The Times they are

In 1963, Bob Dylan wrote a song that I think he first performed publicly the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It became an anthem of my youth, just as I entered into my teens.

"Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone..."

Last night, the American People returned Barack Obama to the Presidency.
As I just explained in my last post, I am not an Obama guy.
But I find tears of joy welling up in my eyes nonetheless.
And it isn't because we dodged what I fear was the Romney bullet.
It is because a huge portion of my country rejected fear, which in my view was the hidden power behind Republican positions - the fear of change chief among them.

When Dylan wrote that song, the idea of a black American president was close to ludicrous.
But times have changed.

Last night, at least two states voted to allow gay folks to marry.
One of those states, Maine, can not be called a liberal bastion - its Governor is a Republican. Since 1815,  it has had only two US Senators who were Democrats, the last in the 1970's.
When Dylan wrote that song, being publicly identified as homosexual was enough to get one fired and/or evicted from one's home. And killed. I well remember one of the "men's magazines" from those days that my brother kept hidden in his closet, the kind of pulp trash that featured uniformed nazis torturing blond women on its cover, which had a photo expose of the men who visited Fire Island. The pictures, taken at a distance, had the men's faces covered with black squares. Last night, not only was the first openly gay when running for office candidate for US Senator elected, the subject was not an issue in her campaign.

Last night, for the first time I can remember, citizens of at least two different states voted to allow the use of marijuana - and not just for medicinal purposes. If this can become a national movement, we would cut our prison costs and populations dramatically.  And that is just a start, but that is a topic for another day.

Last night, the American People stood up to conservative religious bullying and defeated a mindset that holds women to be subservient to men. It is with great happiness that I note that the men who made incredibly ludicrous statements about rape and pregnancy were defeated.

If Obama holds true to his promise to get us out of Afghanistan (and that target date is too far away to suit me) the US will end over a decade of having our armies and our National Guard (who should not have been used for such purposes) entangled in foreign wars.

I could go on, but I have to go off to work, and I think I've made my point.

Last night the people of the United States voted to resume the changes started in the 1960's, when it became important to our people to begin to live up to the fine words and ideals expressed in the opening lines of our Declaration of Independence, that -all- of us are created equal and are endowed with rights. I'm no longer a freshly minted teenager, I'm 62 now. It has been 50 years to get here, far too long. For now, I'm setting aside the pattern of "red versus blue" states and what that means, I'm setting aside the obscene cost of this election and what could have been accomplished with that kind of money. I'm setting aside the frustration I felt yesterday listening to young adults state that they weren't voting or had no time to vote. No, for now, for just a short bit, I'm going to savor those tears welling up in my eyes. And I'll be humming an old Bob Dylan song to myself all day.

In order to form a more perfect - say what?

Continuing on from yesterday's post... this was going to be illustrated, but I've decided against that choice - it is really just distraction from what I want to say.

Okay, so here's the thing. I'm not an Obama guy. I voted for him last time, which I think (just off the top of my head) is the first time I ever voted for the winning candidate. But while the Obama administration has done a number of good things, there are a number of missteps and mistakes that are galling.

Obama may tout his first day in office signing of the Lilly Ledbetter act, but it was passed by Congress before he took office and really doesn't do anything to make certain that women receive pay equal to men in the same job. What it does do is extend the period of time in which women have the right to sue over such a situation. Provided they can find out about it. Then again, guys going for a job don't necessarily get paid the same starting salary as the guy before them either. Companies expect to hire cheaper. They expect the applicant to name a salary range, but they want to get by without mentioning what they are offering. The potential employee is at a disadvantage - the employer controls the information to keep an upper hand. Why not just do away with such nonsense and state upfront the salary range the employer expects to pay for the job without regard to sex, race & etc?

Obama did not close the facility at Guantanamo Bay as promised. Its use as a torture prison by the Bush administration, along with the policies exemplified by it, further sullied the reputation of this country. It is a symbol of what went wrong, of America itself gone wrong, and it needs to be closed and dismantled or burned to the ground - Publicly - for everyone to see. The terrorists held there have no rights. This country was based on having equal civil rights. It may seem odd to give such guarantees of treatment to those who wish to kill us but we need to do it - we need to live by our ideals - they apply to everyone, not an anointed few. These were the ideals for which we stood, and for which we  let ourselves, our neighbors, and our children die in wars foreign and domestic. They mean something, dammit.

