http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:DocSonian&section=today deviantART RSS for by:DocSonian en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:52:58 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/28059793/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/28059793/ Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:16:51 PDT
SLPdomain in her series of artist interviews continues and
did one with me recently. [link]
Check this out.......She did a great job



Jeanne-Claude - Christo’s Collaborator on Environmental Canvas



The Reichstag in Berlin in 1995, wrapped in polypropylene fabric by Jeanne-Claude and Christo.
November 19, 2009
Jeanne-Claude, who collaborated with her husband, Christo, on dozens of environmental art projects, notably the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin and the installation of 7,503 vinyl gates with saffron-colored nylon panels in Central Park, died Wednesday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 74.

A statement on the couple’s Web site, christojeanneclaude.net, said the cause was complications of a brain aneurysm.

Jeanne-Claude met her husband, Christo Javacheff, in Paris in 1958. At the time, Christo, a Bulgarian refugee, was already making art of wrapped packages, furniture and oil drums. Three years later, they made their first work together, a temporary installation on the docks in Cologne, Germany, that consisted of oil drums and rolls of industrial paper wrapped in tarpaulin.

To avoid confusing dealers and the public, and to establish an artistic brand, they used only Christo’s name. In 1994 they retroactively applied the joint name “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” to all outdoor works and large-scale temporary indoor installations. Other works were credited to Christo alone.

Their collaborative approach, as described on their Web site, remained constant throughout the years. After he and his wife conceived an idea for a project, Christo made drawings, scale models and other preparatory works that were sold to finance the final project. With the help of paid assistants, they then did the on-site work: wrapping buildings, trees, walls or bridges; erecting umbrellas (“The Umbrellas,” 1991); spreading pink fabric around 11 islands in Biscayne Bay near Miami (“Surrounded Islands,” 1983).

“We want to create works of art of joy and beauty, which we will build because we believe it will be beautiful,” Jeanne-Claude said in a 2002 interview. “The only way to see it is to build it. Like every artist, every true artist, we create them for us.”

Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon was born on June 13, 1935, in Casablanca, where her father, a French army officer, was stationed. After attending schools in France and Switzerland, she earned a baccalaureate in Latin and philosophy in 1952 from the University of Tunis.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by their son, Cyril Christo of Santa Fe, N.M.

In 1962, Christo and Jeanne-Claude caused a sensation when, in response to the building of the Berlin Wall, they blocked the tiny Rue Visconti in Paris with a barricade of oil drums. Jeanne-Claude managed to stall the police as they closed in, arguing that the work, “Wall of Oil Barrels, Iron Curtain,” should stay in place a few hours more.

Jeanne-Claude and Christo moved to New York in 1964 and embarked on grander, more theatrical projects. Nothing, it seemed, was too large to be shrouded in fabric. In the late 1960s, they wrapped the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, just one of many buildings, walls and statues to come. In 1969 they wrapped a million square feet of coastline near Sydney, Australia.

Although wrapping remained the couple’s signature, they staged other environmental projects and public displays. At the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 1968, they erected, with the assistance of two giant cranes, an inflated cylindrical fabric “ackage,” in appearance a bit like a stretched-out Michelin Man, that stood nearly 280 feet tall.

The projects became communal events, during construction and after. Millions of viewers were attracted to “The Umbrellas,” installed simultaneously in 1991 in Ibaraki, Japan, and at the Tejon Ranch in Southern California. “The Gates,” a series of flapping bannerlike panels installed in Central Park in 2005, also attracted more than five million viewers during the two weeks that the work lasted.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a statement released Thursday, praised “The Gates” as “one of the most exciting public art projects ever put on anywhere in the world — and it would never have happened without Jeanne-Claude.”

The couple often had to overcome stiff resistance to their projects from municipal officials and citizens worried at the possible environmental impact of their work. Some critics dismissed their work as a repetitive series of stunts devoid of intellectual content. More often tha... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/28030386/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/28030386/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:32:19 PDT October 23, 2009

Walt Andrus, best known as the engineer of numerous Thirteenth Floor Elevators sessions, has gone where the pyramid meets the eye. Andrus, who engineered many of the most famous sessions for Houston's infamous International Artists label during the psychedelic period, was living in Truth or Consequences, N.M., when he passed away.

While Andrus is most famous for his Thirteenth Floor Elevators session work, he was also involved with recording seminal Texas psychedelic acts like Lost & Found, Golden Dawn, the Red Krayola's free-form psychedelic opus, The Parable of Arable Land, and Fever Tree's 1968 classic Another Time, Another Place. He also worked for a time with Don Robey at the Duke-Peacock label.

Easter Everywhere, considered by many to be the fullest flowering of psychedelic music, was recorded at Andrus Studios on Broadway near the Houston Ship Channel during the summer of 1967. Most International Artists material was recorded at Andrus's studio until IA purchased Gold Star studios circa 1968.

In a 1996 interview with Richie Unterberger, the Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson said of Andrus, "Walt Andrus was head of the best studio in Houston, and in that particular period, he recorded everybody. Euphoria, who were definitely West Coast psychedelic progenitors of surf music, South Bay surf music, incredible guitar playing, power trio, the bass player out of the band that made "Pipeline" or "Wipe Out" or one of those kind of things, and a great drummer and a good guitar player. What you saw with Hendrix - the same principle, taken to its highest expression. Walt recorded this album."

Andrus was instrumental in remixing the Elevators catalog for the 10-CD recent box set Sign of the 3 Eyed Men.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/27815106/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/27815106/ Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:45:37 PDT Remembering Jim Carroll
A Man of Words, and the Streets
By Lewis MacAdams

He was a basketball legend, a poet, a musician, and most of all, a friend. As he would say, 'I miss you more than all the others.'



Jim Carroll, who died Friday of a heart attack at 60 in Manhattan, was a legend by the time he was 13. That's when the poet Ted Berrigan took him to visit Jack Kerouac, who took a look at some of Jim's writing and said, "Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89% of the novelists working today."

But I was drawn at least as much by his basketball legend: a kid who grew up on the Lower East Side -- Jim said his dad had tended bar for bootlegger Dutch Schultz -- who moved with his family to Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan when the neighborhood was still Irish, got a scholarship to the elite Trinity School, went on to become the only white kid to make all-city, then turned down myriad college scholarships to return to the Lower East Side to shoot junk and pursue the cruel gods of poetry.

He self-published his first book, "Organic Trains," in 1967, when he was still a teenager. It was profoundly influenced by Frank O'Hara, the elegant, witty and tough poet whose seemingly off-handed brilliance celebrated an impossibly sophisticated Manhattan; and John Ashbery; but the deeper monster was Arthur Rimbaud, who illumined the nightmarish corners of the quotidian world.

Everything Jim wrote was laced with a wise-ass sense of humor. His earliest work was championed by a coterie of young poets connected to the Poetry Project on New York's Lower East Side, including Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Larry Fagin, Michael Brownstein and Bill Berkson.

All of us loved Jim's work and were even slightly humbled by it. He was so damn good. He was so damn good looking, a tall redhead with pale, almost transparent skin, and a confident, athletic grace. It took a while for it to sink in that he was often controlled by heroin demons that would follow him for the rest of his life.

Jim lived everywhere and nowhere then. Sometimes he crashed at the Chelsea Hotel, sometimes he worked as painter Larry Rivers' assistant and stayed with him. He was a frequent visitor to Andy Warhol's original Factory, a manufacturing loft on East 47th Street.

I was at graduate school in Buffalo in 1968, hanging out in the student union, when a local asked if I knew where he could score. We were soon on the New York State Thruway, heading to meet Jim. To my eternal shame, I didn't understand what Jim was going through: struggling to kick at the same time he wanted this guy's money so he could score. As usual, heroin won. I can still see Jim that night, his big sneakers slapping the concrete as he raced down a dark street looking for his man.

A guardian angel for Jim then was Patti Smith, who worked at Scribner's bookshop on Fifth Avenue. One day I was there when Jim OD'd. Patti kept him awake, walking him around until he came to.

In 1970, Warsh's Angel Hair Books published Jim's second mimeographed book of poems, "4 Ups and 1 Down." Jim was 20 now, and the work was unassailable, the voice completely his own. "It's true, / you are always too near and I am everything / that comes moaning free and wet / through the lips of our lovely grind."

In 1973, Jim came west to Bolinas, a small town north of San Francisco that was a hotbed of poets. Jim could rarely be found among them. I remember him holed up in a decrepit wood cabin or walking by himself across the mesa wrapped in a serape. It was in Bolinas that he met a tall, beautiful blond, Rosemary Klemfuss, who would later become his wife, and after their marriage was over, a lifetime friend and protector.

Bolinas publisher Michael Wolfe's Tombouctou Press would publish "The Basketball Diaries," the hilarious, scabrous, miraculous excerpts from the journals Jim kept from the ages of 12 to 15.

Also at that time, Smith persuaded him to join her onstage to read some poems. Soon he started singing with a Bolinas band. Onstage, looking into the ancient distance, Jim was mesmerizing. Keith Richards helped the newly named Jim Carroll Band get a deal with Atlantic. The first release was 1980's "Catholic Boy" ("redeemed through pain. Not through joy"). Annie Leibovitz's cover photo of Jim with his arms around his parents gave permanent lie to the idea that he was some sort of punk. He wrote lyrics with Rancid and the Blue Öyster Cult, but also with Boz Scaggs.

He was at every turn an elegant artist, gifted with extreme moral clarity. He was a true poet, that most thrilling and rare of human aspirations. He died sitting at his desk working.

Though "Catholic Boy" sold relatively few copies, a song on the album, "People Who Died" -- its title taken from a Berrigan poem -- became a classic, especially in Leonardo DiCa... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/27655525/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/27655525/ Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:38:39 PDT
]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/27481744/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/27481744/ Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:39:49 PDT

Lucy Vodden, who provided the inspiration for the Beatles' classic song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," has died after a long battle with lupus. She was 46.

Her death was announced Monday by St. Thomas' Hospital in London, where she had been treated for the chronic disease for more than five years, and by her husband, Ross Vodden. Britain's Press Assn. said she died Sept. 22.

Hospital officials said they could not confirm the day of her death.

Vodden's connection to the Beatles dates to her early days, when she made friends with schoolmate Julian Lennon, John Lennon's son.

Julian Lennon, then 4 years old, came home from school with a drawing one day, showed it to his father, and said it was "Lucy in the sky with diamonds."

At the time, the Beatles were preparing material for "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," a landmark album released to worldwide acclaim in 1967.

The elder Lennon seized on the image and developed it into what is widely regarded as a psychedelic masterpiece, replete with haunting images of "newspaper taxis" and a "girl with kaleidoscope eyes."

Rock music critics thought the song's title was a veiled reference to LSD, but John Lennon always claimed the phrase came from his son, not from a desire to spell out the initials LSD in code.

Vodden lost touch with Julian Lennon after he left the school following his parents' divorce, but they were reunited in recent years when Julian Lennon, who lives in France, tried to help her cope with the disease.

He sent her flowers and vouchers for use at a gardening center near her home in Surrey in southeast England, and frequently sent her text messages in an effort to boost her spirits.

"I wasn't sure at first how to approach her," Julian Lennon told the Associated Press in June. "I wanted at least to get a note to her. Then I heard she had a great love of gardening, and I thought I'd help with something she's passionate about, and I love gardening too. I wanted to do something to put a smile on her face."

Vodden enjoyed her connection to the Beatles but was not particularly fond of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

"I don't relate to the song, to that type of song," she told the AP in June. "As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, 'No, it's not you; my parents said it's about drugs.' And I didn't know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself."

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26622282/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26622282/ Sun, 16 Aug 2009 04:42:23 PDT [link]agewanted=all
a video on Les Paul

he was the man...wish i could include here the photos



<hoto>
Mr. Paul at Carnegie Hall during his 90th birthday salute in 2005. He performed every Monday night, accompanied by a backup band, at the Iridium jazz club in New York until just before his death.


Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains, N.Y. . He was 94.

Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.

Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.

<hoto>
Mr. Paul with Mr. Jimmy Page, right, and the guitarist Jeff Beck at Mr. Paul's 72nd birthday party in 1987. "Honestly,
I never strove to be an Edison," he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. "The only reason I invented
these things was because I didn't have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really."

<hoto>
With Paul McCartney in 1988. Mr. Paul's style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness
of jazz and, later, the bite of rock 'n roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home
performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.




Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polsfuss, was born on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his mother, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.” But he picked up harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager and started playing with country bands in the Midwest. In Chicago he performed for radio broadcasts on WLS and led the house band at WJJD; he billed himself as the Wizard of Waukesha, Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red.

His interest in gadgets came early. At the age of 10 he devised a harmonica holder from a coat hanger. Soon afterward he made his first amplified guitar by opening the back of a Sears acoustic model and inserting, behind the strings, the pickup from a dismantled Victrola. With the record player on, the acoustic guitar became an electric one. Later, he built his own pickup from ham radio earphone parts and assembled a recording machine using a Cadillac flywheel and the belt from a dentist’s drill.

From country music Mr. Paul moved into jazz, influenced by players like Django Reinhardt and Eddie Lang, who were using amplified hollow-body guitars to play hornlike single-note solo lines. He formed the Les Paul Trio in 1936 and moved to New York, where he was heard regularly on Fred Waring’s radio show from 1938 to 1941.

<hoto>
A Gibson Les Paul model. This example was once owned by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. The company
hired Mr. Paul to design a solid-body guitar in the early 1950s, and variations of his 1952 model have sold
steadily ever since. With Mr. Paul's patented pickups, they guitars are prized for their clarity and sustained tone.
They have been used by musicians like Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Slash of Guns N' Roses.



In 1940 or 1941 — the exact date is unknown — , Mr. Paul made his guitar breakthrough. Seeking to create electronically sustained notes on the guitar, he attached strings and two pickups to a wooden board with a guitar neck. “The log,” as he called it, if not the first solid-body electric guitar, became the most influential one.

“You could go out a... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26237657/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26237657/ Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:26:00 PDT
Until 1989, when he reached 70, he appeared in every single performance given by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center. In April he observed his 90th birthday with the 90-minute “Nearly Ninety” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Even when it became known that he was fading, and friends began coming to bid farewell to him in recent days, he told one colleague that he was still creating dances in his head.

Mr. Cunningham ranks among the foremost figures of artistic modernism and among the few who have transformed the nature and status of dance theater, visionaries like Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine.

In his works, independence was central: dancers were often alone even in duets or ensembles, and music and design would act as environments, sometimes hostile ones. His movement — startling in its mixture of staccato and legato elements, and unusually intense in its use of torso, legs and feet — abounded in non sequiturs.

In his final years, while still known as avant-garde, he was almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest living choreographer. Mr. Cunningham had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn and Mr. Cunningham. He was American modern dance’s equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap. In old age, when he could no longer jump, and when his feet were gnarled with arthritis, he remained a rivetingly dramatic performer, capable of many moods.

International fame came to him before national fame. In due course he was acknowledged in America as one of its foremost artists, but for a time his work was known here only in specialist dance, art and music circles. Not so in London, Paris and other cities. There Mr. Cunningham was widely celebrated as the creator of a new classicism, as Diaghilev’s successor, as one of the most remarkable theater artists of his day. And it was in Europe that he was most acclaimed right through to this decade, with sold-out Cunningham seasons in Paris at the Théâtre de la Ville or the Opera.

Yet he was always a creature of New York. Close to the founding members of the New York Schools of Music, Painting and Poetry, Mr. Cunningham himself, along with Jerome Robbins and the younger Paul Taylor, led the way to founding what can retrospectively be called the New York School of Dance.

