#studio sixty on the sunset strip

[dovebuffy92]

My Ranking of Aaron Sorkin TV Series & Movies

I am only including movies he directed and wrote in this ranking.

1. The West Wing

2. The Newsroom

3. Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip

4. Sports Night

5. Molly’s Game

6. The Trial of Chicago 7

7. Being the Ricardos

[brosetv]

the funniest thing someone ever said:

[allybelle]

Jim Morrison (Retouched Photo)

[ducktracy]

190. porky at the crocadero (1938)

release date: february 5th, 1938

series: looney tunes

director: frank tashlin

starring: mel blanc (porky)

at long last, frank tashlin has succumbed to putting porky on a diet. this is the first tashlin short to have a slimmed down porky, officially putting an end to “fat porky”’s reign.

the story credit goes to lew landsman—a bit of an anomaly, considering this is his only credit. much of the scoop on him has been lost to the sands of time, but evidently he was a gag artist, selling comic drawings to magazines and even touting showings of his art throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s. you can read more about him here.

porky aspires to be a bandleader at the prestigious crocadero (a parody of the cafe trocadero, a bumping nightclub on the sunset strip from 1934-1947), but quickly realizes he’s too poor to afford its flashy admittance fee. he works as a dishwasher, hoping to catch a whiff of the festivities, but is quickly let go after he proves too incompetent for the job. nevertheless, an impromptu change in plans finds porky at the bandstand conducting a number of acts, including a high-energy cab calloway finale.

the typography of the title card melts away, the camera panning out as we get a full view of the crocadero, illuminated by the moonlight and its flashy neon sign. pan back in to the sign and fade to a standee:

all of the selections are references to pieces of music, with said music serving as accompaniment. the score begins with “little man, you’ve had a busy day”, switches to “in the shade of the old apple tree”, and closes with a carl stalling favorite, “the lady in red”. 

pan over to porky, eagerly ogling the sign. volney white’s animation and mel blanc’s vocals combine to make an energetic performance that will only grow in fervor. “hot duh-dee-duh-dee-duh-diggity dog! all thuh-the-thee-the big shots in person!” the detail of porky’s little hat flipping around, staggering in time to his stutter, is not only funny, but elevates the energy of the sequence. “someday, i’m uh-guh-geh-uh-gonna lead a band, too! s-see?”

porky unfurls a diploma, to which we get a close-up of his not-so-trustworthy credentials (fingernails and all):

volney’s animation continues to be full of character as porky blabs on about how he’s gonna become a famous bandleader. “and meh-muh-mee-mm-maybe i’ll be eh-feh-eh-famous, like eh-leh-lee-le-leopold eh-seh-stokowski!”

a nice change in camera angles as we turn to an upshot of porky, furiously conducting his imaginary band to a rousing rendition of “poet and peasant overture”. 

the mood changes from fervent conductor to crooner as he chooses to mimic rudy vallee, conducting along to vallee’s 1937 “vieni, vieni”, complete with a hilariously amiable facial expression--a stark contrast to the fit he was throwing mimicking stokowski just seconds prior.

another seamless transition in tone to an impression of eh-buh-bee-beh-benny goodman, the song this time being “sweet georgia brown” in the stylings of the king of swing himself. the changes in mood and tone, in both the animation and the music, are as smooth as butter, especially for such drastic shifts in expression. frank tashlin doesn’t skip a beat with his pacing. this is especially true as the camera pans over to another nearby sign, a hilarious sight gag quickly putting an end to porky’s festivities:

dejected, porky rifles in his pocket and pulls out a lone coin emblazoned with a skunk—“one scent”. he trudges along solemnly, away from the crocadero, when all of the sudden a sign catches his eye: BOY WANTED. though porky has been slowly growing more consistent in his characterization, his age still fluctuated from picture to picture. frank tashlin would also portray him as a young boy in wholly smoke just a few months later.

tashlin flaunts his need for speed as porky wastes no time doing the signature volney white eye take and darting into the crocadero, a cloud of dust and the swinging of the doors serving as the only indication of his presence just milliseconds prior.

although the sign doesn’t elaborate on what job it is that porky is doing, the tower of dishes blocking the screen as we fade in to the new scene answers any lingering questions. pan out to porky, happily scrubbing away, while his boss, a pretentious walrus whose vocal stylings are hilarious and borderline incomprehensible orders him around. the bargain—if porky does his job, then he can “watch the orrrrrrchestrey, maybe, hmmm?”

a throwback to the days of working with disney, carl stalling “mickey mouse”’s a little penguin waiter—that is, his quick little steps are fervently timed to the jaunty tinker of an xylophone. the walrus blocks the diminutive penguin, peddling a platter of soup. after they inadvertently do a tango of side-stepping, the penguin wordlessly slides down the walrus’ back, zigzagging around a sea of tables, and right over to a lone giraffe, elevating the table like a car jack to fit the gjraffe’s height. the giraffe laps up his soup with ease. though not the funniest gag ever, tashlin’s quirks—the quick timing, hiding the penguin behind the plethora of tables, etc, make it more endearing.

