Tag Archives: 1940’s

Performing Arts: “The Letters Of Cole Porter” (New Yorker Review)

From a New Yorker online article review:

The Letters Of Cole Porter Yale University Press November 2019Beneath his smooth, genial, almost inhumanly productive and evasive surface, there were turbulent waters. His very name, for all its air of Ivy League ease, represents a burdened legacy. The Porters were his difficult, scapegrace father’s family; the Coles were his mother’s rich and ambitious Indiana family. He was a Porter by birth but, if his mother had anything to do with it, would be a Cole for life.

Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in “The Letters of Cole Porter” (Yale), edited by Cliff Eisen, a professor of music history at King’s College London, and Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at the University of Sheffield (and the editor of Alan Jay Lerner’s letters). Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote.

Read New Yorker Article

Restaurants: “Dear John’s” In L.A. Serves Up 1940’s Style Experience (Video)

In 1962, Johnny Harlowe made the jump from the silver screen to chef and owner of Dear John’s. Convinced by his pal Frank Sinatra, Johnny opened the iconic spot just a ways down from Sony Studios on Culver Blvd. It became the watering-hole for the Hollywood elite with Sinatra often in the corner playing the piano against the dark brick walls once lined with portraits of famous John’s. Seasoned chefs and entrepreneurs Hans Röckenwagner and Josiah Citrin have teamed up to re-open Dear John’s this April with an updated classic American menu and old-school cocktail list.

https://www.dearjohnsbar.com/

Website: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnDaAs5_3WXEY_GF3MJ6lyA

Comics Books: “George Herriman’s Krazy Kat – The Complete Color Sundays 1935-1944” (Taschen)

George Herriman's Krazy Kat The Complete Color Sundays 1935-1944 TaschenThe premise is simple: a black cat loves scheming a white mouse who incessantly throws bricks at the cat’s head, which police dog Officer Pupp, secretly harboring a passionate love for the cat, tries to prevent.

George Herriman endlessly plays with the above formula in his legendary newspaper strip Krazy Kat, published from 1913 until his death in 1944. Through his witdetailed characterizationand visual-verbal creativity, Herriman introduced even the least comically-inclined to the young medium; Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, US President Woodrow Wilson, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, P.G. Wodehouse, Willem de Kooning—all KK fans among many others.

It was thanks to media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, a confirmed fan who gave Herriman carte blanche in his newspapers, that the artist was allowed to freely explore countless absurd and melancholy variations on the theme of unrequited love for years on end. Herriman unabashedly took advantage of this, radically exploring the medium’s potential and pushing all of its formal boundaries; readers had to put up with surreal, Dadaist sceneries, a language that whirled slang, neologisms, phonetic spelling, and scholarly references, and diffuse gender roles—making Krazy Kat probably the first gender-fluid star in comic history.

To read more or purchase: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/graphic_design/all/01173/facts.george_herrimans_krazy_kat_the_complete_color_sundays_19351944.htm

Culture: “Top 10 Defining Events Baby Boomers Lived Through” (Video)

Ok boomer, these are the moments that marked a generation. For this list, we’ll be looking at the cultural and political moments, events and trends that shaped the Baby Boomer generation, focusing on the US. The exact age range of various generations are debated, but we’ll be following the Pew Research definition, which identifies baby boomers as individuals born between 1946 and 1964. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the Top 10 Defining Moments for Baby Boomers.

  • 10. The Rise of Television (1946-)
  • 9. The Army-McCarthy Hearings (1954)
  • 8. The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
  • 7. The Watergate Scandal (1972-74)
  • 6. Beatlemania (1960s)
  • 5. The Vietnam War (1955-73)
  • 4. The First Moon Landing (1969)
  • 3. Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963)
  • 2. Woodstock (1969)
  • 1. The Passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964)

Nostalgia: British Artist Roy Nockolds Captured Motorsport Racing From 1930’s Through 1960’s

From a Grand Prix History online posting:

Roy Nockolds PosterHis work was displayed in many exhibitions in the UK and twenty four of his paintings were exhibited in New York in 1960. the exhibition was entitled ‘British Motoring Achievements’ and was a collection of paintings depicting outstanding performances of British cars during the previous ten years. These included the Vanwall and Cooper in Grand Prix, Monte Carlo and Alpine Rallies, speed records by MG and Austin, and Le Mans wins by Jaguar and Aston Martin.

Roy Anthony Nockolds was born in Croydon in south London, England on the 24th January 1911. He was the last of seven children; one of his brothers Harold F. L. Nockolds would later become a motoring journalist and author of the classic Rolls-Royce history, “Magic of a Name”. His mother Flora Mary van der Heyden was the great grand daughter of Dutch Baroque-era painter and inventor, Jan van der Heyden. His farther Walter Herbert Nockolds was a descendent of farmers who had originally come to Britain from the Frisian Islands.

 

British Artist Roy Nockolds

To read more: http://www.grandprixhistory.org/nockolds.htm