These choreographers both combined and rejected the rival influences of modern dance and ballet, notably the senior choreographers Graham and Balanchine. They absorbed aspects of ordinary pedestrian movement, the natural world and city life. They tested connections between private subject matter and theatrical expression. And they re-examined the relationship between dance and its sound accompaniment. With Graham and Balanchine, they made New York the world capital of choreography, and the New York School influenced the world in showing how pure dance could be major theater.

Many of the dancers who passed through Mr. Cunningham’s company, notably Mr. Taylor and Karole Armitage, went on to become prestigious choreographers themselves. Many other choreographers, notably Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, have paid tribute to his influence.

Mr. Cunningham’s most celebrated and revolutionary achievement, shared with the composer John Cage, his collaborator and companion, was to have dance and music created independently of each other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things.

“Ambiguity” and “oetry” were among Mr. Cunningham’s favorite words when talking about choreography. So was “theater.” Wit and humor abounded in his work; his conversation was full of laughter and wry anecdotes. Partly because dance was the main subject of his choreography, and partly because he often created dances requiring virtuoso skill, he did more than any other choreographer to demonstrate that dance can be classical while being in most ways far from ballet.

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Wash., the third of four children of Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and the former Mayme Joach. (One brother died before Mercier’s birth.) His two other brothers, Dorwin and Jack, followed their father into the... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26152698/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26152698/ Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:23:19 PDT [link]

watch the film
it was worth all the LSD they must have taken back in the day

Yellow Submarine Part One
[link]
and then go from there

Heinz Edelmann, the multifaceted graphic designer and illustrator who created the comically hallucinogenic landscape of Pepperland as art director for the 1968 animated Beatles film “Yellow Submarine,” died on Tuesday in Stuttgart, Germany.

The movie’s mod-psychedelic look, which typifies the era’s spirited graphic art, emerged around the same time as the related psychedelic work of Terry Gilliam, Alan Aldridge and Rick Griffin, but it has its own whimsical aesthetic. The bulbous Blue Meanies, which personify an evil mood as actual villains, pursue the innocent, well-coifed cartoon Beatles across an ever-shifting milieu of mysterious seas and holes that can be magically picked up and moved. The yellow submarine itself stops in an ocean of pulsating watches, representing time, to light a cigar for a friendly sea monster.

Notably, the designs prefigured contemporary music videos, especially in their use of dancing typography. Letters spelling out the lyrics “Love is all you need” morph into a strobing neon wallpaper pattern.

“He became famous because of his work on ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ” said the graphic designer Milton Glaser, a friend. “But that celebrity actually obscured his real talent and imagination.”

A highly successful advertising and editorial illustrator in Germany, England and the Netherlands, Mr. Edelmann was known for combining Impressionist and Expressionist sensibilities leavened with wit, humor and irony. He developed a distinct graphic style that influenced many artists in Europe and the United States. He was given a Masters Series exhibition at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005.

In the 1960s he was experimenting with a stylized, soothingly fluid, neo-Art Nouveau manner. That caught the eye of Al Brodax, producer of a successful animated Beatles television cartoon series for children. He chose Mr. Edelmann to be the chief designer of his first feature-length animated film, “Yellow Submarine,” built around a 1966 song of the same name, credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with lead vocals by Ringo Starr.

It was not easy to get initial approval for “Yellow Submarine.” The Beatles were unenthusiastic about Mr. Brodax’s more conventional-looking cartoon series (not done by Mr. Edelmann), Newsweek reported in 1968; their manager, Brian Epstein, was a stumbling block as well.

The tide turned, Newsweek said, during a stroll through the Tate Gallery in London, where Mr. Brodax and Mr. Epstein happened upon J. M. W. Turner’s “eace — Burial at Sea” and marveled at that painting’s intense colors.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could get those colors to move?” Mr. Brodax asked.

Mr. Epstein replied, “We would need great art.”

Mr. Edelmann was the perfect artist, Mr. Epstein finally agreed, and “Yellow Submarine” had some of the Turner’s shimmering quality.

It was a career-defining work, “designed, for the most part beautifully,” Renata Adler wrote in The New York Times in 1968, “in styles ranging through Steinberg, Arshile Gorky, Bob Godfrey (of the short film ‘The Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit’, the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and — mainly, really — the spirit and conventions of the Sunday comic strip.”

Despite the huge influence of “Yellow Submarine” on the culture of the time, Mr. Edelmann admitted that he could never quite connect with the 1960s aesthetic. Once the film was complete, he altered his approach to avoid being pigeonholed as a psychedelic artist, becoming considerably less ethereal and decorative and turning to what was on the surface his darker side, though it was never really morose but rather ironic.

Born in 1934 in the former Czechoslovakia, Mr. Edelmann studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, one of the most progressive institutions in postwar Germany. After graduating in the late 1950s, he began working as a freelance designer, illustrator, animator and teacher. He created posters for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk radio station in Germany, book covers for the Klett-Cotta publishing house in Stuttgart and editorial illustrations for a smartly designed magazine for teenagers, Twen, whose art director was the adventuresome designer Willy Fleckhaus. He also illustrated t... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26012218/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/26012218/ Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:17:00 PDT
The Associated Press confirmed that they deep-baritone Cronkite has died. In the anchor seat at CBS News With Walter Cronkite from 1962 to 1981, "Uncle Walter," as he was affectionately known by his millions of viewers, came into the USA's living room each weeknight, offering a measured presentation of the news of the day.

That coverage included many of the signature events of modern times: the Cuban missile crisis; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; the Vietnam War; the Apollo moon landing; and Watergate.

Throughout, Cronkite's comforting, authoritative style earned him iconic status as the "most trusted man in America."

"I had a pretty good seat at the parade," Cronkite once said, reflecting on the 20th century. "I was lucky enough to have been born at the right time to see most of this remarkable century."

Portly and mustachioed, Cronkite would be considered an anachronism in TV news today, a 24/7 environment marked mostly by style over substance. But journalism was in the University of Texas dropout's blood as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Times, later as a radio announcer and then for 11 years at United Press, the wire service where he eventually became a World War II correspondent covering North Africa and Europe and the post-war Nuremberg trials.

He began working for CBS' nascent TV news division in 1950, eventually anchoring the first nationally televised Democratic and Republican national conventions, and later hosting the You Are There documentary series.

"He was the personification of an era," says media critic Andrew Tyndall of tyndallreport.com. "At a time when the entire nation could only get information from a few sources, he's indelibly linked to telling us about iconic events."

Cronkite was on air for a staggering 27 of the 30 hours it took NASA to land men on the moon during the Apollo IX mission in 1969, dubbed "Walter to Walter" coverage by his peers. When astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surfaced, Cronkite was almost speechless for the first time in his storied career.

Cronkite earned viewers' respect for his just-the-facts style, rarely displaying much emotion on air. But there was a memorable moment in 1963, when he briefly lost his composure while announcing on live TV that President Kennedy has been shot and killed in Dallas "I choked up, I really had a little trouble...my eyes got a little wet," he said in a 2003 interview. "Fortunately, I grabbed hold before I was actually (crying)."

Cronkite's influence was such that after he ended a 1968 broadcast following a trip to South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive telling viewers that the war could not be won, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly told his aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

It was Cronkite's lifelong fascination with flight — and his unabashed enthusiasm for the U.S. space program— that may be his enduring legacy: his power as a broadcaster was such that he helped stir the public's support for space exploration. "In that age of TV," 60 Minutescreator Don Hewitt said, "Walter Cronkite was as well known as John Glenn."

He was on NASA's list to be the first journalist in space, a project scrubbed after the Challenger explosion.

"I can't imagine any red-blooded person not wanting to get into space," Cronkite told USA TODAY in 1998 before he co-anchored CNN's coverage of John Glenn's return to space at age 77. "Shaking off that idea lacks a certain imagination, a spirit of adventure. I can't think of anything better out there."

Cronkite retired in 1981, replaced by Dan Rather. Cronkite was supposed to have a continuing relationship with the network, but it didn't work out that way, and in ensuing years he smarted at the way CBS rarely invited him back on its air.

"CBS did not live up to the arrangement we had," Cronkite said. "I thought I was only stepping down from the Evening News, but I'd continue to do special events coverage and in-depth reporting. They chose not to use me. I was very unhappy the way it worked out. I kept saying, 'Maybe I could do this,' but it never quite worked out."

Yet in the next breath, Cronkite acknowledged that CBS didn't boot him out on the street, either. He maintained a large office and acknowledged that the network paid him "a magnificent amount of money" over the years, reportedly $1 million a year to do virtually nothing, which made him rich and enabled him to write, travel and found his own TV production company.

Cronkite was married for nearly sixty-five years to Betsy Maxwell, who died in March 2005. In recent years Cronkite wrote a sy... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25718767/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25718767/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:28:15 PDT espionage and was the inspiration for the Broadway show “M. Butterfly,” died in Paris on Tuesday.


Mr. Shi (pronounced Shuh), who was convicted of espionage in France in 1986 along with his lover, Bernard Boursicot, was believed to be 70. He had also been
believed for years to be a woman, at least by Mr. Boursicot, who served time in prison after the affair and became a laughingstock in France.

Mr. Boursicot, who is 64 and has been living in a nursing home in France while recovering from a stroke, showed no sadness when he learned of Mr. Shi’s death
in a telephone interview.

“I’m not surprised,” he said, in a tone that suggested weariness with a former lover’s theatrics. “It is a long time he has been sick. Now it’s over 40 years.”

Asked if he had any sadness at all, Mr. Boursicot said: “He did so many things against me that he had no pity for, I think it is stupid to play another game now and
say I am sad. The plate is clean now. I am free.”

In the 1988 Broadway play and the 1993 film “M. Butterfly,” Bernard Boursicot was depicted as a high-ranking diplomat and Shi Pei Pu as a beautiful female opera
singer who met in 1964. In fact, Mr. Boursicot was a 20-year-old high school dropout who had finagled a job as an accountant at the newly opened French Embassy
in Beijing. His few sexual experiences had been with male schoolmates, and he was determined to fall in love with a woman, he wrote in his diary.

Shi Pei Pu was 26 when they met, delicate and charming. He lived as a man and taught Chinese to the diplomatic wives. He told Mr. Boursicot that he had been a
singer and a librettist in the Beijing Opera. One perfect night in the Forbidden City Mr. Shi told Mr. Boursicot a story no romantic could resist: Mr. Shi said he was a
woman who had been forced to go through life as a man, because her father required a son. A short time later, the men became lovers, although the sex, Mr. Boursicot
would later say, was fast and furtive, always carried out in the dark.

When the affair was discovered by the Chinese authorities, Mr. Boursicot passed them French documents, first from the embassy in Beijing and later from his posting
at the consulate in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Mr. Boursicot spent most of his life outside China and was romantically involved with men and women. On his rare visits to Shi Pei Pu, sexual contact was circumscribed.
On one visit, Mr. Shi presented him with a 4-year-old boy, Shi Du Du, who Mr. Shi said was their son.

In 1982, Mr. Boursicot — then living openly with a male companion, Thierry Toulet — was able to arrange for Shi Pei Pu and Shi Du Du to live with him in Paris. Shortly
thereafter, Mr. Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu were arrested. Mr. Shi first told the police he was a woman, but he admitted the truth to prison doctors, showing them how he hid
his genitals.

Shi Du Du explained the mystery of where he came from in his statement to the police: he was from China’s Uighur minority, he said, and had been sold by his mother.
“It was not that my mother did not love me,” he said. ”We were starving.”

Mr. Boursicot, hearing that Shi Pei Pu was a man and always had been, sliced his throat with a razor blade in prison.

In 1986, Mr. Shi and Mr. Boursicot received six-year sentences for espionage. They were pardoned a year later. Mr. Shi is survived by Shi Du Du, who lives in Paris and
who, Mr. Boursicot said, has three young sons.

Although Mr. Boursicot and Mr. Shi occasionally spoke over the years, relations were strained. Mr. Boursicot said that they last spoke a few months ago and that
Mr. Shi told him he still loved him.

Mr. Shi enjoyed the spotlight, performing in public as an opera singer, but disliked talking about his romance with Mr. Boursicot, particularly the sexual specifics.

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25632607/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25632607/ Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:29:46 PDT
Sky Saxon, the mop-haired bass player and front man for the psychedelic protopunk band the Seeds, whose 1965 song “ushin’ Too Hard” put a Los Angeles garage-band spin on the bad-boy rocker image personified by the Rolling Stones, died Thursday in Austin, Tex. He was thought to be 71.

Mr. Saxon, who had remained an active musician, played his final gig at an Austin club with a local backup band on Saturday night and was taken to the hospital on Monday, she said.

The Seeds, formed in 1965, were a short-lived but cultishly memorable band that melded primitive rock rhythms with the free-love message of the flower power generation. Both their look (mod fashions and bowl-cut hairdos) and their sound borrowed from British rockers. Critics gave them credit for helping to popularize psychedelic rock and for prefiguring the punk movement.

Mr. Saxon composed songs and played electric bass, but it was perhaps his sullen, stylized lead vocals that best characterized the band. Never as threatening as the Stones, they were, instead, rather sweetly dangerous, appearing on white-bread television music and dance shows like “American Bandstand” wearing tailored bellbottoms and velour shirts or shiny Nehru jackets. Mr. Saxon voiced the vaguely menacing lyrics to songs like “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” “ainted Doll” or “ushin’ Too Hard,” a pulsing, anthemic warning to any girlfriend with ambitions to rein in her man.

The Seeds flamed out in the early 1970s, but they lingered in the annals of rock history as representatives of their time and place. Their songs have appeared in movies including “Cop Land” (1997) with Sylvester Stallone and “Secretary” (2002), the story of a dominant-submissive relationship, which starred James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Sky Sunlight Saxon was the name he used in later years, the middle name given to him in the 1970s as a member of the Source Family, a spiritual cult whose leader — known as Father Yod or Ya Ho Wha — started what has been described as the quintessential hippie commune; Mr. Saxon was also known within it as Arelich. He was born Richard Elvern Marsh in Salt Lake City in 1937, according to several online sources. Ms. Saxon said her husband’s birthday was Aug. 20 but would not confirm the year because he believed age was irrelevant, she said. He moved to Los Angeles to start a music career after high school.

Mr. Saxon’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2007, his survivors include an unspecified number of siblings, several children and grandchildren.

After the Seeds dissolved, Mr. Saxon performed and recorded with numerous bands, including some he called the Seeds, and he occasionally played with the Source Family’s own band, known as Ya Ho Wha 13. In 1998, he arranged for a 13-CD boxed set of its music to be produced in Japan.

“Sky has passed over and Ya Ho Wha is waiting for him at the gate,” his wife wrote on Facebook. “He will soon be home with his Father.”

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25430500/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25430500/ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:12:50 PDT 1
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June 19, 2009

Ali Akbar Khan, the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often on display in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularize North Indian classical music in the West, died on Thursday at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 87.

Mr. Khan, who was named a national treasure by the Indian government in 1989, carried on the musical traditions of his father, Allauddin Khan, whose ashram in East Bengal produced some of India’s most celebrated musicians, notably Mr. Shankar, the flutist Pannalal Ghosh and the sitarist Nikhil Banerjee.

Unlike his father, a volatile and uneven performer, Mr. Khan maintained an austere demeanor onstage while coaxing passages of extraordinary intensity from his sarod, an instrument with 25 strings, 10 plucked with a piece of coconut shell while the remainder resonate sympathetically.

“He was not as flashy as Ravi Shankar, but he had the ability to play a single note, or a simple passage of notes, and draw out such amazing depth,” said John Schaefer, the host of “New Sounds” and “Soundcheck” on WNYC-FM in New York. “That’s why he was able to get a world of emotion and color out of ‘Malasri,’ which is often called a three-note raga. That, for me, stands as the calling card of the genius of Ali Khan.”

The violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who brought Mr. Khan to the United States in 1955, called him “an absolute genius” and “the greatest musician in the world.”

In 1971, Mr. Khan performed at Madison Square Garden with Mr. Shankar, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty on a bill with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and other rock stars at the Concert for Bangladesh, a benefit organized by George Harrison and Mr. Shankar. The album and film of the two performances gave added exposure to Mr. Khan and North Indian music.

Mr. Khan, whose name is often preceded by the honorific Ustad, or master, was born in Shibpur, a small village in Bengal (now Bangladesh). He grew up in Maihar, where his father was the principal musician in the court of the maharajah of Madhya Pradesh. He began vocal training at 3 and, after studying the surbahar, sitar and tabla, focused on the sarod.

His father was a stern, sometimes brutal taskmaster, rousing his young son at dawn for several hours of practice before breakfast and continuing well into the evening of what were often 18-hour days. Allauddin Khan had elevated the status of instrumental music, previously regarded as inferior to vocal performance, by synthesizing various regional styles into a modern concert style. His son absorbed his encyclopedic knowledge of North Indian music and eventually outstripped him as an instrumentalist.

Mr. Khan’s younger sister, Annapurna Devi, who later married Mr. Shankar, developed into an equally accomplished master of the surbahar, but custom prevented her from performing in public.

At 13, Mr. Khan performed for a large audience for the first time, at a music conference in the holy city of Allahabad. By his early 20s he was music director of All-India Radio in Lucknow, broadcasting as a solo artist and composing for the radio’s orchestra.

“My father’s main purpose was to hear me play while he was living in Maihar, because I was always being broadcast,” Mr. Khan told Peter Lavezzoli, the author of “The Dawn of Indian Music in the West.” “If I played anything wrong, he would come the next day to Lucknow, straight from the train station, tell me to get my sarod and listen to me play and correct me.”

For part of a series of 78s that he recorded in Lucknow for HMV in 1945, he composed and performed the three-minute Raga Chandranandan (“Moonstruck”http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25355471/ Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:25:57 PDT


New York Times
June 16, 2009

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — Bob Bogle, the lead guitarist and co-founder of the rock band The Ventures, known for 1960s instrumental hits like “Walk, Don’t Run,” “erfidia” and the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” died Sunday.

The Ventures sold millions of albums and heavily influenced other rock guitarists. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. The hall’s Web site hailed The Ventures as “the most successful instrumental combo in rock and roll history.”

“Walk, Don’t Run,” written and first performed by Johnny Smith in 1955, reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart for The Ventures in 1960; a revised version, “Walk, Don’t Run ’64,” reached No. 8 in 1964.

The band’s instrumental version of “erfidia,” a much-covered song by the Mexican songwriter Alberto Domínguez, was also a hit in 1960. (Charlie Parker, Mel Tormé, Glenn Miller, Nat King Cole and Linda Ronstadt, among others, have also recorded versions of it.)

The Ventures scored yet another hit in 1969 with their cover of the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” the long-running police detective show that had its premiere in 1968.

The band got its start in 1958 in Tacoma. Mr. Bogle initially played lead and bass and Mr. Wilson played rhythm guitar. They were soon joined by Nokie Edwards, another guitarist, and the drummer Howie Johnson, later replaced by Mel Taylor.

“Our aspirations were to pick up nothing heavier than a guitar,” Mr. Wilson said last year. “But it just mushroomed into something where we became internationally known.”

The Ventures were particularly popular in Japan, where Mr. Wilson and Mr. Bogle played as a duo during their first tour in 1962 because the promoter couldn’t afford to pay the other two band members.

The two Americans made such an impression, Mr. Wilson recalled last year, that when the band came back in 1964, “there were 6,000 people at the airport.” He said he didn’t realize at first that the Japanese fans were there to see The Ventures.

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25239459/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25239459/ Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:15:27 PDT a cool guy and did some interesting work...you should go take a look


When asked if he didn’t feel an obligation to serve “the black community,”
Mr. Colescott replied, “The way that one serves is to serve art first,” adding
that “the way you serve art is by being true to yourself.”


Robert Colescott - Painter Who Toyed With Race and Sex,
June 9, 2009

Robert Colescott, an American figurative painter whose garishly powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors and almost tangible glee, died Thursday at his home in Tucson. He was 83.

Mr. Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997, the first African-American to do so. By then he was well known for pitting the painterly against the political to create giddily joyful, destabilized compositions that satirized, and offended, without regard to race, creed, gender or political leaning.

People of all colors haunt Mr. Colescott’s paintings, mostly as chimerical stereotypes that exchange attributes freely. Their mottled skin tones often suggest one race seeping through another. Their tumultuous interactions evoke a volatile mixture of suspicion, desire, pain and vitality. His slurred shapes, wobbly drawing and patchy brushwork imply that no truths can be held to be self-evident, that life is mired in slippery layers of false piety, self-interest and greed, but also lust, pleasure and irreverence.
Steeped in history and art history, Mr. Colescott often found new uses and meanings for the landmarks of Western painting, borrowing compositions and characters from van Eyck, Goya and Manet and peppering his scenes with the Africanized faces from Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”



In “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook,” from 1975, he reinterpreted Emmanuel Leutze’s famous painting of George Washington during the American Revolution with Carver at the center, accompanied by black cooks, Aunt Jemimas and banjo players. “Eat Dem Taters” another painting from 1975, substituted laughing black people for the pious Dutch peasants of van Gogh’s “otato Eaters” to attack, in his words, “the myth of the happy darky.” No American painter of the late 20th century made such telling use of painting’s European past to lambaste the painful contradictions of the American present.

Mr. Colescott’s work anticipated the appropriation art and Neo-Expressionist painting of the 1980s. His imagery shared aspects with Pop Art, although he disdained its coolness. His improvisational approach had precedents in jazz and Abstract Expressionism. He said he wanted his surface to “squirm.”

Mr. Colescott was born in Oakland, Calif., on Aug. 26, 1925. His mother, a pianist, and his father, a jazz violinist who supported the family as a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad, had moved to California from New Orleans in 1919 to improve their children’s chances for a good education.

He grew up playing the drums and always kept a drum kit in his studio. But he also drew and painted from childhood. The African-American sculptor Sargent Johnson, who worked with Mr. Colescott’s father on the Southern Pacific, was a family friend.

After serving with the Army in France and Germany during World War II, Mr. Colescott majored in art at the University of California, Berkeley, emerging in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in painting and a geometric abstract style. During a year in Paris he studied with the painter Fernand Léger — whose emphasis on scale, color and narration made a lasting impression — and spent a lot of time in museums, looking at 19th-century painting. He returned to Berkeley for a master’s and spent the next decade teaching in the Northwest.
In 1964, a teaching residency took him to Cairo, where Egyptian art reiterated for him Léger’s ideas about narrative, but from outside the Western canon. After another stint in Paris he returned in 1967 to the United States, which he found changed by the civil rights movement, and to the Bay Area, where artists like Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley, Joan Brown, Robert Arneson and especially Peter Saul had developed extravagant, often caustic figurative styles. By the end of the 1960s he had found his mature style.

Mr. Colescott’s first four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ms. Cattron; his brother, Warrington Colescott Jr., of Hollandale, Wis.; five sons from previous marriages — Alexander, of Napa, Calif.; Nicolas, of Portland, Ore.; Dennett, of San Rafael, Calif.; Daniel, of Modesto, Calif.; and Cooper, of Tucson — and one... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25218167/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25218167/ Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:02:53 PDT
Singing and clowning over a driving shuffle beat, Prima and his wife, the singer Keely Smith, became one of Las Vegas’s biggest attractions in the 1950s with a crowd-pleasing mixture of jazz, rhythm and blues, and pure showmanship. Mr. Butera’s high-energy saxophone solos were an essential element of Prima’s success, as were the many arrangements that Mr. Butera wrote for the band.

Sam Butera was born in New Orleans on Aug. 17, 1927. His father, Joseph, was an amateur musician who made his living as a butcher and encouraged young Sam’s interest in music.

Mr. Butera began studying saxophone when he was 7 and became a professional musician at 14, playing in a strip club on Bourbon Street. At 19 he won a talent contest sponsored by Look magazine, which led to an appearance with other winners from around the country at Carnegie Hall.

After working with the big bands of Ray McKinley, Tommy Dorsey and others, he formed his own group and began a four-year residency at the 500 Club in New Orleans. He was hired by Prima, a fellow New Orleans native, in December 1954 and put together a band, the Witnesses, to back Prima at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas.

Mr. Butera and the Witnesses continued to work with Prima, in Las Vegas and later in New Orleans, until Prima fell into a coma after undergoing brain surgery in 1975. He died in 1978.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Butera stepped into the spotlight. Doing as much singing as playing, he led a band that performed songs from the Prima repertory and frequently accompanied Ms. Smith, who had divorced Prima in 1961. He retired in 2004.

Mr. Butera’s survivors include his wife, Vera; two daughters, Cheryl and Diane; two sons, Sam Jr. and Nick; eight grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Among Mr. Butera’s best-known arrangements was the medley of “Just a Gigolo” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” that was a hit for the Prima-Smith team in 1956. To Mr. Butera’s chagrin, it became an even bigger hit for the rock singer David Lee Roth three decades later.

“He copied my arrangement note for note, and I didn’t get a dime for it,” Mr. Butera told The New York Times in 1997. “But there wasn’t an act in Atlantic City or Las Vegas that would do that song, out of respect for me.”

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25149685/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25149685/ Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:03:42 PDT June 4, 2009

David Carradine, an enigmatic actor who never outran the cult status he earned in the 1970s television series “Kung Fu” — even though he went on to star as Woody Guthrie in the film “Bound for Glory” and as the title character in Quentin Tarantino’s twin thrillers, “Kill Bill” Volumes I and II — was found dead on Thursday in a hotel room in Bangkok, where he was filming a new movie. He was 72 and lived in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.



The police in Bangkok are treating the death as a suicide, The Associated Press reported, though Mr. Carradine’s manager of six years, Chuck Binder, said he didn’t believe this was the case.

“He was working, he had a family, he was happy,” Mr. Binder said in an interview Thursday. “He just bought a new car.”

Thai authorities informed the United States Embassy that Mr. Carradine, who was staying in a suite at the Swissotel Nai Lert Park, died either late Wednesday or early Thursday, The A.P. said.

“I can confirm that we found his body, naked, hanging in the closet,” Teerapop Luanseng, a police officer investigating the death, told The A.P.

A busy actor if not always the most discriminating in his choice of roles, Mr. Carradine had hundreds of credits on television and in the movies, and it can be fairly said that acting was in his blood. He was the oldest son of John Carradine, a prolific character actor who was a favorite of the director John Ford, and he had three actor half-brothers, Keith, Robert and Bruce Carradine.

He was in his early 30s and had a decade of credits in the theater, in films and on television behind him when he was cast in “Kung Fu” as Kwai Chang Caine, a half-Chinese, half-American Shaolin monk who had fled China after he killed a man in defense of his master and was on the lam in the 19th-century American West.

The character, a martial arts master and mystical peacenik, was portrayed by Mr. Carradine with a preternatural calm and, in moments of heroic violence — deployed only as a last resort — an explosive grace, a reluctant hero more comfortable spouting vaguely Confucian aphorisms than wreaking physical vengeance on even the most evil foes. The show caught on, especially with young viewers, plugging into the battle-weary spirit of the waning years of the Vietnam War and, in its depiction of the ill treatment of Chinese immigrants, the indignant anguish of the civil rights movement as well (though some Asian-Americans were irked that the role was not given to an Asian actor).

“Kung Fu” made its debut as an ABC movie of the week in 1972, then ran as a series until 1975. And though Mr. Carradine was not proficient in the martial arts himself — he studied them later — the show was influential in the rise of American interest in them and in Eastern philosophy.

In an interview with The New York Times after “Kung Fu” became a hit, Mr. Carradine said that no one was more surprised than he.

“Man, I read that pilot script and flipped!” he said. “But I never believed it would get on TV. I mean, a Chinese western, about a half-Chinese half-American Buddhist monk who wanders the gold rush country but doesn’t care about gold, and defends the oppressed but won’t carry a gun, and won’t even step on an ant because he values all life, and hardly ever speaks? No way!”

He was born John Arthur Carradine in Hollywood on Dec. 8, 1936; he changed his name in his early 20s, at the start of his acting career, because he didn’t want to be known as John Jr. (especially since his father’s birth name was not John but Richmond). He attended several colleges in the San Francisco area, studying music and eventually acting and earning money by painting murals in bars.

He served in the Army from 1960 to 1962 and landed on Broadway in 1964 in “The Deputy.” His break came the next year, when, alongside Christopher Plummer, he played an Inca king, also on Broadway, in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” by Peter Shaffer. From there he was cast in the lead of a short-lived television series based on the classic western film “Shane.”

As a young actor, Mr. Carradine had a reputation for being headstrong and difficult. He was also an admittedly freewheeling child of the 1960s, a partaker of psychedelic drugs who had occasional run-ins with the police. He lived with the actress Barbara Hershey during the time when she had changed her name to Barbara Seagull, and they had a son they named Free.

Mr. Carradine was married five times. In addition to his son Free and his half-brothers Keith, Robert and Bruce, he is survived by his wife, Annie; another half-brother, Michael Bowen; five daughters, Kansas, Calista, Amanda,Madeline and Olivia; another son, Max; and several grandchildren and great-grandchild... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25124453/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/25124453/ Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:11:22 PDT CHICAGO, Illinois
Along the dark cold streets of oblivion,
where Al Capone danced
and the frozen lake exploded.
Chicago Sun Times (AP) -- Koko Taylor, a sharecropper's daughter whose regal bearing and powerful voice earned her the sobriquet "Queen of the Blues," has died after complications from surgery. She was 80.

Taylor died Wednesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital about two weeks after having surgery for a gastrointestinal bleed, said Marc Lipkin, director of publicity for her record label, Alligator Records, which made the announcement.

The break for Tennessee-born Taylor came in 1962, when arranger/composer Willie Dixon, impressed by her voice, got her a Chess recording contract and produced several singles (and two albums) for her, including the million-selling 1965 hit, "Wang Dang Doodle," which she called silly, but which launched her recording career.

From Chicago blues clubs, Taylor took her raucous, gritty, good-time blues on the road to blues and jazz festivals around the nation, and into Europe. After the Chess label folded, she signed with Alligator Records.

In most years, she performed at least 100 concerts a year.

"Blues is my life," Taylor once said. "It's a true feeling that comes from the heart, not something that just comes out of my mouth. Blues is what I love, and blues is what I always do."

Taylor appeared on national television numerous times, and was the subject of a PBS documentary and had a small part in director David Lynch's "Wild at Heart."

In the course of her more than 40-year career, Taylor was nominated seven times for Grammy awards and won in 1984.

Born Cora Walton just outside Memphis, Tenn., Taylor said her dream to become a blues singer was nurtured in the cotton fields outside her family's sharecropper shack.

"I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas and he would play the blues," she said in a 1990 interview. "I would hear different records and things by Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Sonnyboy Williams and all these people, you know, which I just loved."

Although her father encouraged her to sing only gospel music, Cora and her siblings would sneak out back with their homemade instruments and play the blues. With one brother accompanying on a guitar made out of bailing wire and nails and one brother on a fife made out of a corncob, she began on the path to blues woman.

Orphaned at 11, Koko -- a nickname she earned because of an early love of chocolate -- at age 18 moved to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert "Pops" Taylor, in search for work.

Setting up house on the South Side, Koko found work as a cleaning woman for a wealthy family living in the city's northern suburbs. At night and on weekends, she and her husband frequented Chicago's clubs, where many the artists heard on the radio performed.