The Obama administration had majorities in both houses but was unable to pass a decent Health Care bill. The administration settled for a bastardized piece of legislation that will prove a boon to the insurance companies which helped create the problems we have with our healthcare system in the first place. They say it's a decent first step. Yeah, sure. This situation will not be resolved until part of the expense of healthcare is removed from the employer, who offers a lesser salary in order to pay it. Healthcare should not be tied to one's job. Certainly, in my low wage case, I paid a larger weekly sum for healthcare than the contribution required of my employer. Just like most other people I know, my portion, with its sizable deduction, left me unable to afford to use my coverage to go see a doctor or to purchase many of the medications I had been taking before I took that low wage job out of necessity. My weekly deduction would have served me better if it had been pooled into universal coverage. The Republicans claim that such a move would financially destroy the country, yet it hasn't destroyed all the other countries which adopted such a system as noted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in the post World War II environment. (The United States has never signed that portion of the Declaration.) European countries afforded it while rebuilding after the destruction of war.

At the time of Obama's inauguration, the Republicans said upfront that they intended to stonewall his administration's legislation, and to do everything they could to make certain that he failed the country and become a one term president. And they delivered on their promise. They don't care about our lives. Yet Obama has never publicly taken them on, never used what was once called the "bully pulpit" to hoist the other rich bastards on their own petard. He should have used this situation to campaign, and lent the support of his person and office to Democrats, Independents, and Republicans willing to compromise who are running for the House and Congress. We don't need a passive aggressive President. We need a fighter, and a Leader.

I could go on, and I was prepared to, but there really isn't much point in it. People seem to think that Obama is some kind of populist President. He is not.  Most people who think this do so because the republicans and their o&o (owned and operated) media told them so. It is uncritical acceptance of an untruth as truth. He didn't start the bank bailouts, but he did administer them, and created and oversaw others. It should be noted that the work he did with the automotive industry was not a bailout, it was a bridge loan. The bailouts were probably necessary, and followed the system set up in the eerily similar Swedish banking crisis of 1991 brought on by the collapse of their housing/real estate markets engineered by speculators. The important thing here is that the Banks got bailed out. The mortgage companies got bailed out. The people did not. Most of the people who owned real estate were middle class. Obama, in his original campaign, talked a lot about the middle class. Too bad he didn't do much about it. In those campaigns, he did not talk about the poor. He barely mentioned the poor this time around. No one talks about the poor anymore except the poor. And Bernie Sanders. Under Obama, Wall Street came back and is enjoying record profits. Which means that the rich, and the corporations, oil companies, and etc. are doing very, very well. The big companies get to take out big loans through the non-government bank called the Federal Reserve  - loans backed by the government using our taxes - at 0% interest. When did we the people who pay the bills get that kind of service? The money the people lost (including pensions and retirement savings) in the banking crisis just "disappeared". That is mostly fiction. It was stolen. We were mugged, just not in a dark alley. Mr. Obama has continued many of the polices that created this situation, just as he has continued Guantanamo Bay, the onerous Homeland Security laws and etc. Do you really think that the financial crisis that came close to destroying us just happened? Do you think that Banks didn't learn anything from the Great Depression? Or the similar situation in Sweden in 1991 that was resolved by government bailouts? This crisis was less an accident than a managed event.

And the really sad thing is that none of this is new. It is a cycle that has repeated many, many times - and not just in the United States. This is the way things work. We pay taxes for services - most services are local - water, sewer, streets cleaned, etc. The larger share of taxes go to the government - for what? Only a small pittance goes to the arts, to education, to parks & etc. We are never asked how, or on what, we want our taxes spent. Why not healthcare? One thing I always adored about my country is that our forefathers chose the name United States. The initials read "us". It hasn't ever really been all of "us" now, has it? The rich and super rich are the 1%, the 5% or whatever. We outnumber them. We pay them to take care of things, but all they really do is take. It is time we demand more. Not request. Demand. Today is Guy Fawkes day. It used to be common to burn effigies of the disliked ruling classes on this day. We need to do more than burn effigies.

