Happy 92nd Birthday To Mel Brooks!

Care to guess which director has three of the top fifteen films on the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Comedies? It's none other than Mel Brooks, performer, writer, director, and producer of some of the finest comedy to grace the American stage, big screens in theaters, and the television screens in millions of our homes. Brooks was born in Brooklyn on June 28, 1926. He started in comedy in the Catskills in the late 1940's, became a television comedy writer and performer in the early 1950's, and graduated to film direction with The Producers in 1968. The rest is history, a laugh track of films including:

Blazing Saddles (1974) "Pardon me while I whip this out."

Young Frankenstein (1974) "Abby...Normal."

Silent Movie (1976) "Non!"

High Anxiety (1977) "Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup!"

History of the World Part I (1981) "It's good to be the king."

Spaceballs (1987) "May the schwartz be with you."

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) "Actually Scarlet is my middle name. My whole name is Will Scarlet O'Hara. We're from Georgia."

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) "I have been to many stakings - you have to know where to stand! You know, everything in life is location, location, location...."

The Producers (musical) 2001 "Will the dancing Hitlers please wait in the wings? We are only seeing singing Hitlers.

The Producers (film remake) 2005 "My blue blanket! Give me back my blue blanket!"

The American Film Institute list referenced above has The Producers at #11 , Blazing Saddles at #6 , and Young Frankenstein at #13.

Brooks in a still from Blazing Saddles, 1974

It's amazing to realize that Brooks has been entertaining us for over 65 years. He has no plans to stop. A musical production of Young Frankenstein is back in the news. What I find even more remarkable is the fact that the Mel Brooks on stage and film is most often the same man one finds in private life. How does he do it?   I recall the many stories my National Park Service colleagues told of Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft. In the '70's and '80's they were frequent guests at Caneel Bay Resort inside Virgin Islands National Park on the island of St. John. Known for playing practical jokes on the younger park rangers and resort staff during the day, Brooks and Bancroft hosted them at after-hours gatherings where hilarity ruled. Given the public comedy we know, one can only imagine the memories to come out of the spontaneity of such an evening. Regardless, we're wishing one of the funniest men on the planet a very happy birthday.

And now, an unforgettable three minutes and twenty seconds from the film he calls his personal favorite, the 1968 production of The Producers:

In today's PC environment I doubt we'll ever see comedy quite like this for a long, long time, if ever again. So unfortunate.

Johnny Mercer's Music Never Ends!

Today we commemorate the passing of Johnny Mercer (1909-1976), a sentimental gentleman from Georgia, the favorite son of Savannah, and one of the most significant figures in American music history. He died in Los Angeles after a wide-ranging career as a prolific lyricist and songwriter, popular singer, and music industry innovator, entrepreneur and benefactor.  He may be gone but his music is very much alive through current interpretations in the popular music, jazz, and big band genres as well as the continuing interest in the Great American Songbook.

Mercer statue by Susie Chisholm erected in Ellis Square, Savannah, Georgia, 2009

For those who may not be familiar with his work, here is a list of what Mercer considered his "bread and butter songs," including his four Academy Award-winning efforts (in bold) and several nominations (underlined):

Lazybones (1933), music by Hoagy Carmichael

Goody, Goody (1936), music by Marty Malneck

Too Marvelous For Words (1937), music by Richard A. Whiting

Jeepers Creepers (1938), music by Harry Warren

Satin Doll (1958), written with Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn

You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby (1938), music by Harry Warren

That Old Black Magic (1943), music by Harold Arlen

Accentuate the Positive (1944) music by Harold Arlen

Fools Rush In (1940), music by Rube Bloom

I Remember You (1942), music by Victor Schertzinger

Day In - Day Out (1939), music by Rube Bloom

Dearly Beloved (1942), music by Jerome Kern

Come Rain or Come Shine (1946), music by Harold Arlen

Tangerine (1942), music by Victor Schertzinger

Hooray For Hollywood (1938), music by Richard A. Whiting

Laura (1945), music by David Raksin

Dream (1944), words and music by Johnny Mercer

On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe (1946, Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song), music by Harry Warren