"I started going to these local clubs, me and my husband, and everybody got to know us," Taylor said. "And then the guys would start letting me sit in, you know, come up on the bandstand and do a tune."

In addition to performing, she operated a Chicago nightclub, which closed in November 2001 because her daughter, club manager Joyce Threatt, developed severe asthma and could no longer manage a smoky nightclub.

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24655327/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24655327/ Fri, 08 May 2009 17:01:16 PDT



Bob Dylan also known as Elston Gunn Blind Boy Grunt, Lucky Wilbury/Boo Wilbury, Elmer Johnson, Sergei Petrov, Jack Frost, Jack Fate, Willow Scarlet, Robert Milkwood Thomas


Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, author, poet and painter who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of both the civil rights movements and of the opposition to the Vietnam War. Dylan's latest studio album, Together Through Life, was released on April 28, 2009. In its first week of release, Billboard magazine reported that: "Bob Dylan is headed for his fifth No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart next week as his Together Through Life looks like a shoo-in for a debut atop the list."

Dylan's early lyrics incorporated political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture. While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has explored many traditions of American song, from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, and even jazz and swing. Dylan performs with the guitar, piano and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the "Never Ending Tour". Although his accomplishments as performer and recording artist have been central to his career, his songwriting is generally regarded as his greatest contribution.

Throughout his career, Dylan has won many awards for his songwriting, performing, and recording. His records have earned Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards, and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2008, a "Cultural Pathway" was named in Dylan's honor in his birthplace, Duluth.In 2008, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."


Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) was born in St. Mary's Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota,[14] and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior. Research by Dylan’s biographers has shown that his paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States following the antisemitic pogroms of 1905.His mother's grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902.[15] In his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan writes that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul.

Dylan’s parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. Robert Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age six, when his father was stricken with polio and the family returned to his mother's home town, Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood. Robert Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio—first to blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport, Louisiana and, later, to early rock and roll. He formed several bands in high school: The Shadow Blasters was short lived, but his next, The Golden Chords, lasted longer and played covers of popular songs. Their performance of Danny and the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone off. In his 1959 school yearbook, Robert Zimmerman listed as his ambition "To join Little Richard." The same year, using the name Elston Gunnn, he performed two dates with Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing handclaps.

Zimmerman moved to Minneapolis in September 1959 and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. His early focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in American folk music. In 1985 Dylan explained the attraction that folk music had exerted on him: "The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." He soon began to perform at the 10 O'clock Scholar, a coffee house a few blocks from campus, and became actively involved in the local Dinky... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24417581/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24417581/ Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:22:17 PDT who turned her hacienda into a museum devoted to paintings
by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, died in Mexico City on
Saturday. Her age was a matter of debate, but she used a
birth date that would make her 88. Mrs. Olmedo amassed 137 works by Rivera and 25 by his wife,
Kahlo, and for decades controlled the estates of these
Mexican artists. Although Mrs. Olmedo eventually opened her
collection to the public, she was denounced by her critics
for delays in inaugurating the museum and for her
reluctance for many years to give art experts and
biographers ready access to the works and archives of
Rivera and Kahlo. But the diminutive Mrs. Olmedo, who once modeled for Diego
Rivera, welcomed controversy as an opportunity to move from
the margins of Mexican cultural history to center stage.
Her stubbornness was vindicated when her Museo Dolores
Olmedo Patiño, on the southern outskirts of Mexico City,
was judged an artistic success. Mrs. Olmedo loved flaunting her independence. Once asked
how she would like to be remembered, she replied: "Just as
I am - a woman who did whatever she felt like doing, and
luckily succeeded at it." Born in Mexico City on Dec. 14, 1913, Dolores Olmedo was 17
when an encounter cast her destiny. She accompanied her
mother, a schoolteacher, to the Ministry of Education,
where they had a chance exchange in an elevator with
Rivera, then a renowned artist in his 40's working on
murals in the building. "He asked my mother if he could make some drawings of me,"
Mrs. Olmedo recalled. "She agreed without knowing that I
would pose nude." Rivera made 27 drawings of the young woman and gave them to
her. Years later, her husband, Howard S. Phillips, an
American publisher in Mexico, discovered them and ordered
her to return them to Rivera. When Rivera was dying in the
mid-1950's, Mrs. Olmedo, by then divorced and wealthy, put
him up in her home and helped care for him. A grateful
Rivera, whose reputation and earnings had tumbled, again
gave her the nude drawings. He also sold her scores of his
paintings and many works by Kahlo, who had died in 1954.
Before his own death in 1957, Rivera designated Mrs. Olmedo
to administer his and Kahlo's estates. As the artists' reputations - and the prices for their work
- rebounded, art critics and intellectuals began to resent
Mrs. Olmedo's huge hoard of Riveras and Kahlos and her
power over the artists' legacies. She was accused of having
grossly underpaid for her collection. Stories swirled that
a jealous Mrs. Olmedo was intent on sabotaging Kahlo's
legacy. "I was never a friend of Frida Kahlo," Mrs. Olmedo conceded
in an interview with The New York Times, in which she
referred to the artist's bisexuality. "Frida Kahlo liked
women. I liked men." She said that she bought her 25 Kahlo paintings - for which
she paid only $1,600 - because Rivera begged her to do so
to make sure that an important part of his wife's work
remained in Mexico under one roof. "Otherwise I would not
have done it," Mrs. Olmedo said. Fewer than 200 Kahlo paintings survive, and Mrs. Olmedo's
collection is the most significant private holding of her
works. Critics agreed that she owned some of the most highly
regarded Kahlo paintings. Mrs. Olmedo "has Kahlo's gritty,
ferocious paintings - the kind no one else could have
painted," said Hayden Herrera, the author of "Frida," a
1983 biography. Mrs. Olmedo had little regard for Kahlo as an artist, and
in several interviews referred to her works as "trashy."
Her estimation of Rivera, on the other hand, was
uncritical. "I will always defend his work energetically,
while I'm alive and even after I die," she wrote in her
museum's catalog. Mrs. Olmedo's collection included dozens of little-known
early works by Rivera done in post-Impressionist and Cubist
styles. She also owned highly acclaimed paintings from
Rivera's later period, including "La Tehuana" (1955), a
portrait of Mrs. Olmedo wearing the colorful dress of a
native of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; Kahlo often wore such
a costume. But she also had many of his least memorable
works, like saccharine portraits of Russian children that
look like Soviet propaganda. Mrs. Olmedo became the major collector of Riveras as well
as Rivera's benefactor late in his life, thanks to her
entrepreneurial acumen. After divorcing in the 1940's, she
became one of the first Mexican women to succeed in real
estate development. The business brought her into contact
with leading industrialists and politicians, and fueled
rumors, vigorously denied by Mrs. Olmedo, linking her
romantically to severa... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24352192/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24352192/ Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:45:45 PDT music, died yesterday at her home in Fort Lee, N.J. She was
77. The cause was complications after surgery for a brain
tumor, said a spokeswoman, Blanca Lasalle. Onstage, Ms. Cruz was a petite woman who wore tight,
glittering dresses and towering wigs, dancing in high heels
and belting songs that she punctuated with shouts of
"Azucar!" ("Sugar!"). She was a vocal powerhouse, with a
tough, raspy voice that could ride the percussive attack of
a rumba or bring hard-won emotion to a lovelorn Cuban son. "When people hear me sing," she said in an interview with
The New York Times, "I want them to be happy, happy, happy.
I don't want them thinking about when there's not any
money, or when there's fighting at home. My message is
always felicidad - happiness." In a career that began in the 1940's, Ms. Cruz sang with
every major Latin bandleader and recorded more than 70
albums. She sang a full spectrum of Afro-Cuban music, from
the religious chants of santería to mambos and cha-chas to
modern salsa. Yet unlike many of the Latin musicians in her
wake, she didn't court a crossover audience. She recorded
in Spanish, modestly saying that her English was not good
enough. Ms. Cruz was born in Havana to a poor family, and she
regularly sang her brothers and sisters to sleep. She won a
radio talent contest after a cousin took her to the radio
station García Serra; first prize was a cake. She went on
to study at the Havana Conservatory and to sing on radio
programs. In 1950, she joined La Sonora Matancera, Cuba's
most popular band. "I wanted to be a mother, a teacher and
a housewife," she told The New York Times. "But when I
began to sing with La Sonora Matancera, I thought, `This is
my chance, and I'm going to do it.' " She toured with the group constantly, sometimes singing
five sets a day; they were also headliners at Havana's most
celebrated nightclub, the Tropicana, and performed on radio
and television. But in 1960, a year after Fidel Castro took
power in Cuba, she was touring Mexico with La Sonora
Matancera and decided not to return to Cuba. Years later,
Cuba refused permission for her to attend her father's
funeral. Ms. Cruz moved to New York in 1961, and later to Fort Lee.
In 1962, she married Pedro Knight, a trumpeter from La
Sonora Matancera who became her musical director and
manager. He survives her, along with two sisters, Gladys
Becquer and Dolores Cruz. In New York, she held on to her Cuban roots while adding
some of the city's Puerto Rican and later Dominican
elements to her music. She sang with Tito Puente's
orchestra in the 1960's, a collaboration she periodically
renewed through the next decades, and in the 1970's she
also sang with bandleaders like Johnny Pacheco, Willie
Colón and Ray Barretto. She performed with the Fania
All-Stars at Yankee Stadium in 1975. "Women are afraid to sing salsa," she once said. "I don't
know why. Maybe they think it's for men." She added, "But I
think everybody can sing everything." She continued to modernize her music, working with
Miami-based producers like Willy Chirino and Emilio Estefan
and with Sergio George in New York, who produced her most
recent albums. She also collaborated with many of the
musicians who admired her, among them Luciano Pavarotti,
Gloria Estefan, David Byrne of Talking Heads and the
Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso. In 1989, Ms. Cruz won a Grammy award for best tropical
Latin performance for an album in collaboration with Mr.
Barretto, "Ritmo en el Corazón." In 1989, Yale University
awarded Ms. Cruz an honorary doctorate (alongside Stephen
Hawking), and in 1990 the main street of Little Havana in
Miami, Calle Ocho, added the name Celia Cruz Way. In 1994,
President Clinton gave her the National Medal of Arts. She
won the first Latin Grammy Award for best tropical album in
2000. Until last year, Ms. Cruz continued to perform and
record constantly on an international circuit that included
jazz festivals and arena concerts along with Latin clubs. She had surgery for a brain tumor in December 2002, but in
February she returned to the studio to record an album,
"Regalo de Alma," that is due for release Aug. 5 on Sony
Discos. That same month, her 2002 album, "La Negra Tiene
Tumbao," won the Grammy Award for best salsa album. In
March, the Telemundo network broadcast a live concert
tribute to Ms. Cruz, in which she performed alongside other
Latin stars, including Marc Anthony, to raise money for the
Celia Cruz Foundation for Hispanic students to study music.
It will give its first five grants on her birthday this
year, Oct. 21... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24241408/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24241408/ Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:38:02 PDT
The cause was not yet determined, said Ed Winter, assistant chief of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. He said that the death was being investigated but that foul play was not suspected.

Ms. Chambers was an aspiring actress and model in 1972 when she starred in “Behind the Green Door,” a pornographic film about a woman who is abducted to a theater and ravished in front of an audience, ultimately to her great satisfaction, by both men and women. It became especially popular when it was learned that its star was the same fresh-faced blonde who appeared beaming at a baby on boxes of Ivory Snow, a laundry soap famously described by Procter & Gamble, its manufacturer, as “99 and 44/100 percent pure.”

Ms. Chambers declared at the time that her film would help “sell a lot more soap,” though Procter & Gamble did not see it that way and replaced her.

“Behind the Green Door” was among the first X-rated films to gain wide distribution and, along with “Deep Throat,” released the same year, is generally credited with helping establish a mainstream market for pornography.

“Behind the Green Door” was more than just a parade of sex scenes, said Steven Hirsch, the co-chief executive of Vivid Entertainment Group, which makes adult films. Even though Ms. Chambers did not actually have any lines in the film, he said, she brought it to life.

“It was a movie that really dug deep into sexuality, psychologically,” Mr. Hirsch said in an interview on Monday. “It took you to a place that no other adult film had gone before, and the reason they were able to pull that off is that she was a talented actress.”

When Ms. Chambers died, she was identified by documents with her body as Marilyn Ann Taylor, evidently the name she assumed after a marriage, though along with many other details that could not be confirmed on Monday. She was born, Mr. Winter said, on April 22, 1952, though he could not confirm that her birth name was, as often reported, Marilyn Ann Briggs. She is most often said to have been born in Westport, Conn., though in a 2007 interview with The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, Ms. Chambers said she was born in Providence and grew up in Westport.

The Associated Press reported that her survivors include a daughter, McKenna Marie Taylor; a brother, Bill Briggs; and a sister, Jann Smith.

Before making “Behind the Green Door,” Ms. Chambers had hoped to establish an acting career in fully clothed roles. She had had a small part in “The Owl and the Pussycat,” a 1970 comedy starring Barbra Streisand and George Segal, and she later appeared in “Rabid” (1977), an early film by David Cronenberg, but most of her work after “Green Door” capitalized on her fame as a sex star.

“I thought there would be a chance to cross over,” she said in the Providence Journal interview. “Boy, was I wrong.”

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24182248/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24182248/ Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:30:04 PDT Coosje van Bruggen was Dutch

It all worked out pretty nice.

Coosje van Bruggen, a critic, art historian and artist known for the colorful public sculptures she created around the world with her husband, the Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 66 and had homes in New York and Beaumont-sur-Dême in the Loire Valley, France.
The cause was metastatic breast cancer, said Andrea Glimcher, director of communications at PaceWildenstein, which has represented Ms. van Bruggen since 1990.

Over three decades, Ms. van Bruggen and Mr. Oldenburg created more than 40 public sculptures for parks, urban centers and museums. Typically, each piece depicts a monumentally sized object that often comments archly on its surroundings, like the giant up-ended “Flashlight” (1981), 38 feet tall and installed at the University of Las Vegas, or “Bicyclette Ensevelie” (“Buried Bicycle,” 1990), a mammoth bicycle that appears to be half-buried at Parc de la Villette in Paris.

Although their projects often engendered controversy, Ms. van Bruggen always adopted a matter-of-fact approach to persuading civic governments and mayors to embrace them.

“I’m the daughter of a physician,” she said in a 2006 interview, “and I always feel that every piece is a diagnosis.”

Ms. van Bruggen was born on June 6, 1942, in Groningen, the Netherlands. While she was growing up, her father, a doctor, held a weekly salon for writers and painters at the family home, and she and her siblings were encouraged to participate. She went on to study art history at the Rijks University of Groningen, obtaining a graduate degree in 1967.

That year, she became an assistant curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, working with environmental artists like Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, and the members of the Dutch avant-garde.

“I belong to the first Conceptual generation,” she told Artnews in 1990. “I was involved when Jan Dibbets dug up the foundations of the Stedelijk and Ger van Elk made a sidewalk out of bathroom tiles. I wanted to push the parameters of art.”

Along the way, she married her first husband and had two children.

In 1970, Mr. Oldenburg, the Swedish-born giant of American Pop, arrived at the museum to install a traveling retrospective, and Ms. van Bruggen, 13 years his junior, was assigned to help. Although Mr. Oldenburg was smitten, their initial meeting went badly.

“I had a lot of anti-American feelings,” Ms. van Bruggen told Artnews. “I thought, ‘Here is a typical imperialist American artist.’“

Their courtship didn’t take off until 1975, by which time Ms. van Bruggen was divorced and teaching art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede.