So why vote, and why vote for Obama? Because if you vote for the Republican candidate, things will get worse. Much worse. The republicans will use religion and morals (which they themselves do not follow) to make our lives completely miserable. The real reason they do this is to keep us busy trying to survive, and to distract us from the other things they are doing, like stealing everything they can.  I don't know about you, but with my meager income, I pay taxes. Money is taken out of my check. The government uses it without paying interest. I get a portion of it back as a refund - but by no means do I get the full amount back. Yet the Republican candidate states that 47% of the people of this country simply drain off the treasury, meaning the lesser than working men and women amount they put into the kitty. We work. We pay taxes. They stole our money, and they go unpunished. In voting for a President in this country, what you are really doing is voting for a philosophy. Do we the people want an almost illusory chance to move up the economic ladder, a chance to have a little trickle down to help our lives (acquired after the riots of the past), and a few paltry civil rights to attempt to live our lives with a modicum of dignity; or do we want to become serfs to the ruling classes which own the majority shares of the corporations in one giant company town? That's the choice we really have.

Disney, Star Wars, and the Election.

In a televised fundraising concert to benefit areas hard hit by hurricane Sandy this past Friday, Bruce Springsteen is reported to have ended the concert with the words, "God bless New York. God bless the Jersey shore". Amen to that, brother, amen to that.

On October 30th, as the hurricane hit areas in which I used to live - and still love - there was another story briefly in the news which affected other things I love. The Walt Disney Company, now a multinational corporation with investments in media and amusement parks, has acquired Lucasfilm, another Hollywood heavyweight. This gives Disney full control of the Star Wars franchise. They have already announced that Star Wars Episode VII is in the works with a release targeted to the year 2015.  (Lucas' deal with Fox gave him the Star Wars rights. His deals with with Paramount for the Indiana Jones series are much more complex and it may prove hard for Disney to meddle with that material.)

Now, I used to love the Disney organization and its work. Walt Disney created something wonderful. Not that all was a bed of roses - just about every animator out there wanted to work at Disney, but the exchange for giving one a certain degree of artistic accomplishment was long hours and low pay. Disney took a huge hit with the combination of the outbreak of World War Two and an animator's strike. (If you remember the movie Dumbo, there is a scene in which the silhouettes of circus clowns are seen on a canvas tent while the clowns complain and sing about hitting up the big boss for a raise - those were caricatures of some of the striking animators.) The studio recovered, and diversified into TV, Disneyland and Disney World  Over the years, the product became ever more homogenized so as to not offend, and to appeal to the largest number of potential ticket and product buyers. But it was still a largely good company with a high quality product. The Disney of today, however, is a different matter.

Beginning in the 1990's, the Disney organization under the leadership of Michael Eisner, and now Robert Iger, went on an investment buying spree. The Disney Company now owns a number of TV stations, ABC television and its myriad companies, ESPN, the Muppets, Pixar, Marvel comics, 27% of Hulu, 50% of A&E (A&E, History, Biography, Lifetime) - and etcetera. In terms of revenue, it is the largest media conglomerate in the world. The quality of the Disney product has suffered, and the company covered itself in ignominy for its part in the shoddy Marvel treatment of the late Jack Kirby (the family of the man who created or co-created many of the Marvel characters and visual style, and who revolutionized comic art, was denied any financial remuneration from the success of those products as Marvel considered his contribution to their incredible success "work for hire" with no creator's rights whatsoever).

It is just this kind of thing which gave corporations a bad and evil name. And such tactics make me think of the current crop of Republicans and their Tea Party amanuenses who have given the Republican party and its puppeteers an even more sinister reputation for evil. Any person who has followed the current US Presidential campaign has by now had the chance to see or read multiple reports which cover Republican attempts to squelch the vote by falsely removing voters from the rolls (usually black and Hispanic folk), require restrictive ID checks even though there is little evidence of voter fraud (thankfully found illegal so far), and possibly change the tabulations of electronic voting machines (most of the companies involved are right wing, and one voting machine company has a large ownership stake by the Romneys - and in Ohio yesterday a mysterious unvetted software "patch" was added to voting machines in make or break areas of Cleveland and Columbus). Their candidate has continuously changed positions in a move to get more votes - translation - he is lying about his and his party's intentions. Period. You don't have to dig to find evidence - it's all in the public record. These folks are out to destroy the concept that government exists to help the people who pay for it through taxes, and who give it power over their lives - although they do seem to want the power to force their religious morals on everyone else. Current media polling claims that this election is tied. I can not understand this, and I can not believe it. Before the first "debate" Obama had a sizable lead. In that debate, Obama seemed tired and disconnected, but Romney came off as a shrill, lying frat boy easily angered when he wasn't getting his way. But the media declared him the winner of the debate. Most media news ownership is in the hands of right wing aligned companies and owners. They have to be lying about the polls to make it less obvious that they are going to attempt to steal this election. These are the bully tactics of the Boardroom. The completion of the corporate takeover of the country may finally be at hand. Considering the storm that will hit us if this happens, God bless the United States. God bless its people.