Something's Gotta Give (1954), words and music by Johnny Mercer

One For My Baby (1943), music by Harold Arlen

In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening (1951, Academy Award for Best Music, Oroginal Song), music by Hoagy Carmichael

Skylark (1941), music by Hoagy Carmichael

Autumn Leaves (1950), music by Joseph Kosma

I Wanna Be Around (1962), words and music by Johnny Mercer and Sadie Vimmerstedt

Blues in the Night (1941), music by Harold Arlen

Charade (1963), music by Henry Mancini

Summer Wind (1965), music by Henry Mayer

Moon River (1961, Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song), music by Henry Mancini

Days of Wine and Roses (1962, Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song), music by Henry Mancini

Hardly a day passes that even a casual music listener will not hear a Johnny Mercer song.  Yip Harburg, who brought us Over the Rainbow, once described Mercer as "one of our great folk poets." I think American listeners will assure us that Mercer will be around for a long, long time. How lucky we are!

Self-portrait and signature at grave, Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
grave site photo, Emily E. Beck

Text:
Harburg quote, Portrait of Johnny: The Life and Times of John Herndon Mercer, Gene Lees, Hal Leonard, February 2006.

Georgia Summer 2018

Summer arrived in Atlanta a few minutes before sunrise this morning. The sun reaches its highest point in the sky today and it is the longest day of the year. Although the sun begins its descent tomorrow, insolation from our star will continue to raise atmospheric temperatures until late July. As this day marks the end of the season of renewal and the beginning of the season of growth and flower, I am reminded of this quote by the English writer and poet, D. H. Lawrence:

The greatest need of man is the renewal forever of the complete rhythm of life and death, the rhythm of the sun's year, the body's year.

Sunrise from the International Space Station                   NASA/Reid Wiseman

For me the rhythm also calls for music.  In Atlanta the longest day of 2018 has been a steamy one featuring wave after wave of brief and often heavy showers and thundershowers.  Skies have calmed for the moment. Perhaps the calm will last into sunset  when we can retire to the porch and enjoy this music accompanied by that from the woods. 

Splendid way to end the day.

Happy National Martini Day 2018!

Yes. There really is a national day for that delicious beverage staple, the dry martini. It is a classic though, no vodka allowed. Wikipedia has an informative post about the drink, including a few recipes.  The information there may be useful but there is no finer discourse on the martini than Judge Robert Bork's 1996 article in National Review. Thanks to columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez you can enjoy it here.  

For me the perfect cocktail calls for some perfect jazz.  Today we'll enjoy a cut from John Coltrane's album, Blue Train, released in 1957. It may be sixty years old but it still sells well and consistently ranks among the top jazz albums of all time. 

When it's time for dinner and relaxing afterward I suggest the 1963 album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman - also an all-time top ranked album - in addition to another martini. This combination must only be enjoyed with the one you love. No better way to enjoy the  progression of the evening and the close of National Martini Day. 

Juneteenth 2018

Emancipation                                                                       Thomas Nast, 1865

There's no federal holiday but there will be official state celebrations of this historic national event in forty-three states today. The day itself has come to be called Juneteenth. The Library of Virginia says this about it:

[The celebration] has grown into a popular event across the country to commemorate emancipation from slavery and celebrate African American culture. Juneteenth refers to June 19, the date in 1865 when the Union Army arrived in Galveston and announced that the Civil War was over and that slaves were free under the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the proclamation had become official more than two years earlier on January 1, 1863, freedmen in Texas adopted June 19th, later known colloquially as Juneteenth, as the date they celebrated emancipation. Juneteenth celebrations continued into the 20th century, and survived a period of declining participation because of the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s Juneteenth celebrations witnessed a revival as they became catalysts for publicizing civil rights issues of the day. In 1980 the Texas state legislature established June 19 as a state holiday.

For more about the history of this significant day in American history visit Juneteenth World Wide Celebration.

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Library of Congress at loc.gov

Text:
virginiamemory.com
loc.gov
wikepedia.com
pbs.org

Paul McCartney Turns 76

Today is Paul McCartney's birthday.

McCartney performing in the East Room of White House, 2010

The man remains as powerful a force in music today as he was in 1966. What more can be said other than...