Their first collaboration came in 1976, when Mr. Oldenburg was commissioned to rework “Trowel I,” a 1971 sculpture of an oversize garden tool, for the grounds of the Kröller-Müller museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. At one point, Ms. van Bruggen recounted later, “Claes said, ‘I made the trowel for you.’ I said, ‘It is not for me, and I don’t like it!’ ”

At her urging, he changed its color from silver to the bright blue of Dutch workmen’s overalls, and placed it where the garden became wild parkland, to underscore its function.

They married in 1977.

The next year, Ms. van Bruggen moved to New York, and they began working together in earnest.

Although critics often looked askance at Ms. van Bruggen’s participation in what was often perceived as Mr. Oldenburg’s work and sometimes even refused to credit her, the couple maintained that theirs was a true collaboration. They conceived their ideas jointly, but he did the drawing while she chose the colors and handled the work’s fabrication and siting. Ms. van Bruggen often described their working process as “a unity of opposites.”

At her instigation, too, they branched out into indoor installations and performance. In 1985 they collaborated on “Il Corso del Coltello” (“The Course of the Knife” a performance piece in Venice, Italy, with the architect Frank Gehry, whom Ms. van Bruggen had met in 1982, when she was on the selection committee for Documenta, the important contemporary art show in Kassel, Germany.

Ms. van Bruggen maintained an independent career as a critic, writing monographs on her husband’s early work as well as that of Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven and Mr. Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Together with Mr. Oldenburg, Ms. van Bruggen has been the subject of nearly 40 exhibitions, the most extensive of which was “Sculpture by the Way,” a 2006 retrospective at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24095611/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/24095611/ Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:50:01 PDT
He was 78 and lived in Wilmington, where he had moved two or three years ago to prepare for a 2008 exhibition of his work at the Cameron Art Museum there.

The death has been ruled accidental, Deputy Sheriff Charles Smith of the New Hanover County Sheriff’s office in North Carolina said. The cause appeared to be drowning. Mr. Brown was last seen on March 20, said his stepdaughter, Carol Cone. Mr. Brown, who had had hip surgery and walked with a cane, was known to have been scouting locations for an art project in the river involving a number of rafts, and he is thought to have fallen in.

A colleague of artists like Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Nam June Paik, Mr. Brown was a central figure in the anarchic New York art scene of the early 1960s, a participant in — and instigator of — events-as-art known as “happenings.” He saw the potential for aesthetic pronouncement in virtually everything. His métier was willful preposterousness, and his work contained both anger and insouciance.

His raw materials included buildings, pornographic photos and even meat carcasses.

He often performed in the persona of a religious leader, but dressed in a clown suit with a red nose and antennas hung with ripe bananas. In the end his message to the world was that both spirited individualism and unimpeded creativity must triumph.

One happening, a 1964 performance of a musical theater piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen called “Originale,” included, according to Time magazine, “two white hens, a chimpanzee, six fish floating in two bowls suspended from the ceiling, a shapely model stripping to her black lace panties and bra, and a young man who squirted himself all over with shaving lather and then jumped into a tub of water.”

Mr. Brown, then known as a painter, played “The Painter.” He appeared showering colored powder on the floor while perched on a ladder and clad in a costume of his own creation, a suit appropriate for coping with hazardous materials with what seemed to be a giant vacuum cleaner tube attached like a monstrous phallus. He was inventing a creation myth, he said later, and indeed, his appearance in “Originale” led him to create his own religion, The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. The church was jokey, but not a joke. It had a deity, called Who, to answer the mysterious questions of the universe. (What does the future hold? Who knows.) It had a philosophy, known as Pharblongence, an Anglicized skewing of the Yiddish word farblonjet, meaning “confused.” And it had a creation story, “about a civilization that has played a violent game of baseball” since its first invention, the stick, wrote Mark Bloch, in a biography of Mr. Brown, “Meat, Maps, and Militant Metaphysics,” published by the Cameron Museum.

And in 1967 the church got a home, a former New York City branch library building at 251 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village, built in 1887 and designed by the Beaux-Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt. Mr. Brown hired the Modernist architect Paul Rudolph to redesign the entrance and the interior, creating a purposeful clash between the old and the new that Mr. Brown called “The Great Building Crack-Up.” He lived in the building until 1997, staging art exhibitions and happenings there and preaching the gospel of Pharblongence. “This is a Dada improvisation, an architectural improvisation, a Dada gesture,” Mr. Brown told Mr. Bloch. He called the building “an architectural doodle.”

Robert Delford Brown Jr. was born in the tiny community of Portland, Colo., on Oct. 25, 1930. His family moved to Long Beach, Calif., when he was an adolescent, and he attended Long Beach State University and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. A Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist as a painter, he moved in 1959 to New York City, where he found himself among artists calling themselves Neo-Dadaists, devoted to action-based pieces.

In 1963 he married Rhett Cone, an Off Broadway theater producer from an affluent family, and she became a muse, collaborator and financial backer. She died in 1988; her daughter, Carol, from her previous marriage, is his only immediate survivor.

On their honeymoon in Paris the couple met Allan Kaprow, an early advocate of happenings, who later encouraged Mr. Brown to join the cast of “Originale.”

“Everything is art, everyone is an artist; there is no not art” was among his credos. In his later years he spent much of his energy making collages and organizing the kind of public art event he had helped... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23973932/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23973932/ Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:12:53 PDT
Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”

The late 1930s and early ’40s, when Ms. Levitt created an astonishing body of work, was a time when many noted photographers produced stark images to inspire social change. Ms. Levitt also took her camera to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and where she showed an unerring instinct for a street drama’s perfect pitch. In his 1999 biography of Walker Evans, James R. Mellow wrote that the only photographers Evans “felt had something original to say were Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and himself.”

Helen Levitt was born on Aug. 31, 1913, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her father, Sam, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a successful wholesale knit-goods business; her mother, May, was a bookkeeper before her marriage.

Finding high school unstimulating, Ms. Levitt dropped out during her senior year. In a 2002 interview with The New York Times in her fourth-floor walk-up near Union Square, she said that as a young woman she had wanted to do something in the arts though she could not draw well.

Her mother knew the family of J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx, and in 1931 Ms. Levitt began to work for him. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.”

With a used Voigtländer camera, she photographed her mother’s friends. Through publications and exhibitions, she knew the documentary work of members of the Film and Photo League and of Cartier-Bresson, Evans and Ben Shahn.

In 1935 she met Cartier-Bresson when he spent a year in New York. On one occasion she accompanied him when he photographed along the Brooklyn waterfront. She also trained her eye, she said, by going to museums and art galleries. “I looked at paintings for composition,” she said. In 1936, she bought a secondhand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson favored.

Two years later, she contacted Evans to show him the photographs she had taken of children playing in the streets and their buoyantly unrestrained chalk graffiti. “I went to see him,” she recalled, “the way kids do, and got to be friends with him.” She helped Evans make prints for his exhibition and book “American Photographs.”

Both the quintessentially French Cartier-Bresson and the essentially American Evans influenced Ms. Levitt. Cartier-Bresson had a gift for catching everyday life in graceful, seemingly transparent flux; Evans had a way of being sparingly, frontally direct with his commonplace subjects. Ms. Levitt credited Shahn, whom she had met through Evans, with being a greater influence than Evans. Photographs Shahn took of life on New York sidewalks in the ’30s have an unmediated, gritty spontaneity.

James Agee, a good friend, was also a major influence. She had met him through Evans, who noted, “Levitt’s work was one of James Agee’s great loves, and, in turn, Agee’s own magnificent eye was part of her early training.”

The kind of pictures Ms. Levitt took demanded a photojournalist’s hair-trigger reflexes. But photojournalism didn’t interest her.... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23923372/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23923372/ Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:38:43 PDT
Ms. Johnson, who began showing her paintings in the 1930’s, continued to exhibit until the end of her life. In 2002, in honor of her 90th birthday, she was the subject of a one-woman show at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York. Last year, the gallery featured her work as part of its group exhibition “Betty Parsons and the Women.”

A woman of independent means, Ms. Johnson was by all accounts a woman of sociable temperament, and her life was intertwined with those of some of the 20th century’s leading artists, writers and performers. Over the years, she befriended, socialized with or otherwise brushed up against a cast of luminaries including Paul and Jane Bowles, Truman Capote, Willem de Kooning, Lawrence Durrell, Greta Garbo, Patricia Highsmith, Gene Krupa, Gypsy Rose Lee, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Gore Vidal and Andy Warhol.

In her work, Ms. Johnson was concerned with the intersection of spiritualism, myth and symbol. Deeply influenced by the psychiatrist Carl Jung, whom she also befriended, she wrote “Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals,” published by Harper & Row in 1988.

Buffie Johnson was born in New York City on Feb. 20, 1912. After studying at the University of California, Los Angeles, she embarked for Europe, where she trained with the noted painters Francis Picabia and Stanley William Hayter. In 1943, she was included in an exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, which featured the work of 31 women.

After an early marriage that ended in divorce, Ms. Johnson married the writer and critic Gerald Sykes, from whom she was later divorced. Their daughter, Jenny Johnson Sykes, of Nyack, N.Y., is her only immediate survivor.

Ms. Johnson’s earliest works tended toward the Surrealist; then came more abstract canvases of intense color and pure form. In later years, she turned to huge realistic paintings of flowers and other plant forms, which were imbued with texture through their profuse, veiny detail.

In the late 1950’s, Ms. Johnson was commissioned to paint a huge abstract mural for the Astor Theater on Broadway at 45th Street. Comprising more than 200 45-foot-high panels, the mural, in deep blues, evoked the city at night. The panels were returned to her when the theater was demolished in 1982.

Her work is in the collections of major museums, including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Ms. Johnson sometimes figured in the work of her celebrated friends — she was photographed by Edward Weston, André Kertesz and Karl Bissinger — and they sometimes figured in hers. One of her best-known paintings from the 1940’s is a portrait of Tennessee Williams.

It was an association Ms. Johnson came to regret after she let Williams stay in her house. He used the good china when he wasn’t supposed to.

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23838318/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23838318/ Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:58:09 PDT by Heidi Benson,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
March 19, 2009


On Tuesday, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 90. Nearly 60 years ago, he came to San Francisco, fell in love with this "small white city," and soon after co-founded City Lights Books. One of the most vibrant and long-lived cultural institutions in town, the store remains an international magnet for the imaginative, as does the Web site for City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Just this week, production began on a film based on the obscenity trial over Ferlinghetti's publication of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl."

Mayor Gavin Newsom has declared that March 24 will henceforth be called "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day," in honor of his "enormous contributions to our city's life and culture."

Q: When you were named San Francisco's first poet laureate in 1998, you spoke of the damage to the culture caused by the yawning gap between the city's rich and poor. Have your worst fears been borne out?

A: When I arrived in the city, the citizens seemed to have an island, considering San Francisco a kind of offshore republic, founded by gold miners and gold diggers, cast-off seamen and vagabonds, railroad barons and rogue adventurers and ladies of fortune. What with the electronic revolution and the Information Age, we have joined the rest of the world.

Oldies such as myself talk about the good old days with nostalgia since that was when they were young and beautiful (and full of testosterone).

Q: You served as a ship's commander in the Pacific during World War II. What's the most important thing you learned in the Navy?

A: In four years at sea, I learned that the sea is a monster and can turn on you at any time. Seeing Nagasaki made me an instant pacifist.

Q: How have the concerns of poets changed since you began writing?

A: In the social revolution of the 1960s, the chant was "Be here now." Today with television, e-mail and especially cell phones, it's "Be somewhere else now."

Q: Your favorite 19th century American poet?

A: Walt Whitman, of course. He gave voice to the people and articulated an American populist consciousness.

Q: Why do you prefer the term wide-open poetry to Beat poetry?

A: I never wrote "Beat" poetry. Wide-open poetry refers to what Pablo Neruda told me in Cuba in 1950 at the beginning of the Fidelista revolution: Neruda said, "I love your wide-open poetry."

He was either referring to the wide-ranging content of my poetry, or, in a different mode, to the poetry of the Beats. Catching up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti also refers to the "open form" typography of a poem on the page. (A term borrowed from the gestural painting of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Q: Can writing be taught?

A: It has to be taut.

Q: Is texting poetry?

A: It can be.

Q: You've always been an activist, as well as an artist. What do you advise activists who are complacent now that a new, seemingly more enlightened administration is in charge?

A: The dictatorial reign of George the Second almost destroyed our civil liberties as well as our economy.

We shall now see whether an "enlightened" administration can defeat Washington, D.C.,'s culture of corruption. The press has given socialism a bad name, falsely equating it with Soviet Communism. What is needed today is a form of civil libertarian socialism in which all democratic civil rights are fully protected.

What with shrinking energy resources and radical climate change, a worldwide planned economy is needed. Why won't any politician even whisper it?

Q: In the upcoming film of "Howl," James Franco will play Allen Ginsberg. Who is playing you?

A: Charlie Chaplin.

Q: Who is the love of your life?

A: Life itself is the love of my life.

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23819738/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23819738/ Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:56:08 PDT The cause was heart disease, her manager, Doug Yeager, said.

Odetta, who lived in Upper Manhattan, had been admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital three weeks ago with a number of ailments, including kidney trouble, Mr. Yeager said. In her last days, he said, she had been hoping to sing at the presidential inauguration for Barack Obama.

In a career of almost 60 years, Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall. She became one of the best-known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Her recordings of blues and ballads on dozens of albums influenced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin and many others.

Odetta’s voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger led to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. “All of the songs Odetta sings,” she replied.

One of those songs was “I’m on My Way,” sung during the pivotal civil-rights March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. In a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word,” Odetta recalled the sentiments of another song she performed that day, “Oh Freedom,” which is rooted in slavery: “Oh freedom, Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me/ And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave/ And go home to my Lord and be free.”

Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.

“They were liberation songs,” she said in the interview with The Times. She added: “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life.”

Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later Odetta discovered that she could sing.

“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”

She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.

“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.

In a National Public Radio interview in 2005 she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”

In 1950 Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.

She moved to New York in 1953 and began singing in nightclubs like the storied Blue Angel, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair, her voice plunging deep and soaring high. Her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” released in 1956, resonated with an audience eager to hear old songs made new.

Mr. Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview with Playboy, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” The songs included “Muleskinner Blues,” “Jack o’ Diamonds,” "Ramblin' Round Your City" and “ ’Buked and Scorned.”

“What distinguished her from the start,” Time magazine wrote in 1960, “was the meticulous care with which she tried to recreate the feeling of her folk songs; to understand the emotions of a convict in a convict ditty, she once tried breaking up rocks with a sledgehammer.”

