Almanac for May 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for May 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/May-18-Go-Tell-It-On-the-Mountain-C0C01FR4CC

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Bertrand Russell

Bummer May 18th

May 18, 1927: Local school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe rigs explosives inside the Bath Township, Michigan elementary school to explode. He murders his wife and sets his house and barn on fire. Kehoe also fills his automobile with nails and explosives, detonating it and killing himself and sending shrapnel flying. The local mail carrier loses a leg when the vehicle explodes and later dies from his injuries. 

As a result of the school explosion and detonation of the vehicle, 38 children and a total of five adult victims are killed. The exact reason for Kehoe’s rampage is unknown, but he may have been upset about losing a local election and his wife’s increasingly poor health.

May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington State, erupts. An estimated 57 people die as a direct result of the volcano, and over one billion dollars’ worth of property is destroyed.

May 18, 1996: 29-year-old musician Kevin Gilbert is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation at his home in California.

May 18, 2017: Musician Chris Cornell, age 52, dies of suicide by hanging.

Now let's move onto something significantly more life-affirming: My all-time (2017-2026) most-played songs on Spotify, Part II.

"Love Is Blindness" by Jack White is the only cover of a U2 song that I actually like better than a U2 song.

"Gettin' It" features into the plot of the tv series Blindspotting, an amazing musical love story starring the uber-talented Jasmine Cephas Jones of Hamilton (the musical) fame. Her character's beloved is played by Rafael Casal and he is also great in this. He's basically playing the most ride-or-die husband in modern musical history.

Cillian Murphy has his own tag HERE.

"Ava Gardner" has its own post HERE.

I like the soundtrack to Disney's The Greatest Showman a normal amount. Don't worry about it. It's probably fine.

"Soul Kitchen" by the Doors is playing in the Umbrella Academy episode where Klaus meets Dave, the closest thing he has to a love of his life. It's beautiful and tragic and I was more than a little obsessed.

I should watch the Bruce Springsteen movie starring the gorgeous Jeremy Allen White of The Bear fame. (The Bear also had Jon Bernthal, who is about to return to playing The Punisher on Disney+. Right after the latest season of Daredevil: Born Again showed us Jessica Jones and Luke Cage as a couple, with their daughter, future Captain America Danielle Cage. I hyperventilated. JonesCage was all I ever wanted out of Marvel's The Defenders. Well, that and for [spoilers] Electra to still be alive, but we can't have everything, can we?)

(P.S. Jon Bernthal is also starring on Broadway in the theatre version of the classic Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon. And while I have mixed feelings about Jews and Italians being used interchangeably in media - don't get me started again - that's pretty fuckin' awesome. I love that guy. I just love him, period.)

I'm done listening to Nicki Minaj now that she's joined Team Maga (a.k.a. the American fascists who want to reinstate white supremacy) and how we just all know instinctively that if she was in that juke joint in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, she would have let those vampires in and fixed them a Myx Moscato to boot.

Doechii is a better rapper, anyway.

I like Murray Head a normal amount. Don't worry about it.

"My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" has its own page HERE.

"Buttons" is a very catchy pop song, and also I hear it in the voices of Bob Belcher and Jimmy Pesto (senior). And this makes me laugh.

"The Future" from Batman (1989) isn't actually my 121st most-listened song, it's in fact the first song I ever listened to on Spotify on March 31, 2017. I wonder what I was thinking that day. It's true that as a 12-year-old in 1989, I was hella excited about Batman, and I saw it in the theater twice, once regular movie theater and once drive-in. Maybe I was leaning into 1980s nostalgia, as I sometimes do, with or without Murry Head. Maybe I was fantasizing about Christian Bale's Batman, as I sometimes do, with or without Cillian Murphy.

Anyway, those are my songs. 

Song: Ava Gardner

Here's a song which I feel is very cool: "Ava Gardner" by SuperKnova. Deliberately crafted in an homage to "Buddy Holly" by Weezer, instead of Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore, it asks us to imagine roleplaying the love story of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra.

Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner at a table in a restaurant in Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) on December 13, 1951 Photo Ben van Meerendonk. Via Wikimedia Commons.

25 Years Ago Today: Frank Sinatra Dies

May 14, 1998: Frank Sinatra dies of a heart attack. He's 82 years old.

Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in Hoboken, New Jersey, to parents who were both immigrants from Italy. He got a ukulele for his 15th birthday and taught himself to play it. He made his first record as a singer in 1939. In November of that year, he became the lead singer of the Tommy Dorsey Band. He recorded his first hit song, "Polka Dots and Stardust," in 1940.

On January 19, 1942, Sinatra recorded one of my favorite Cole Porter songs, "Night and Day."

On May 6, 1944, Warner Bros. released a Porky Pig cartoon, "Swooner Crooner," that mocked Sinatra-mania.

In 1947, he recorded the song "Mam'selle" for the soundtrack of The Razor's Edge, based on the 1944 book by W. Somerset Maugham.

On November 7, 1951, he married Ava Gardner.

On March 25, 1954, Sinatra won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Maggio in From Here to Eternity.

His 1954 album Songs for Young Lovers includes Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You" and the George Gershwin song "They Can't Take That Away From Me."

He recorded Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin," reportedly in 22 takes, for the 1956 album Songs for Swingin' Lovers.