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:

public domain photo: official White House photograph by Pete Souza, 

Father's Day 2018

Below is a photo of my dad at seventeen, a high school graduate, holder of class medals in English and debate, and a seasoned thespian. He was a mill town boy with high ambitions tempered by the security of a good-paying, full-time job in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. He never got the college degree he wanted but he was successful, building on his strong faith, a solid marriage, and a remarkable work ethic.When I look at this picture I am reminded that he only had four "good" years before the Great Depression and World War II brought him and the country he loved into sixteen years of hard times. Through it all he survived as a member of the "Greatest Generation" to see his nation prosper.  He was "old school:" through and through and never met a stranger.

Graduation, High School Class of 1925

Though neither of our dads was present during virtually all of our children's "shaping" Nancy and I know that their values played a major role in teaching our kids to be responsible, caring, and loving individuals. Not a day passes without a wish to have our dads and their guidance with us once more. How fortunate we were to have such beacons in our lives. And how wonderful it would be to see the reverence and respect for fatherhood restored in our nation today.

Having expressed that wish for the future, we are left with this wish for today: Happy Father's Day and a big "Thank You" to our dads, Bill and Vergil, and to fathers everywhere.

Igor Stravinsky: Rule Breaker, New Music Maker

U.S. public domain

Today is the birthday of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), popularly recognized as a leading founder of Modern music in the 20th century. Born in Russia, he lived in Switzerland and France before immigrating to the United States after World War II. He composed in a variety of styles over his lifetime but is best remembered for his dazzling, rhythmic music in the early years - 1910 to 1914 - of the Ballets Russes produced by Sergei Diaghilev in Paris.

His work during that brief period included The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). One could say they are all signature pieces - experimental and revolutionary - that dazzled and in some cases infuriated their audiences. Regardless, the three compositions as well as other sounds from Stravinsky's imagination had a huge impact on music and the arts. He was 27 when audiences first heard The Firebird. For a taste of that music here is the finale. While you listen, keep in mind that Henry Ford sold 10,000 cars that year, the U.S. had 1000 miles of paved road, half the American population lived on farms or towns with fewer than 2500 people, and the flying machine was a very rare and thrilling sight. 

Indeed, Stravinsky broke rules. In doing so he made new music. A century later it remains as fresh as the year it was composed.

James Joyce's Ulysses: Far More Than The Racy Bits

A first edition copy described as "unread except for the racy bits."

Today is far from an ordinary day in the world of western literature. It isn't that a number of significant events occurred or that any event occurred that day. Instead, June 16 (1904) is the setting for a several hundred page descriptive stream of happenings in the life of the fictional character, Leopold Bloom. The work is Ulysses, published in book form in 1922. The author is James Joyce. The day is Bloomsday, a time to celebrate the book and its author among literary circles around the world.

Ulysses is a shape shifting piece of art written out of the ashes of the Belle Epoque and the alienation of an increasingly existential world. If you accept that meanings are in people, this book assuredly means something different to every person who accepted the challenge to read it. Just can't get more existential than that. The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, said this about it:

What is so staggering about Ulysses is the fact that behind a thousand veils nothing lies hidden; that it turns neither toward the mind nor toward the world, but, as cold as the moon looking on from cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being, and decay to pursue its course.

To say the least, Ulysses is an adventure. For some it may be merely pornographic or a huge word puzzle or a unique work of art in its truest form. However you chose to view the novel keep in mind that people are celebrating this work and its author across the world today on what has become known as Bloomsday. And even those who know nothing about Bloomsday, never read the book or know little about the author have likely encountered bits and pieces of Joyce's skill in school and through popular culture. This memorable paragraph ends the book:

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I came to appreciate that quote so much I used it for almost twenty years in a descriptive writing course. Other quotes could have been useful but their playfulness simply made them interesting, maybe even enjoyable if you had a reading guide - really an essential - at hand:

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

So there is word play at its best with lots of traditional arts and sciences, a dash of Dadaism, even a precursor or two of pataphysics. Rest assured there's more there than the racy bits.

If you want to learn more about the day, the book, and the author, visit these sites: Bloomsday, Ulysses, and James Joyce.

