I really don’t know what to make of Ma Barker’s Killer Brood (1960). Of course, it is a completely ahistorical gangster film – J. Edgar Hoover created the Ma Barker myth after the Feds shot her – but that is par for the course. (See Bryan Burrough’s superb book Public Enemies for the actuality.) Lurene Tuttle tears into the lead role with gusto, and Ron Foster is fine as Doc Barker – I had to see the movie as a Foster completist – but much of the other acting is extremely amateurish. The film proceeds by way of unconnected vignettes spanning many years, which I’m not sure works but is at least interesting. Way too many characters are introduced to make sense of in a 90-minute movie. The incidents depicted are often pretty lurid – suicide, immolation, Russian roulette, botched plastic surgery, etc – which might sound like pulpy fun, but the result is actually ugly-spirited, not something I’d care to watch again. (It was denied a UK release by the censors there.) So overall, an intriguing footnote in the history of the gangster film, but a very mixed show.
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Morning Opera: Mikhail Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842). The granddaddy of Russian fairy-tale operas; Rimsky-Korsakov took this intravenously. This 1978 recording under Yuri Simonov, available at Spotify, is idiomatic to say the least.
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Recommended: Fourteen for Now, ed John Simon. Although Simon was a nasty man, he did at least one nice thing, because this 1969 anthology intended for young adults is exquisite – look at that roster of authors! The introductions are first-rate. Too bad this book is almost unknown.
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The camera loved Bobby Harron, BOTD 1893. An early member of the 27 Club, and one of countless silent film tragedies (I once made an interminable list). His loss was akin to that of Heath Ledger in our time.
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Tiny Tim, BOTD 1932, on buying pornography and sex toys: “I don’t want to lose my soul and go to h-e-l-l…Also there’s the danger I’ll get ripped off. It isn’t easy to find a good dealer.”
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Morning Jazz: Anita O’Day Swings Cole Porter with Billy May (1959). Recorded during the period of her maximum heroin use / abuse, and all you can say is that her artistry ran on its own track. The drug might even have boosted her confidence and performing freedom, who knows?
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I am re-reading Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and near the end of the first section on Cardinal Manning, there is a mention of his admiration of Croker’s Life and Letters and Hayward’s Letters. Now, the Anglo-Irish politician and writer John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), and The Croker Papers, I was aware of; the Papers are on one of my TBR lists. But who is Hayward?
It took a little digging to determine that it is Abraham Hayward (1801-1884), essayist and bon vivant, who cut quite a figure in Victorian England, and whose Correspondence was published in two volumes, two years after his death. There is a recent (2009), hefty biography by Antony Chessell; it is a little pricey. The Correspondence is at the Internet Archive, so I immediately downloaded the first volume and started in on it tonight. It promises to be a whirl of everyone who was anyone in that era – many dimly remembered now, like Hayward himself.
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Gustav Vigeland (BOTD 1869), Spitfire (1940). Influenced by the famous Olmec babyface scultures? Has been vandalized numerous times, alas.
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En plein air Australian painter Julian Ashton (1851-1942), Circular Quay, Sydney (1888). He laid the groundwork for Australian Impressionism (some of those painters were known as the Heidelberg School, after a Melbourne suburb). I like the uneasy mood here.
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Morning Opera: Puccini, La Rondine. Mellifluous! Not staged as often as Puccini’s other mature operas, but the Met has it this season and I’m sure I’ll be hearing that. This Antonio Pappano recording is superb, as you might expect. Available at Spotify.