That year she gave a celebrated solo concert at Carnegie Hall and released a live album of it. Eight years later she was on stage there again, now with Mr. Dylan, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and other folk stars in a tribute to Woody Guthrie, which was... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23739331/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23739331/ Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:37:12 PDT [link]
and
6 x 6
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We Are Polaroid
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The Devil's Workshop



Rosemary Clooney, whose warm, radiant voice placed her in
the first rank of American popular singers for more than
half a century, died Saturday night at her home in Beverly
Hills. She was 74. The cause was complications from lung cancer, according to
her spokeswoman, Linda Dozoretz. Ms. Clooney did not dig as deeply into the emotional
content of a song as Frank Sinatra did; she never tried to
emulate the sound and delivery of an instrument as Mel
Tormé seemed to do so easily; she did not burst into the
scat choruses favored by Ella Fitzgerald. But she sang with
so much assuredness, simplicity and honesty that these
elements became her trademark and endeared her to audiences
and critics alike. In the words of the director Mike
Nichols, "She sings like Spencer Tracy acts." In recent years Ms. Clooney had been appearing in the best
cabarets and on concert stages, largely with small groups,
singing pop-jazz standards that earned her new audiences
and renewed respect. Reviewing a performance at Michael's
Pub in Manhattan, Stephen Holden of The New York Times said
of her: "Her special strength is an ability to infuse
everything she touches with warmth, intelligence and a
subtly swinging energy that make her interpretations of
standards models of balance and clarity. Her emotional
perspective is dry-eyed and perceptive. Rather than acting
out the romantic dramas of well-known song lyrics, she
projects an understanding that is almost maternal in its
blend of wisdom and empathy." Although she did her best work singing standards with a
fidelity to their composers, Johnny Mercer and Harold
Arlen, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, George and Ira
Gershwin, Johnny Burke, Jimmy Van Heusen and Richard
Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, her beginnings were decidedly in a
genre not nearly so distinguished. She became one of
America's best-known popular singers in 1951 with a novelty
called "Come-on-a-My House," which became a huge hit
record, and followed that with other novelties like
"Botcha-Me," "Mambo Italiano" and "This Old House," songs
that her audiences always wanted to hear long after she was
pursuing a less-flamboyant repertory. Some fans even occasionally asked her to sing "How Much Is
That Doggie in the Window?" a novelty that belonged to
Patti Page, never to Rosemary Clooney. "They probably
figure if it's a bad song I must have done it," she once
said about her earlier recording career. But even then Ms. Clooney recorded pensive ballads like
"Tenderly" and "Hey There" with such simplicity and beauty
that they also became songs indelibly associated with her.
Ms. Clooney with a good ballad was always approachable and
intimate. Her early career reached a height in 1954 when she appeared
opposite Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye singing Irving Berlin
songs in the hit musical "White Christmas." But her good
looks and cheery disposition masked a life with more than
its share of pain. She survived a disastrous marriage to the actor Jose
Ferrer; she was scarred by the assassination of her friend
Robert Kennedy, which she witnessed first hand; she abused
drugs and had affairs that disappointed and wounded her;
she had a childhood of uncertainty with an affably
alcoholic father and a mother who eventually deserted the
family. And yet Ms. Clooney never completely lost her admiration
for Mr. Ferrer, the father of her five children, whom she
married and divorced twice, not even after she learned of
his womanizing during their marriage that led her to
conclude that he was breaking her heart "in small
increments." And she always made a place in her home for
the parents who had not done the same for her when she was
a child. She was nominated for an Emmy award for an appearance on
"E.R.," the series that featured her nephew George Clooney,
and this year she was given a lifetime achievement Grammy
award a month after she was hospitalized for lung cancer
surgery. Rosemary Clooney was born May 23, 1928, in Maysville, Ky.,
a small town on the Ohio River southeast of Cincinnati. She
was one of five children born to Andrew and Frances
Guilfoyle Clooney. Mr. Clooney was a house painter who
drank so much and so often that his own father, a jeweler
who served several terms as mayor of Maysville, had his son
jailed for public drunkenness. One of the Clooney children,
Andy, drowned as a boy swimming in the Ohio River. But the
others survived and remained close. They included Betty,
who sang professionally for a while with Rosemary; and... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23703850/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23703850/ Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:57:21 PDT [link]
and
6 x 6
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We Are Polaroid
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The Devil's Workshop




Cindy Walker, a country songwriter whose pure, plainspoken lyrics of romance, heartbreak and picturesque prairies were recorded by major artists like Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson, making Top-40 country or pop charts more than 400 times, died on March 3 in Mexia, Tex.

She was 87, but did not broadcast her birthdate any more than the brief marriage she sometimes confirmed and sometimes did not. Her niece Carol Adams reported her death, The Associated Press said.

Until the 1990's, it was easier to count the number of country stars who had not recorded Cindy Walker songs than those who had, Texas Monthly observed in 1999. She had Top 10 hits in every decade from the 1940's to the 1980's.

Even as country music veered in louder, brasher directions, her continuing appeal to traditionalists is suggested by Mr. Nelson's release this year of an album of her songs, "You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker."

The title song was a hit for Eddy Arnold in 1956, Ray Charles in 1962 and Mickey Gilley in 1981, and was re-recorded by Mr. Charles with Diana Krall for his best-selling 2004 album of duets, "Genius Loves Company." Presley, Van Morrison, Patti Page, Roy Orbison, Kenny Rogers and Emmylou Harris are among others who have recorded the tune.

It told of a man too shy to tell his true feelings to a female friend:

You give your hand to me

And then you say hello

And I can hardly speak

My heart is beating so

And anyone could tell

You think you know me well,

But you don't know me.

Writing on a floral-patterned typewriter, she produced a string of other sentimental standards like "Cherokee Maiden," "In the Misty Moonlight," "Dream Baby," "Jim, I Wore a Tie Today" and "Distant Drums." Gene Autry and other singing cowboys crooned her lyrics onscreen, and Bob Wills, patron saint of western swing, recorded more than 50 of her tunes, some of which he helped write.

Her songs have many times crossed over to pop to be recorded by Bette Midler, the Byrds, Cher and Michael Bolton, among other stars.

Harlan Howard, himself often called the greatest country songwriter, deferred to Ms. Walker when both were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1997. He called her "the greatest living songwriter of country music."

Fred Foster, Mr. Orbison's producer and the discoverer of Dolly Parton, the only woman songwriter whose output rivals Ms. Walker's, said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman in 2004, "Cindy Walker has never written a bad song in her life."

Howard once called a great country song "three chords and the truth," and Ms. Walker's life sounds as if it springs from that formula. A granddaughter of the hymn writer F. L. Eiland ("Hold to God's Unchanging Hand"), she was born on July 20, 1918, on a farm near Mart, Tex. By age 12, she was composing songs on her Martin guitar.

On a family trip to Hollywood in 1940, she barged into Bing Crosby's studio and sold him a song, "Lone Star Trail," which he recorded. Within weeks, she had her own record deal, with Decca.

From 1942 to 1944, she wrote 39 songs for Wills's western movies; was a movie actress herself; and, in 1944, wrote her first Top-10 country hit, "You're From Texas," which Wills performed. She also recorded a hit herself in 1944, "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again," a song she did not write.

In 1954, she moved to Mexia, near her East Texas birthplace. There she lived in a modest three-bedroom house with her mother, Oree, and rose at dawn, made herself black coffee and went upstairs to write. She often wrote 50 songs before she liked one enough to sell.

She was as proficient at pushing songs as writing them. Each year for decades, she and her mother would set up shop in an apartment in Nashville for five months or so to market songs. They would sweeten deals by inviting music industry people by for a plate or two of her mother's delectable Southern cooking.

Oree Walker was her best friend and, until her death, in 1991, worked out melodies for her daughter's words. Some suggested that Ms. Walker's declining output in later years was a result of Oree's absence.

Ms. Walker guarded her privacy. When she granted interviews, she stipulated that her age not be given. She worried that she might be regarded as too old to write contemporary songs.

Many articles about her, often based on interviews, say she never married. In an interview with The New York Times this year, however, she said she had had a "short-lived marriage" but declined to discuss it. She is survived by three nieces.

Ms. Walker did not... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23618068/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23618068/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:11:38 PDT [link]

6 x 6
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We Are Polaroid
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The Devil's Workshop


New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Dina Vierny, the model whose ample flesh and soft curves inspired the sculptor Aristide Maillol, rejuvenating his career, and who eventually founded a museum dedicated to his work, died on Jan. 20 in Paris. She was 89.

Her death was announced by the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, which she founded in 1995.

In the same period when she was modeling, Ms. Vierny, who had joined the Resistance early on during World War II, led refugees from Nazism across the Pyrenees into Spain as part of an American organization operating out of Marseille.

Ms. Vierny was a 15-year-old lycée student in Paris when she met Maillol, in the mid-1930s. The architect Jean-Claude Dondel, a friend of her father’s, decided that she would make the perfect model for the artist, who was 73 and in the professional doldrums.

“Mademoiselle, it is said that you look like a Maillol and a Renoir,” Maillol wrote to her. “I’d be satisfied with a Renoir.”

For the next 10 years, until his death in a car accident in 1944, Ms. Vierny was Maillol’s muse, posing for monumental works of sculpture that belied her modest height of 5 feet 2 inches. By mutual agreement, the relationship was strictly artistic.

Maillol threw himself into his sculpture with renewed energy and, at Ms. Vierny’s urging, began painting again. After his death, she worked tirelessly to promote his art and enhance his reputation, eventually creating the Maillol Museum and donating 18 sculptures to the French government on the condition that they be placed in the Jardin des Tuileries. She later added two more.

Ms. Vierny was born in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, in 1919 and was taken by her parents to France when she was a child. Her father, who played the piano at movie houses, made a modest living while opening his home to an entertaining collection of artists and writers.

Ms. Vierny, who was intent on studying physics and chemistry, took to the role of artist’s muse reluctantly at first, posing during school vacations and glancing sideways at her schoolbooks on a nearby stand. The generous modeling fees and Maillol’s sense of fun won her over.

For the first two years, though, she kept her clothes on, not out of modesty — she and her friends belonged to a nudist club — but because of Maillol’s timidity. She herself later proposed that he try some nude studies. “Since he never asked, I figured he would never have the courage,” she told National Public Radio last year.

Her Rubenesque figure and jet-black hair indeed made her, as Dondel had predicted, “a living Maillol,” memorialized in works like “The Seated Bather,” “The Mountain,” “Air,” “The River,” and “Harmony,” his last, unfinished sculpture. Maillol also turned to her as a subject for drawings and painted portraits, like “Dina With a Scarf,” now in the Maillol Museum.

In 1939, Maillol took refuge at his home in Banyuls-sur-Mer, at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees. There, Ms. Vierny, who had already begun working for a Resistance group in Paris, was approached by the Harvard-educated classicist Varian Fry, whose organization in Marseille helped smuggle refugees from occupied France into Spain. Unbeknownst to Maillol, she began working as a guide, identifiable to her fleeing charges by her red dress. The work was doubly dangerous because she was Jewish.

Ms. Vierny soon began dozing off at her posing sessions. The story came out, and Maillol, a native of the region, showed her secret shortcuts, smugglers’ routes and goat paths to use. After several months of working for the Comité Fry, Ms. Vierny was arrested by the French police, who seized her correspondence with her friends in the Surrealist movement but failed to notice stacks of forged passports in her room.

A lawyer hired by Maillol won her acquittal at trial, and to keep her out of harm’s way the artist sent her to pose for Matisse in Nice. “I am sending you the subject of my work,” Maillol told Matisse, “whom you will reduce to a line.”

Matisse did several drawings and proposed an ambitious painting that he called a “Matisse Olympia,” after the famous painting by Manet. When Maillol heard that the project would take at least six months, he hastily recalled her to Banyuls.

She also posed for Dufy and for Bonnard, who used her as the model for “Somber Nude.”

In 1943, Ms. Vierny was again arrested, this time by the Gestapo, in Paris. She was released after six months in prison when... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23454663/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23454663/ Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:28:25 PST [link]

and a proud new member of
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: i c o n s i x b y s i x : : d e v s i x b y s i x :





Bettie Page, a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the rebellious ’60s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 85.
Her death was reported by her agent, Mark Roesler, on Ms. Page’s Web site, bettiepage.com.

Ms. Page, whose popularity underwent a cult-like revival in the last 20 years, had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia and was about to be released Dec. 2 when she suffered a heart attack, said Mr. Roesler, of CMG Worldwide. She was transferred in a coma to Kindred Hospital, where she died.

In her trademark raven bangs, spike heels and killer curves, Ms. Page was the most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era, a centerfold on a million locker doors and garage walls. She was also a major influence in the fashion industry and a target of Senator Estes Kefauver’s anti-pornography investigators.

But in 1957, at the height of her fame, she disappeared, and for three decades her private life — two failed marriages, a fight against poverty and mental illness, resurrection as a born-again Christian, years of seclusion in Southern California — was a mystery to all but a few close friends.

Then in the late 1980s and early ’90s, she was rediscovered and a Bettie Page renaissance began. David Stevens, creator of the comic-book and later movie character the Rocketeer, immortalized her as the Rocketeer’s girlfriend. Fashion designers revived her look. Uma Thurman, in bangs, reincarnated Bettie in Quentin Tarantino’s “ulp Fiction,” and Demi Moore, Madonna and others appeared in Page-like photos.

There were Bettie Page playing cards, lunch boxes, action figures, T-shirts and beach towels. Her saucy images went up in nightclubs. Bettie Page fan clubs sprang up. Look-alike contests, featuring leather-and-lace and kitten-with-a-whip Betties, were organized. Hundreds of Web sites appeared, including her own, which had 588 million hits in five years, CMG Worldwide said in 2006.

Biographies were published, including her authorized version, “Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend,” (General Publishing Group) which appeared in 1996. It was written by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson.

A movie, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” starring Gretchen Mol as Bettie and directed by Mary Harron for Picturehouse and HBO Films, was released in 2006, adapted from “The Real Bettie Page,” by Richard Foster. Bettie May Page was born in Jackson, Tenn., the eldest girl of Roy and Edna Page’s six children. The father, an auto mechanic, molested all three of his daughters, Ms. Page said years later, and was divorced by his wife when Bettie was 10. She and some of her siblings were placed for a time in an orphanage. She attended high school in Nashville, and was almost a straight-A student, graduating second in her class.

She graduated from Peabody College, a part of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but a teaching career was brief. “I couldn’t control my students, especially the boys,” she said. She tried secretarial work, married Billy Neal in 1943 and moved to San Francisco, where she modeled fur coats for a few years. She divorced Mr. Neal in 1947, moved to New York and enrolled in acting classes.

She had a few stage and television appearances, but it was a chance meeting that changed her life. On the beach at Coney Island in 1950, she met Jerry Tibbs, a police officer and photographer, who assembled her first pinup portfolio. By 1951, the brother-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw, who ran a mail-order business in cheesecake, were promoting the Bettie Page image with spike heels and whips, while Bunny Yeager’s pictures featured her in jungle shots, with and without leopards skins.

Her pictures were ogled in Wink, Eyeful, Titter, Beauty Parade and other magazines, and in leather-fetish 8- and 16-millimeter films. Her first name was often misspelled. Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January 1955, when she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas tree. Money and offers rolled in, but as she recalled years later, she was becoming depressed.

In 1955, she received a summons from a Senate committee headed by Senator Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, that was investigating pornography. She was never compelled to testify, but the uproar and other pressures... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23404942/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23404942/ Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:30:28 PST I dropped a fiver ($5) on her at Specs Bar in North Beach awhiles ago.

Here are three local newspaper articles on the disappearance and reappearance of the local San Francisco legend Polaroid Mary.
And with a very nice happy ending


Millie, the Polaroid Lady, has been a fixture in North Beach for many years. Here she sits at the bar at Enricos
ready to make a polaroid photo for five dollars on March 2, 2002.


Everyone in North Beach (San Francisco), it seems, knows Millie.
by Kevin Fagan,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, February 14, 2009

The beloved San Francisco street character, known for decades as the elderly, affable lady who shoots Polaroid pictures and sells roses to people in restaurants, was last seen here on Monday. She apparently turned up two days later in Reno, wandering disoriented downtown in the snow - but nobody really knows for sure that it's Millie.

That's because nobody among the saloon and restaurant owners, religious leaders and community stalwarts of North Beach actually knows Millie's full name. Or age. Or true biography.

So all calls to the Renown Regional Medical Center to inquire about Millie, if it is really her, are rebuffed - because under federal privacy laws, a person must ask for a patient by his or her full name.

"In a way I hope it's not her up there in Reno, but if it is, I hope she's OK," said Tosca Cafe owner Jeannette Etheredge, who has known Millie as a neighborhood fixture and friend for nearly 40 years. "You want this to have a happy ending."