To be continued....

Days dwindling down

It's been a crazy week. The passing of a friend I truly admired - who could also be a royal pain in the toches (tukas) but whose intensity made the world a better place (and whose obituary reminded folks to vote in the US election on November 6th), the hurricane which spared my corner of the world this time, but destroyed much of the world I used to inhabit (Ocean City, NJ and lower Manhattan), work associated with the radio station, work associated with work (I'm not only retiring, I asked for a particular day off - so I'm back on the night shift during part of my last week), etc. So I've not much time today to post. I'll just let this clip speak my mind for today:

This is Halloween

One of those bothersome poets noted that the best laid schemes "Gang aft agley".  I'd had many plans for a series of Halloween posts. In previous years I posted stills from my collection of Halloween Hollywood starlets, Victorian Halloween postcards, and I don't remember what else. I haven't had the time to look. This year time and events have played out in such a manner that my plans went agley.

I do love this season for any number of reasons. When I was - hmmm, I'm not sure how old I was, maybe six or seven, I went into hospital to have my tonsils out on Halloween Day. I dare say that had something to do with the crushed and maimed adult I became. My father designed his own house, into which we moved in August of 1959. It had a huge open basement. I can remember having at least one (but I think it was two) Halloween parties, complete with bobbing for apples in those big old tin basins that I haven't seen since those days. No one in my family asked me about my costume, and I was left to cobble together an outfit out of an old robe, a pillow case belly, and my great grandfather's cane. There is  a bit of 8mm home movie of that one, but I haven't had the time to find it - it will have to wait for another year, I suppose.

It had been my intention to have a post I would have called "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" which was going to focus on my love of the old fashioned Hollywood "horror" movies. Horror movies today are horrible, but in another way. I've greatly enjoyed things like "The Bride of Chucky" and a number of the other slasher/gore fests - which can be quite inventive and quite funny, depending. I do not care for the trend of the last decade or so of more or less realistic torture horror movies. No, real horror movies to me are those wonderful old creaky atmospheric gems like 'Frankenstein" et al. There is too much real horror in our world as it is.

My favorite is, and always has been, the 1931 Universal version of "Dracula" directed by Todd Browning. (Unless you give credence to the stories that Browning often didn't show up and that most of the direction was actually handled by his cameraman, the great Karl Freund. Freund photographed The silent era German classics The Golem, The Last Laugh, and Metropolis. He also directed the Boris Karloff version of The Mummy, the wonderful Mad Love, and - I Love Lucy!) So, I'd meant to write about the 1931 Dracula, and an encounter with a soap opera actor roommate of a friend of mine, who insisted that Dracula was a socialist expose of the ruling class living off the blood of the workers. From there I would have segued into the current political election here in the states.

I was trying to salvage the idea and actually working on a few frame grabs from Dracula when I got the email about Larry. (The friend who notified me didn't have my current phone number, which was just as well. I think it was easier reading the news). Back in the early days of radio free brattleboro, the two of us tried to plan elaborate radio Halloweens - unlicensed and pirate radio in those days considered it a special national holiday. I wish I had more time to work out this post, but I must get ready and leave for work.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

Larry Bloch

Yesterday was a gray day. Around the time the sun was setting, around the time the light began to fade, Larry Bloch left us.

It's the next morning and still, everything I start to write seems to be inadequate, to come out wrong.

Larry created and ran the Wetlands Preserve, a famous rock club in New York City which featured social activism as part of its ethos. The club was just a couple of blocks from where I used to live, but it opened after I'd left NYC for Boston. But I was lucky - Larry Bloch moved here and I got the chance to know him. Better yet, I got the chance to call him my friend. He was a co-founder of both radio free brattleboro and WVEW-lp, which quite simply and honestly would not exist without him. He opened a store here devoted to clothing made from hemp - he called it "Save the Corporations from Themselves". It had a loft where he kept free copies of the U.S. Constitution, and literature on many local and local-world causes - it was known as the "Activist's Attic". In my mind's eye I can see him changing the community billboard he maintained outside the Common Ground. Larry was a major force for good. I wrote that last as "in this town", but deleted it on purpose. Larry touched lives around the world. And he made the world, and his local community, a better place.

To be continued,
when my heart is not so heavy.



As Larry would have said,
Enjoy the day.