On July 2, 1966, the #1 song in the U.S. is Sinatra's "Strangers In the Night." The melody was composed by Bert Kaempfert, who's got the mad hits. That same year, 50-year-old Sinatra marries 21-year-old Mia Farrow.

On April 15, 1967, the #1 song in the U.S. is "Something Stupid" by Sinatra and his 26-year-old daughter Nancy. Where did I first hear this song? Performed by Kelsey Grammer and Julie Kavner as Sideshow Bob and Selma Bouvier on Simpsons episode 8F20, “Black Widower,” which originally aired April 9, 1992.

Nancy Sinatra is like Mary Wollstonecraft in that mother and daughter have the same name. Frank Sinatra's first wife and eldest child are both called Nancy Sinatra.

On November 13, 1967, NBC gives him a TV special with guest star Ella Fitzgerald.

https://www.jazzonthetube.com/john-gennari-flavor-and-soul/

Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Count Basie, and Pat Henry's Orchestra performed a revue together on June 6th through June 18th at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Although allegedly "retired," he recorded two best-selling Duets albums, the first in 1993 and Duets II in 1994. These include the "I've Got You Under My Skin" duet with Bono.

I don't have a source for this, but I remember watching Bono talking on TV about a night of drinking that the two had together. Bono fell asleep with a glass of whiskey in his hand and spilled it on himself in his sleep. He woke up and got terribly embarrassed that the great Frank Sinatra would think he, Bono, had gotten so drunk he pissed himself.

Frank Sinatra had a good, long, musical life. He died in 1998, and his second child Frank Sinatra Jr. died in 2016. Nancy and Tina Sinatra are still with us, as is Ronan Farrow, Mia Farrow's son of whom Sinatra may be the biological father. On paper, the alleged sexual predator Woody Allen is Ronan's father, but Ronan looks a lot more like Sinatra than Allen.

https://amzn.to/3Jo241l - this is an affiliate link

'From Here to Eternity' Backstory + My 'Killers' Video

So I'm reading Montgomery Clift by Patricia Bosworth. Beautiful man, very talented in short bursts. Really insecure. Lots of addictions, way too much alcohol. Oddly close relationships with his twin sister and "Irish twin" brother. A Freudian wet dream, really. He had a weird thing about lying and crawling on floors, as if he preferred not to stand up (which you see Perce doing in The Misfits, and it works wonderfully for that character).


My favorite parts of this book are the parts with James Jones, regarding the filming of From Here to Eternity in 1953. (I've finished reading The Thin Red Line and started Whistle. I'm only on page 26 and already about to cry because Bobby Prell - the third avatar of Robert E. Lee Prewitt - is so gravely wounded.)

Jones, Clift and Frank Sinatra got along really well. Bosworth quotes an unnamed press agent as having said, "Jones looked like a nightclub bouncer with his thick neck and broken face. And there's this edgy cocky little wop Sinatra always spoilin' for a fight, and then Monty who managed to radiate class and high standards even when he was pissing in the gutter." Sorry for the ethnic insult, but that's the exact quote.

Jones was quoted as saying, "He'd come crawling down the fire escape, agile as a monkey, and then swing into my room. He'd be brandishing a bottle of Scotch and a pot of espresso. First time I ever tasted that kinda coffee. I hated it, but I drank it 'cause Monty did...He was an odd man, but I felt a strange rapport with him while we were making the movie."

Bosworth writes, "Driving out of Los Angeles Jones talked sotto voce to Jeanne [Green; she and her husband Fred were Clift's close friends] about Monty, saying he found him strange and asking if he was a homosexual. Jeanne said, 'I got very prim and said I had no idea. With that Jones suddenly confided, "I would have had an affair with him but he never asked me." ' "

Given that many James Jones characters are sexual opportunists willing to make love to whoever happens to be at hand, it's not too surprising that James was, most likely, bisexual. Just one more reason for me to feel affinity for the late author.

I don't share his dislike of espresso, though.

Clift was not fond of Burt Lancaster, and called him a bad actor behind his back. (Jim Caviezel and Sean Penn, playing essentially the same characters in The Thin Red Line, did not get along particularly well either. Must be a Prewitt-Warden/Witt-Welsh thing.) He was upset that Lancaster got first billing. He didn't get along with Marlon Brando, either, and he thought James Dean was just "weird." Of course, Dean was a very conscious imitator of both Clift and Brando.

The role of Adam in East of Eden (the "good" brother, not the one James Dean played) is one that Clift turned down. He was also offered a part in a production of Fahrenheit 451; he could have made a really great Montag. (When I first read 451 in middle school, I imagined that Montag was really old - I was surprised when I re-reread it earlier this year that Montag was 30- younger than I am now!)


Incidentally, I made this one-minute video with Ava Gardner stills from The Killers today.


Ava Gardner was married to Frank Sinatra during the filming of From Here to Eternity. Bosworth wrote,   "[Sinatra] seemed obsessed with [Gardner] - she had left him, unable to cope with his rages and his entourage, which followed him everywhere.

"Once during the course of the filming he became so depressed by her rejection he threatened suicide. Monty talked him out of it."

I do not think it would be an ethnic insult - or a stretch - to say that Frank Sinatra was kind of a drama queen. A straight guy drama queen.  At least the way Patricia Bosworth tells it.