The supposition is that Millie is in Reno because a social worker from the hospital called Millie's main point of contact in the world, Jenny Antoniolli, Wednesday night.

"They found our business card in her pocket, where she always keeps it, and that's why they called us," said Antoniolli, who owns Columbus Cutlery. "The social worker said she was doing OK now, but they can't find any relatives and don't know where to start. We couldn't find out much."

Antoniolli's shop is in the hotel building where Millie has lived for decades, the Columbus Hotel on Columbus Avenue, and she is one of dozens of people in the neighborhood who look after Millie. She said Millie may have given the hospital her name as Mildred Gardiner - but a hospital spokeswoman said it has no patient under that name.

Neither does the hospital have a patient named Mildred Fishman, or Fishburne, the other two names people have guessed at over the years.

"There is no way to say if someone named Millie is in our hospital, or what's going on with her if she is," said Renown spokeswoman Nicole Shearer. "Unfortunately our hands are tied. Without her full name, we can't say anything."

Back home in San Francisco, Millie's friends are becoming worried.

Millie is either 85 or 86 years old, and has been a North Beach legend since the 1960s. She strolls to Tosca, Enrico's, Spec's and other famous spots around North Beach every day snapping Polaroids of people for $5 a pop, or selling roses.

With her roundish figure, black hat and a perpetually big smile scrunching her face into something resembling an apple doll, she is as recognizable to locals as the Golden Gate Bridge.

"She is very beloved by the community," said Rabbi Micah Hyman of Congregation Beth Shalom, where Millie, who apparently is Jewish, often attends services.

"She is someone who is always welcome, and we would love to find out that she is truly all right."

Antoniolli said Millie once told her she liked to visit synagogues in Reno. But she apparently didn't tell anyone she was going there this week. It has been snowing there for days.

Rumor has it Millie survived the Holocaust in Europe, has a Nazi concentration camp number tattooed on her arm, and hitchhiked to San Francisco from Chicago as a teenager.

What's known for sure is that once she hit the city, she fell in with a beatnik crowd, married a one-armed World War II vet named Butch who sold newspapers, and became part of the North Beach landscape.

In 1963, she, Butch and 40 other beatniks posed for a famous mural that hung in the middle of the now-defunct Old Spaghetti Factory. Butch died more than a decade ago.

"Millie is pretty private about herself," said Antoniolli. "She stops by every day to make sure my husband is working hard, that we're feeling good, things like that. She is the sweetest thing you ever saw."

"I just hope we can all get some answers soon."






Millie expected to return to the city soon
by Kev... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23255820/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23255820/ Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:21:47 PST
For a few years in the mid-1960s Estelle Bennett lived a girl-group fairy tale, posing for magazine covers with her fellow Ronettes and dating the likes of George Harrison and Mick Jagger. Along with her sister and their cousin Nedra Talley, she helped redefine rock ’n’ roll femininity.

The Ronettes delivered their songs’ promises of eternal puppy love in the guise of tough vamps from the streets of New York. Their heavy mascara, slit skirts and piles of teased hair suggested both sex and danger, an association revived most recently by Amy Winehouse.

But Ms. Bennett’s death last week at 67 revealed a post-fame life of illness and squalor that was little known even to many of the Ronettes’ biggest fans. In her decades away from the public eye she struggled with anorexia and schizophrenia, and at times she had also been homeless, said her daughter, Toyin Hunter.

“I want to know who my mother was,” Ms. Hunter, 37, said in an interview. “From the time I was born she suffered with mental illness; I never really got to know Estelle in a good mental state.”

Those who knew Ms. Bennett in her healthier days portray her as gentle and intelligent, and as playing a critical part in the development of the Ronettes’ style. The eldest of the group, she worked at Macy’s and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the look she helped devise for the group was all superlatives: bigger, badder and sexier than anybody. Racial ambiguity lent an exotic element: the Bennett sisters had black, American Indian and Irish blood; Ms. Talley was black, Indian and Puerto Rican.

“We called them the bad girls of the ’60s,” said the singer Darlene Love, who met the Ronettes in 1962, a year before they became famous with “Be My Baby.” “They had the really, really short skirts and they had big, big, big hair. Most of the black entertainers of the ’60s didn’t look like that, but they wanted to be separate from everybody else.”

By the time they met Phil Spector and began recording with him in 1963, the Ronettes had their look precisely calibrated. That August “Be My Baby” went to No. 2, and the Ronettes were instant stars. When they toured Britain in 1964, the Rolling Stones were an opening act.

But even in the early days there were signs that Estelle was fragile. When their grandmother died in 1959, Estelle was shattered, said her cousin, now known as Nedra Talley Ross.

“She was going to buy Mama knee warmers,” Ms. Talley Ross said, “and I remember Estelle being so devastated — screaming, like she would never go on. Just screaming for this thing that would never get done.”

After the Ronettes broke up, in 1966, and Ronnie married Mr. Spector, in 1968, Estelle was lost, Ms. Talley Ross said. She made several failed attempts at a solo career, and when Ronnie Spector, who divorced Mr. Spector in 1974, formed a new version of the Ronettes in the early ’70s it did not include either of her former band mates. (Ms. Spector did not respond to messages left for her.)

Meanwhile, Ms. Bennett was gradually becoming more ill. When she brought her infant daughter to visit, Ms. Talley Ross said, she slept straight through the baby’s crying. Not long after, Ms. Bennett was hospitalized with anorexia, and her grip on reality continued to loosen. In recent years, Ms. Hunter said, she sometimes wandered the streets of New York, telling people that she would be singing with the Ronettes in a jazz club.

“Estelle had such an extraordinary life,” Ms. Talley Ross said. “To have the fame, and all that she had at an early age, and for it all to come to an end abruptly. Not everybody can let that go and then go on with life.”

In 1988 the Ronettes sued Mr. Spector for back royalties, and the suit dragged on for 14 years. Part of the case was dismissed, but the three women won the right to some royalties, and according to Jonathan Greenfield, Ms. Spector’s husband, they received “in excess of $1 million.” After lawyers’ fees, Ms. Hunter said, each woman took home about $100,000. Ms. Talley Ross said the figure was a little higher.

During the litigation Ms. Love was called as a witness, and one day at court she saw Estelle.

“She didn’t remember me,” Ms. Love said. “They cleaned her up and made her look as well as possible. She wore white gloves. She looked the best she could for somebody who lived on the street. It broke my heart.”

Her daughter and her cousin said they also helped her to look her best for the Ronettes’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two years ago. They were worried that the ceremony would overwhelm her, so... ]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23180926/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/23180926/ Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:48:41 PST By STEPHEN HOLDEN
February 8, 2009

Blossom Dearie, the jazz pixie with a little-girl voice and pageboy haircut who was a fixture in New York and London nightclubs for decades, died on Saturday at her apartment in Greenwich Village. She was 84.

She died in her sleep of natural causes, said her manager and representative, Donald Schaffer. Her last public appearances, in 2006, were at her regular Midtown Manhattan stomping ground, the now defunct Danny’s Skylight Room.

A singer, pianist and songwriter with an independent spirit who zealously guarded her privacy, Ms. Dearie pursued a singular career that blurred the line between jazz and cabaret. An interpretive minimalist with caviar taste in songs and musicians, she was a genre unto herself. Rarely raising her sly, kittenish voice, Ms. Dearie confided song lyrics in a playful style below whose surface layers of insinuation lurked. Her cheery style influenced many younger jazz and cabaret singers, most notably Stacey Kent and the singer and pianist Daryl Sherman.

But just under her fey camouflage lay a needling wit. If you listened closely, you could hear the scathing contempt she brought to one of her signature songs, “I’m Hip,” the Dave Frishberg-Bob Dorough demolition of a namedropping bohemian poseur. Ms. Dearie was for years closely associated with Mr. Frishberg and Mr. Dorough. It was Mr. Frishberg who wrote another of her perennials, “eel Me a Grape.”

Ms. Dearie didn’t suffer fools gladly and was unafraid to voice her disdain for music she didn’t like; the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber were a particular pet peeve.

The other side of her sensibility was a wistful romanticism most discernible in her interpretations of Brazilian bossa nova songs, material ideally suited to her delicate approach. Her final album, “Blossom’s Planet” (Daffodil), released in 2000, includes what may be the definitive interpretation of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave” Her dreamy attenuated rendition finds her voice floating away as though to sea, or to heaven, on lapping waves of tastefully synthesized strings.

Born Blossom Margrete Dearie in East Durham, N.Y., on April 28, 1924, she was a classically trained pianist who switched to jazz after joining a high school band. Moving to New York City in the mid-1940s, she sang with the Blue Flames, a vocal group attached to the Woody Herman band, and with Alvino Rey’s band before embarking on a solo career.

Traveling to Paris in 1952, she joined the Blue Stars, a vocal octet that recorded a hit version of “Lullaby of Birdland.” While there she shared quarters with the jazz singer Annie Ross and met the Belgian flutist and saxophonist Bobby Jaspar, to whom she was briefly married.

She also met Norman Granz, the owner of Verve Records, who signed her to a six-album contract. All six Verve albums — “Blossom Dearie” (1956), “Give Him the Ooh-La-La” (1957), “Once Upon a Summertime” (1958), “Sings Comden and Green” (1959), “My Gentleman Friend” (1959) and “Soubrette Sings Broadway Hit Songs”(1960) — are today regarded as cult classics.

In the early 1960s a radio commercial she made for Hires Root Beer became so popular it spawned an album, “Blossom Dearie Sings Rootin’ Songs” (DIW). Her 1964 album, “May I Come In?” (Capitol), a straightforward pop collection, was her first to employ a full orchestra, but on subsequent albums she veered back into jazz and supper-club fare, mixing standards, jazz songs and witty novelties.

Beginning in 1966 she traveled regularly to London to play Ronnie Scott’s, a popular nightclub, and while in England recorded four albums for the Fontana label. Back in the United States she established her own label, Daffodil Records, in 1974. Its first album, “Blossom Dearie Sings,” released at the height of the singer-songwriter movement, contained all original songs, including “Hey John,” a tribute to John Lennon (with lyrics by Jim Council), and “I’m Shadowing You,” a collaboration with Johnny Mercer.

Although Ms. Dearie never had a hit as a songwriter (she usually wrote the melodies, not the lyrics), a number of her songs have enjoyed fairly wide circulation in nightclubs, most notably “Bye-Bye Country Boy” (written with Jack Segal), a pop star’s rueful farewell to a farm boy she meets on the road.

The last record Ms. Dearie recorded was a single, “It’s All Right to Be Afraid,” a comforting ballad dedicated to the victims and survivors of 9/11. She is survived by an older brother, Barney, and a nephew and niece.

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/22847959/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/22847959/ Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:49:24 PST searing moments of electricity
carried in her purse
notes of the underground
writing scribbles in between the pages,
she knew the names of everyone she ever met
making small paintings on paper
swirling kaleidoscopes of thought and passion
the day always came when she left,
she took her heart on the road
met strangers
left donations
sat quietly on park benches
watching the days go slowly by,
very late in the day
she often thought she was Alice
loved to say
"Go feed your head,"
loved to walk alone
in the forest
bringing back small animal skulls
she found along the way,
left the bones in her yard
drank Absinthe and sugar cubes
with a straw
smoked Cubans and blew smoke rings
out into the fog

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/22605629/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/22605629/ Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:01:21 PST

luscious fruit
like the sea air in the morning
like the sun on a cloudy day
like tides that pull us all away
from what we are supposed to be doing

luscious like the first fruit ever touched
and the last before the avalanche
like the sea air in the morning
like the sun on a cloudy day
like tides that pull us all away
from what we are really supposed to be doing

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/22039267/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/22039267/ Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:37:20 PST on the final final shore
on the mall in the capital
like an old whore
laying on the floor
waiting for more,
spiraling down slow
rocket-ship cat fur
splasheddownprincess
screambloodymurder
just a last chance Miranda,
an old lock in the lost and found
not much left but a notion
a bell sound
like tires on the waterline,
and you tell yourself
with sky blue eyes
and a hand over your mouth
after the morning came
that you just didn't want to hear
the water lapping up to the frame
of the door you were about to leave through,
you feel the mist
you can tell what's going to happen
as you sit and listen
to the birds sing from the roof
not that high from the waterline,
one secret hiding place
where the birds come and fly
no doubts no disturbances
just their work in the sand,
so you search for the old Blue Bloods
high and dry in the cocktail lounge
drinking Imperial pints from shot glasses
feeling all a bit left of center
holding tight
like a stash of cash
on the last mile of a bad bet,
so lay them down slow
reap the end
ask for another round
say goodnight
sunlight
it's all coming around again
in due time

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/21306829/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/21306829/ Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:04:50 PST to an old Victorian
half blasted away by time

once inside
leaning against the bar
drinking some tea
listening to your favorite song
waiting for someone to come
through the swinging door,

as the lights dim
it's getting dark outside
you notice the book on the bar
an old journal you wrote in as a child
hand carved remnants of a life left behind
the turning whirlwind of your last memory,

you see the reflection in the mirror
you turn
daylight sears the mercury coating
a look you recall
the past before you
the tea gets cold,

you stare and wait
for the call
the creaks of the door
the sounds you never forget,

outside you see the lines between the trees
the way you came
all drawn out and splattered
how to get back
is anyone's guess
how you got here
is the written in the book

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/20695876/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/20695876/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:02:12 PDT
Like an ocean
the sea sputters
and churns
the tides pull
tight across the middle distance
the forest splinters
its relics are the figures hidden in the trees

when one is alone
one can
see
and witness
the final act of nature
it implodes on the notion
as time takes its toll


only then
will the voices be heard
by the wind, the air, the trees

If all this is true
and the night is colored like charcoal
in these black days
that surround us
the ones that say
their thoughts play games,
do not appear so bleak and dark
feel the blue and the white
of puffy clouds and sun,
shining in like a blaze of gold and light
no tightness
from the west
where shadows are long and lean over the Pacific
and the light is true blue
and the days last forever

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/20315612/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/20315612/ Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:41:21 PDT the light in the air is actually sound
rainwater collects on the porch
the distance you see between us
is the same
as the distance between light and nature,
riding in the sky
on the dangling string of life
will only let you want better seats,
you pay for what you get they say
when the preacher is smaller than an acorn
a squirrel slides up the tree
you best be leaving the church
it does not get better from here,
when forms are expressed
and lines are drawn
sights are seen and beauty blossoms,
the answers are in the reasons we bother
always worth a trip to the rabbit in the headlights
like pissing down rain
or thunder'n slick roads,
they keep you down with their questions
and long written forms
while you are waiting to go somewhere
you thought you were already at,
guess that is the way it is
but not the way I wanted it
not the way I expected it
and not the way it will be,
the trees flutter
its Pacific wind finally comes
the heat is intense
like being in a vice
from the dust
in the last quarter of the sea

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/19731848/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/19731848/ Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:01:32 PDT like strawberry short cake
her cherry pie
or once fallen apple fritters,
red slides like courage
it slides and murmurs
the depth of the fall
or the deepness of the fire,
short if you have an apple a day
they say
a shiny ruby red
or a Fuji lost of the Pacific,
as the walls
collapse around the collections
down the halls
reflect the beauty lost in her deluge

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/19116325/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/19116325/ Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:05:16 PDT the steeple rings and shakes,
Alice sits and waits
she shifts in her seat
and feels a bit like a church,
filled with images
of crosses and deja vu
and the halo around her hair,
slightly quietly leaning
towards the reflected stained glass window
to her right
above her altar,
she notices it is a bit off
the angle is wrong
nothing stays the same,
as she tilts her head
the trees outside shimmer
the glass and her dark eyes simmer,
the man holding the red book
two rows ahead
stands and turns,
the day shutters
as she wonders about the trees
outside
their branches bend
to the dance of the seamstress