These wounds I have...

This morning is one of those mornings.
Blogger is acting up.
Today already feels like it is going to be one of those days.
Every time I web surf or see a political poll, I find myself feeling extremely pessimistic.
Halloween is approaching, and the world is frightening - not in a good way.
I do not wish to go off to work, but I must. Earning a living is still my necessary duty.
And so off to the battles with management and the battles with the teenage slacker staff, and the battles with the customers.

We who actually do the work shall proudly bear our wounds from this day to the ending of the world.
We shall be remembered- we few, we happy few, we band of workers
And those still now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not there,
 And hold their persons cheap whiles any speaks that worked with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

 (with apologies to Will S.)

My patience, like autumn, is fleeting...

Two and a half weeks. Every few minutes I tell myself, it will all be better in two and a half weeks. In two and a half weeks, the elections will be over. With any luck, the Democrats will then stop sending me twenty plus emails a day begging for money. Some of their emails show the level of my contributions - which are nil. I have explained to them on multiple occasions that the economy, reluctance to hire older workers, and the lack of decent jobs in my area have all conspired to leave me unable to contribute to the obscene amount of money they have collected and spent already. I guess they are trying to shame me into a donation. Better yet, in two and a half weeks, on November the 10th, I will become officially retired. I will be living in genteel poverty, but hell, I've been doing that for quite awhile, and I will actually have a better income than I have now from my place of employment after 5 years of subservience. (I'm not joking about that - one of the first things they do is make a name-tag for you, which you must wear, which uses your first name so that people may address you as though you were the stable boy or the scullery maid.)

(Not quite) soon enough it will all be over. Although the election is troubling - it turns out that the company which makes the voting machines in the make or break state of Ohio is owned by a company with heavy investment by Romney's son Tagg (the one who wanted to "take a swing" at Obama). Who names their kid Tagg? Well, today I suppose that is a conservative name.

With the day off, I started digging to find those photos of Newfane in autumn that I promised to scan. The first box I picked up had its bottom give way just shy of where I was going to put it. Most of the photos in it were ones that I was looking for last Spring. I didn't find the Newfane shots, but I did find a few others that I took some years back. So here, from two different scanners, two 35mm cameras and one low price digital camera, are a few pics of autumn in New England. (note- Blogger is acting up and not putting the photos where I want them. With any luck, I can still make this make a little bit of sense....)

 Taken by the side of the road at a Gentleman's Farm in Rhode Island

The next Gentlemen's Farm down the road....

Another farm in Rhode Island - okay not especially autumnal,
but I liked these Scottish Highland wooly cows - this guy came over to check me out.

When I had a car, I used to go visit an old friend - meaning a friend who has known me for a very long time (although he is now getting along in years just like myself), who lives just over the Vermont border in New York State. On the way to his town, this old diner sits abandoned by the road. I love diners, so I had to take and share this picture, oaky?

On the way back from the above visit... I just liked this scene - it cried out to be photographed.

I used to live in Boston, so it's only fair that I post one of two pics from there.

The above was taken in the Back Bay Fens. On the other side of that bridge are the old Victory Gardens.
Across the street to the left of the photo is Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox.

I can remember taking this in a Boston park, but I can't remember which one ---
I think it was the Esplanade  but it looks more like the Arnold Arboretum. 

Just a short train ride from Boston in Concord, Mass.

Monument Mountain in western Mass., near the spot where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville had a picnic with friends (which I seem to recall included Thoreau) - and  let me tell you, those Victorians had to be pretty damn hardy to carry a full picnic up to this spot.

Just a little south of the above, across the border into Connecticut. I used a version of this shot with people in it (towards the left) so there is a reference point for the scale of this waterfall.

Somewhere around the Mass/Ct. border.

I don't remember where I took this -
I thought it was near the Wachusetts Reservoir in MA,
but I could be wrong about that.

A "Kodak moment" by the woolen mill in (upstate) Johnson, Vermont

The Cemetery in (upstate) Hyde Park, Vermont

Now, I do have a thing for cemeteries - particularly New England cemeteries in autumn. The tombstones in Vermont's "Northeast Kingdom" are especially wonderful - Italian stone cutters were brought over to work the granite quarries, and they carved wonderful monuments. Here's an example from the town of Hardwick:

The Hardwick cemetery is situated on a hill. As I walked up the hill to take the photo above, I saw one large headstone, which was very plain. The husband's name was on the left, and the wife's name was on the right. As I passed the stone, I noticed something carved on the thickness of the right hand side:

I walked around the headstone to the husband's side.

