melmoth: "At this point, that must give George W. a few ideas." ...
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