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:theguardian.com, June 4, 2009, photo by Martin Argles

Text:
quotations, goodreads.com
Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, revised, Viking Press, 1964

Flag Day 2018: Celebrating Our Grand Old Flag

Today is Flag Day, a day for commemorating the adoption of a design by Francis Hopkinson as the official Flag of the United States on this date in 1777. Here are some words about the Hopkinson flag from the link above:

Hopkinson is recognized as the designer of the official "first flag" of the United States. Although he sought compensation from Congress, the letter was somewhat comical. He asked for a quarter cask of wine in payment for the flag, the Great Seal, and various other contributions. Congress used the usual bureaucratic tactics of asking for an itemized bill. After some back and forth, Congress eventually refused on the pretext that Hopkinson was already paid as a public servant. The letter also mentioned that Hopkinson collaborated with others on his designs because he was one of many contributing to the Great Seal.

Francis Hopkinson Flag                                                                        1777

While there is no known Hopkinson flag in existence today, we do know from his rough sketch that it had thirteen stars and thirteen stripes. It is believed that his flag used red and white stripes and white stars on a field of blue. Because the original stars used in the Great Seal had six points, we might also assume that Hopkinson's flag intended the use of a 6-pointed star. This is bolstered by his original sketch that showed asterisks with six points.

The legend of Betsy Ross as the designer of the first flag entered into American consciousness about the time of the 1876 centennial celebrations. See Betsy Ross Flag. This flag with its circle of 13 stars came into popular use as a flag commemorating our nation's birth. Many Americans today still cling to the Betsy Ross legend that she designed the flag and most are unaware of Hopkinson's legacy.

There are any number of song written about our national flag. Among the best of them is George M. Cohan's 1906 rouser, "Your A Grand Old Flag," written in 1906 for his musical, George Washington, Jr. It's performed by Billy Murray, a leading American entertainer in the first decades of the century.

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Hopkinson Flag, public domain image, wikimedia.org

Text:
Francis Hopkinson, entry, wikipedia.org
"You're A Grand Old Flag," entry, wikipedia.org

A Commencement In Troubled Times: June 8, 1968

Fifty years ago today I received my B.A. (American History) from the University of Maryland in College Park. There were several thousand degrees conferred that day in the sober atmosphere of Cole Field House. Robert F. Kennedy had been murdered in Los Angeles two days earlier. Martin Luther King Jr. died at the hands of an assassin in early April. Our commencement speaker, James B. Reston, Executive Editor of The New York Times, delivered an address for hope couched in terms of the difficulty and challenge facing the American experience and its response to the war in Vietnam, its most serious internal struggle since the Civil War a century earlier.

In 1968 I had not yet formed a strong opposition to our nation's war against communist influence in Vietnam. My focus that summer targeted a new and narrow direction in behavioral studies involving geography, cartography and psychology. It was a full and exciting challenge for any first-year grad student. By early 1969 with no end in sight for what appeared to be a hopeless war many friends immersed themselves in  radical politics. I watched from the sidelines until my closest friend, a brilliant mathematician, elected to leave the country rather than face the increasingly troubling national crisis unfolding on the home front. The day before he left he asked if I could drive him to his family home in the idyllic farm country near Emmitsburg. He wanted to say "good-bye". For an hour I sat alone and quiet in an overstuffed chair in a comfortable, dimly lit parlor straight out of 1910. On the return to Washington not a word was shared between us. It remains one of my strangest and darkest days. It was also the last day of my support for a military solution in Vietnam. The following day, Dave and his girlfriend left for Canada. I never heard from them again. 

Much happened to the American - and our personal -  experience in the decades since as economic, political, and social waves passed over the nation. It's nothing new among civilizations as history tells us. The cycle of growth, maturity and decline among nation-states has always been with us. Only the scale changes. It's a matter of managing the process through the anchors of Western civilization that really matters. And we are still seeking the restoration of some of those anchors displaced in the Vietnam era.

Today is very much like June 8, 1968 when James B. Reston explored the expression of hope in the face of adversity across 4000 years. So it remains for us to see how we manage our national maturity and our nation's place in the great chain of being.