And  there I discovered this:

Righteous

So I was kind of needing to hear a little music. Dave was doing his reggae show on the community radio station I help to run, but it just wasn't what I was looking for. While idly drifting along in the web, I looked in on the blog and this morning's post, which I finished just in time to head out to work. I ended up watching and listening to all the songs again. God but I loved those songs back then. I still love them now. Momma Cass sends me, what can I say? Love the voice and the persona. Watching and listening to her makes me happy.

Okay, here comes the confession. I was a Righteous Brothers fan. I have more than one of their 45s. As a teenager I was a huge fan of those bombastic Phil Spector wall of sound productions that played like mini rock and roll operas. I wrapped myself in them as I embraced my loneliness. You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' was great. But there was one other song that was just mournful teenage superb. It was sung as a solo by Bobby Hatfield. I was 14 when it was a hit, I loved it then and I cherish it now. Here's a clip I found on YouTube of Hatfield singing it on the old Shindig show. Hatfield sings and moves like a cross between Sam Cooke and Johnnie Ray. This clip is before the image makers took over and cleaned up the 'Brothers' look and movements into a more homogenized product. If you look for the version of this recorded one year later in color, you'll see what I mean. Here it is the way I remember it, and the way I prefer to remember it, and them.

Her own kind of music

My gosh, but the birthdays this month.... Today there are a number of people to celebrate whom I've admired, who have given me pleasure, or who have influenced my life in one way or another. But one name on the list today stands out for her songs, which were popular as I was growing up. Cynthia Weil trained as an actress and dancer, but discovered that she had talent as a songwriter. While working at the office of Don Kirshner's and Al Nevin's Aldon Music Co., she met and married songwriter Barry Mann, who had written and performed the hit song "Who Put the Bomp". Together they became major players at the Brill Building, the 1960's incarnation of Tin Pan Alley, writing many of the top pop hits of the day. Young Stevil loved many of their songs. Last year, the couple was awarded the Johnny Mercer Prize, the highest and most prestigious award which can be given a songwriter.

Many of the Weil-Mann collaborations expressed a social consciousness unusual for their day. One, "Only in America" was written for the Drifters but was reworked into an uncontroversial song by Leiber and Stoller for Jay and the Americans. I first heard the Drifter's version, and like it better.

 

A few other favorites include:

 



The following song was one that I often played on the jukebox at a favorite Boardwalk diner in Ocean City, NJ. There is a lip synch video of it which is staged on a beach that I would have put here but it sounds like it was recorded underwater, so I'm using a different version with less visual quality. No matter, it still expresses my teenage angst. Hell, it expresses my adult angst for that matter.

 

There are so many other songs that anyone my age would recognize instantly, But finally, I have to post this one. As of 2010, it was the most popular song ever to appear on radio with over 14 million plays. And yes, I have the 45rpm record.

 

So Happy Birthday Cynthia Weil - and Thank You for so much wonderful music!

A moody, sensitive young man

Marilyn Monroe called him, "The only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am." He was nominated for three Best Actor Academy Awards and one for Best Supporting Actor. He was James Dean's idol - Dean used to call him just to hear his voice. The Clash recorded a song about his sad later years. He was stunningly handsome. The New York Times noted that he was known for his portrayals of "moody, sensitive young men". His mother raised him as though he were an aristocrat, partially home schooled, and educated in French, German and Italian. Today is the birthday of another Stevil fave, Montgomery Clift. His is a hell of a story.

One of the foremost actors of his day, with a penchant for re-writing the scripts of movies in which he appeared, Clift was disfigured in an horrible automobile accident. He was patched back together, but he never really recovered. His health suffered, and he became addicted to pain killers and alcohol. During his last years people thought he was often drunk or drugged, but an autopsy showed that he had a thyroid condition which would make him appear so while cold sober. He was only 45 years old when he died. But he lives on as George Eastman in A Place in the Sun, as Morris Townsend in The Heiress, as Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity, and in roles in projects as diverse as The Search, Red River, The Misfits, and Judgement at Nuremberg among others. His performances have given me a great deal of pleasure over the years, and I just want to wish him a Happy Birthday.

From the opening sequence of A Place in the Sun

With Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun

Both of them were just so damned beautiful to look at (sigh).

Near the beginning of his film career, in Red River

After the accident, in The Misfits

Happy Birthday, Monty.