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/19116008/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/19116008/ Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:43:36 PDT the steeple rings and shakes,
Alice sits and waits
she shifts in her seat
and feels a bit like a church,
filled with images
of crosses and deja vu
and the halo around her hair,
slightly quietly leaning
towards the reflected stained glass window
to her right
above her altar,
she notices it is a bit off
the angle is wrong
nothing stays the same,
as she tilts her head
the trees outside shimmer
the glass and her dark eyes simmer,
the man holding the red book
two rows ahead
stands and turns,
the day shutters
as she wonders about the trees
outside
their branches bend
to the dance of the seamstress

It's Sunday morning
the steeple rings and shakes,
Alice sits and waits
she shifts in her seat
and feels a bit like a church,
filled with images
of crosses and deja vu
and the halo around her hair,
slightly quietly leaning
towards the reflected stained glass window
to her right
above her altar,
she notices it is a bit off
the angle is wrong
nothing stays the same,
as she tilts her head
the trees outside shimmer
the glass and her dark eyes simmer,
the man holding the red book
two rows ahead
stands and turns,
the day shutters
as she wonders about the trees
outside
their branches bend
to the dance of the seamstress

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/18797352/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/18797352/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:17:10 PDT on the dangling string of life
the letdown was minor
as she brought drinks
in short glasses

but then she said
I just don't want to talk to tonight
that put a chill on the ceremony

someone said "cool in Italy"

I've seen cool before in Torino
I saw cool
take a guy
sliding down the street
on his knees
illuminated in the night
by his sparkling splintering motorcycle
keeping pace with him on Corso San Maurizio

The memory of the early morning
before the night
before the crash
walking and seeing the light change
as the sun branded the path
the clouds wandering in full and gray
and still we talked of the little girl's laugh



Someone finally said the coast is clear

as beauty goes
so do our souls
to be straight like an arrow
or to bend with the wind,
to fly like the birds
or soar like the Renaissance,
to understand
or to discover
to see and feel
to travel the horizons
the search always goes to the end
the play we are acting in
believing it is all true
and we hope to know the ending,
that one blessed morning
blue and true
like the glue in between the layers
the reasons make sense
once in awhile

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/17736620/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/17736620/ Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:59:04 PDT

The ghost ship drowned around
half past seven
around the same time
I discovered the simple pleasures of pure expression,
like a post World War II city blown to hell
with no one around
except the ghosts and the smoke,
a stranger walked up to me
just like a summer night
and he said.
Here I am
Asking about the rain,

a true keeper
taking down your visions,
then he said
the painting's propped against the wall in my bedroom pending construction
standing in front of it last night
up close and personal
it seemed like the days of blue rain
were upon me,
Here I am
Asking about the rain again
and the rain in Smoke City is wet this time of year,

it's always eye level hanging on the wall
and I'm constantly nearly brushing against it
as I walk by,
but with it standing on the floor right in front of me
it's different every time I see it
the blood of her flowers
indeed


I see
I said

I was drawn so much more deeply into it then
even when it did rain in Smoke City,
it was overwhelming!

I swear once I get the joke
I will laugh

I'm sitting on a bus and driving by this city
and the rain is pouring down the windows
these horizontal lines seem to appear
they mean something I think
I stare and they continue,

I'm sitting on a train at night
looking out of the window
the city is passing by again
maybe another city
it does not matter
they seem all the same from here
when you are going this fast,
and while I see what's going on outside
I'm noticing at the same time
the reflections inside the car
that's what those horizontal lines are suggesting
they are telling me
how to see
but also the feeling of speed
blurs even my imagination,

the pattern in the sky
is looking like the the horizontal lines of the window
pouring rain makes the running seem sideways
like a mindspill
this has a special feel,

I've seen scenes like this so often
years and years, hundreds of times
it's looking so familiar
that's why it's so special maybe
everywhere and nowhere
every inch of the shapes and colors
like rewatching 'Masked and Anonymous' for the 8th time
I heard Bob Dylan won a Pulitzer Prize today
good for him
if anyone ever deserved it
why not him

black and red and yellow exploding and dancing right in front of me,
the eye to the details of the canvas
are important
the words are too

where I seem to be able to touch the brush strokes of that flat blue
the change in perspective was absolutely absolute

almost like I felt how you created it ...

yea,
it was a pretty intense and magical experience...


I'd like to go there again

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/17528337/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/17528337/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:20:45 PDT
Like a sudden flash in the Latin Quarter
or a roadside wash-out at Devil's Slide
the yellow sun burns truest
wishful sights of the dark night,

a little girl walks past her abandoned school
and waits for a bus to take her miles away,
a man watches a building fall
barely noticing that he is standing way too close,
a woman sits in the waiting room of her lawyers office
drinks absinthe reading People Magazine
about beautiful dreams and a world gone wrong,
a little boys grows up in America
Jack Ripper at the door,

fallen and twice branded
the land scorched in orange and ash
it crests up and blows out all the candles
that have ever been
pretty maids all in a row,
sudden bursts of the cauldron
the crucible bubbling
the meltdown complete on Main Street,

images floating along past the tall fence
skimming the surface
like flat stones tossed in memory
across the smooth waterline,
the tides glow bright
waves beat the shore
nothing but flamed remains
of the skidding sparkling jubilee

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/17415612/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/17415612/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:32:20 PDT still needs work



Never the same drop of river water
twice falls

"Sure, something like that,"
she said
"that's exactly true, a good call
no need to overdo the sentiment when you write that note
just leave it here in the door-slot and we'll go"
staring at me while I wrote
made me uncomfortable
then she walked off and I followed
wondering why,

a splatter of words
a consortium of phrases
a gaggle of geese
it all makes sense somehow,
the writers know
as they peck away in their birdcages
expecting people to care what they say,
the stories they make up
all like a movie
no popcorn and having to take a pee
and it could be the best part of the film
where the plot thickens
or falls apart

that is the key
let it go
and let me see what you can do
till then
just try and be useful
wait and see what comes of it all
easier said than done
we still wait for the call

before the light fades
before the days become ablaze
before the tides pull you back again
the man at the coffee shop said
pointing across the street
"before long the view will be obscured
by those ugly loft buildings they are building everywhere"
some New York City developer I hear,"
I laugh, another easterner from Manhattan
like my mother and grandmother
but different

the man moved in closer
"The guy is into making canyons and hiring cold doormen
cars that pick up kids for private school
staring cabbies and people everywhere
and women with shopping bags
and men with blank faces"
I shifted away from him
and looked out to the empty lot across the street
you could see the water
and the two bridges
and you could feel the sea

that gorgeous view off the waterway
I love to sit on my roof
with a cup of coffee in the morning
and watch the coast go bye
the container ships and the sail boats
and that constant sea breeze off the Pacific

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/16648344/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/16648344/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:49:15 PST searing jolts of electricity
carried in her purse
notes of the underground
wrote scribbles in between the pages,
late in the day
she often thought she was Alice
loved to say
"Go feed your head"
loved to walk alone
in the forest
bring back small animal skulls she found
along the way
left them in her yard
drank Absinthe and sugar cubes
with a straw
smoked Cubans and blew smoke rings
out into the fog

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/16030060/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/16030060/ Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:53:04 PST traces of her tears
like lit beauty
reflecting into her eyes,
sand blows away the travelers steps
no hints or shadows
just thoughts she could not say
or dare to even write down,
"pray for us all"
said the preacher on a box
"don't lose your way"
in a town square in some lost forgotten city,
the scavenged remains of creative minds
the adventurers of the images lost
hijacked sailors of the cool blue
her skin soft unknown too far away,
the soldiers miss fortuned misguided notions
ladies of the forgotten plain
disdained and misunderstood
stand naked to their core,
remains of the daze
all cause and effect
coffee and the long struggle
sustained in deception and final illusion,
all castaways of the spirit
poets and painters and stragglers
of the final final
paved secrets of the struggle,
love lost ladies
their time drawing close
a mysterious case of the soul
of that strangers stolen adoration

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/15948122/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/15948122/ Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:16:17 PST down city blocks
wide and as distant as baseball fields
long gone memories lingering
still in his mind as he strolled
streets so familiar
like so many before,
one after another
past stores and diners
tree-lined gray apartments
abandoned cars filled dumpsters
and bad appointments,
the lines in the cracks
of peeling paint
like distressed paintings
from long long ago
dinged signs pointing to nowhere
in particular
sandwich boards
deals a plenty
chipped stairs going to there
and back again,
generations of boys
hanging out in front
of the same liquor stores
fathers before and grandfathers before that even
night strangers stumble
line the blocks of the desolation,
a clearing, an oasis
lit by nothing that he had ever felt
but something different
the streets change
the neighborhood less dismal,
he wanders into a bar lit by candles
he finds a stool
motions for a drink
to no-one in particular,
two couples at table towards the back
near the corner
behind the jukebox
they sit and talk amongst themselves
their own private party,
the stranger stands
walks towards the four
"Do you mind?"
the stranger points towards the bar
one of the men at the table gestures
"Be my guest."
the stranger rounds the bar
and heads to the tap
pours himself a tall pint
and looks around
takes a long long pull
then refills the glass
the man in the back laughs
the stranger does not even look
then the other man dressed in black
sitting with a blonde lady
heavy mascara rouge lips
hoop earrings and a pierced nostril
hot in her day
which was not that long ago,
"Hey boy! Do you need a job?"
the stranger stares out to nowhere
"Maybe"
he then takes another long pull on his beer
sets it down, rubs the edges with his fingers
savoring the glistening glass,
"Let me think about it."
He jumps the bar
in one clean full leap
and settles down in his stool
" well, have a few drinks
and think about it and if anyone comes in
serve them, drinks for you are on the house."
the stranger lost in a gaze into his beer
bubbles rising into oblivion
the jukebox clicks over
quiet, the bar still
even the couples stopped talking
then an old Bob Willis song
comes slowly over the room
everyone recedes into their talk and their staring
the stranger's eyes catches the flutter of the neon sign
the music bounces
a few people walk into the bar and find barstools
they look around
the stranger leans in
takes a last pull on his beer
more folks walk in
the lights shimmer
its distractions cast shadows
the candles flicker
the stranger peruses the sights
along his bar and smiles

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/15271704/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/15271704/ Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:10:33 PDT
Imaginary Western - A Tale of Spanish Eyes
a cool Nancy Sinatra & Calexico song

[link]




From the Light Swirling


The rest of time
a close call
sudden thoughts
rest on your next move
from the light-swirling
discotechnica jail-break
ecstasy crime-scene stairs


to the studio

of the master

of visual illusion

high heels

like a knife in the oxygen in the room

like a sword through melted water
reflected tint of my favorite sky color

that turquoise baby blue
like her 1963 Ford Falcon
the same exact color
it was so sexy a shade
on the cold metal
of the rounded fenders
and the sleek long waisted front


that was the most powerful
the one that said how she felt
how she felt when I was feeling different

may have to read this all again
see if any of this makes sense
if it doesn't
well then something is off



the day calls
paint
blue
life
cowboys at the door
with paperwork about bad attitudes
those endless checkerboard squares
the light casts across her body
shadows
the way is clear
there are always two choices
just sometimes i feel it is better
to walk on the black squares

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14958556/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14958556/ Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:01:49 PDT
The Bird Calls Us Both

[link]

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14906530/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14906530/ Wed, 03 Oct 2007 23:04:48 PDT
]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14785551/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14785551/ Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:57:38 PDT
[link]


a recent film
check it out

with some images and words and an Austrian vibe
dark shadowed Nick Cavian
ee cummings

a tale of Alice

and splashed cartoons into the night extreme

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14697795/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14697795/ Wed, 19 Sep 2007 07:34:19 PDT
check it out 'Days of Mercury' at this link and enjoy the great music


[link]

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14169905/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/14169905/ Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:03:19 PDT the birth of a flower
like the unbridled exposing nectar
where the stem breaths over the vulnerable pedals
as it trembles in disbelief,
hiding from the powerful submission
the exotic spellbinding wreath of lust
touches the skin of the flower
an unholy hidden mountain cavelike dwelling
where moments of her unconsciousness
light her movements passing slow,
as she rests along the river's edge
down down
far into her valley
her thoughts resist
like the gates of heaven
waiting glistening doors
swinging open and closed
wind like charm
whispers of salvation,
her last final burst of pleasured response
in the wake of an eye
gone as fast as the blue passes to night
and the gates swing back
to rest
shut tight
like the final final at closing time

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13937602/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13937602/ Mon, 30 Jul 2007 07:26:36 PDT traces of her tears
like lit beauty
reflecting into her eyes,
sand blows away the travelers steps
no hints or shadows
just thoughts she could not say
or dare to even write down,
"pray for us all"
said the preacher on a box
"don't lose your way"
in a town square in some city lost,
the scavenged remains of creative minds
the adventurers of the images lost
hijacked sailors of the cool blue
her skin soft unknown too far away,
the soldiers miss fortuned misguided notions
ladies of the forgotten plain
disdained and misunderstood
stand naked to their core,
remains of the daze
all cause and effect
coffee and the long struggle
sustained in deception and final illusion,
all castaways of the spirit
poets and painters and stragglers
of the final final
paved secrets of the struggle,
love lost ladies
their time drawing close
a mysterious case of the soul
of that strangers stolen adoration

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13877737/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13877737/ Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:55:51 PDT

The great washed out plains
graffiti writhing wall splashed dancers
the endlessness of it all
the wonder
that point where sky and water meet
where words collide
like systems unraveled
too distant to determine,
if a waterfall is one's memory
then the rocks are mere obstacles
rounded in time
less the age of wear,
you sat and wait
for the light to fade
your mind is washed out
her beauty could never fade
like the light reflects the moment
the water rushes past you,
someone once waited there
in the same place
as the day passed
and the eve splashes down
like a miracle unleashed,
that story once recalled is clear
as if you were the witness
to something unheard of
the viewer in traction
sitting in that white room
skin glowing
body trembling
all alone and deciding
whether watching the words
will twirl the red square
into the vast distance between
you and what used to be

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13761146/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13761146/ Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:59:54 PDT like the light
in the night sky
serene as brilliant star-fighters
crashing into oblivion's wake


To breathe slowly
to see the air
lifting the moment
as the light glows
you recall each breath
like it was her last

I found the rain
melting
stolen
it washed over me
like mercury floats on glass


Once the blue in the rain
like reflections in fire
it is her eyes
reflecting in the night
that spins the gray away


The warmth and the light
the day becomes dark
when she turned off the light
when time stood at the cliff's edge
waiting for orders to jump
or cast the sand into the midst

The day ends too soon
where there is no view better
than seeing the rain in her eyes
hearing her first reaction
knowing that sound
as the lines blur
the seconds creep like murder

Deeper than the dark ocean
I will never travel
the dark skies that scare the sailor
warns the master
that time is at hand
scarlet sacred blood red heart

Once the words
they come in heat
they burn the watcher
the time keepers lament
like ships crashing in spectacular
hellbent sparkling
lonely
suicide

]]> ~DocSonian http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13730914/ http://DocSonian.deviantart.com/journal/13730914/ Sat, 14 Jul 2007 09:36:13 PDT that aren't our own
days alone to think and wonder,
reflection of the sky girl's path
her part is the blue
as she soars from towered church
dipping down
low
curves straight
inches off the ground
upended back up
high and sleek
and over
and all over again
down and across
as her body moves
lustfully above the tired paths
and the storm caught farmhouses.
scenes from the sky girl
part II
act III
the final bow
the mischievous look of the moment
looking back
as she sees the distance approach
and what was
before
her beauty stays with me
farther and farther away

]]> ~DocSonian