back to porky, carrying a dangerously tall tower of plates with him. a fly causes him to nearly spill his goods, but ducking in place renders the pig safe. that is, until he throws all of the dishes in the air, swatting the fly spastically. the music cue of porky ducking, looking around to make sure the fly is gone, sounds eerily similar to the stylings of norman spencer, who scored the cartoons up until mid-late 1936. 

without a break in pace, porky catches all of the dishes he threw into the air in one fell swoop. more buttery pacing from tashlin, who is able to switch tones and moods at lightning speeds without missing a beat. this is INCREDIBLY difficult to pull off, and he makes it look too easy.

as to be expected, the fly lands right on porky’s snout. instead of attacking it without hesitation, porky slowly reaches for a spoon on the kitchen counter... and THEN disregards his duties as dishwasher, carelessly tossing his pile of dishes aside to swat furiously at his foe.

the pompous walrus from before spots porky’s silhouette from outside the kitchen doors, flailing and waving around like a madman. “der loafer!” his boss interprets porky’s frantic waving of the spoon as a frantic imitation of a bandleader, promptly tossing him out. porky recovers in the back alley, left with his diploma and metaphorical birds of cartoon pain as the boss scolds “today, you are a ham!”--a take on the bar mitzvah declaration “today, you are a man”, which has been spoofed previously in cartoons such as egghead rides again.

it doesn’t take long for the boss to eat his own words. frank tashlin does a great job of creating a genuinely anxiety inducing mood as a crowd of people, now filling the crocadero, chant “we want mu-sic! we want mu-sic! we want mu-sic!” the musical accompaniment is more akin to the stylings of scott bradley, in the sense that it’s purely atmospheric and contextual, rather than an actual melody. the chanting and disconcerting music get louder as we cut to dramatic up shots of hands clapping to the beat, down shots of foots stamping, etc. it’s genuinely unnerving--and the manager agrees, pacing circles around his office, muttering incoherently to himself about the absence of “the musicmaker”.

knocking on the door serves as a symbol of hope as the manager whips around. “who’s dere?” 

“telegram, i bet’cha!” inside bursts a total loon of an old man, his long, white beard whipping in the wind as he does donuts on his bicycle inside the manager’s office. if it weren’t for his looks and speech patterns, which already tell a story, carl stalling’s score of “the woods are full of cuckoos” certifies that this old coot definitely has some screws loose. 

the old coot reaches into the depths of his beard and pulls out said telegram. “y’ owe me sixty cents, i bet’cha.” the manager unceremoniously dumps a handful of coins into the coot’s possession, who does a few more donuts in the office, indicating his exit. that is, until he suddenly halts, tipping his hat to bid “g’bye, i bet’cha.” such a scene is nonsense--and it’s hilarious nonsense rather than perplexing nonsense. it makes no sense, and yet it’s speedy enough to get its point across AND not overstay its welcome. had the same gag been executed by someone such as ben hardaway, who probably would have LOVED this gag, it would have been milked to death and bloated to ensure the audience “got it”. here, frank knows when to start and when to stop, an incredibly valuable skill not all directors possess.

contents of the telegram include a rather morbid nod to the hit ‘20s song “i faw down an' go boom”:

to add insult to injury, the old coot sticks his head in the door and adds “yeah, and they won’t come ‘t all, i betcha!” before slamming the door. though i can’t place the animator, the style of the animation looks eerily similar to that of izzy ellis’, from the spiral motion lines to the thin, squished look of his face. izzy ellis would animate in the clampett unit after leaving ub iwerks’ studio, later animating under norm mccabe, frank tashlin himself, bob clampett again, and then bob mckimson. an example of some of his work under frank tashlin here. 

back to the crowd, still demanding their music in the same unnerving drone. the manager continues to pace in his office, until a bright idea hits. “that sving dishvasher! i must get him back schnell!” 

a moment of frank tashlin greatness: the entire cartoon screeches to a halt as a narrator explains “ladies and gentlmen, ‘schnell’ means ‘quick’!” and, just like that, cartoon hijinks resume. this joke is hilarious 83 years later--imagine the reaction it evoked from theatergoers in 1938. once more, the matter-of-fact execution of the gag is what sells it. no build up, no cool down, no bloating of anything. short, sweet, and to the point. it’s so hilariously and purposefully redundant that you can’t NOT laugh at it.

speaking of quick, that would be an understatement to describe the rapid cutting after the fact. the manager rushes outside, whipping around street corner after street corner to find the dejected dishwasher he berated just minutes prior. he finds his target, grabbing porky and rushing backwards--the same way he came at the same exact lightning speed--all while monologuing about how porky can be a bandleader and break all of the dishes he wants.

again, no breaks in momentum whatsoever as the bandleader tosses a nonplussed porky into a bandleader’s outfit, stuffing a pillow under his shirt (had this cartoon been made a few months prior, there’d be no need for a pillow!) and giving him a fake mustache/curl of hair via makeup. “pull de vool over dere eyes!”

thus cues the music portion of the cartoon. a spotlight shines on a sign introducing porky as “the jazz king”, much to the pleasure of the audience. a giraffe in the orchestra introduces the song with a clarinet solo of “rhapsody in blue” before getting down to business.

porky, dressed as paul whiteman, conducts whiteman’s “avalon”, as indicated by the music stand. volney white does some great animation here--porky struggles to keep his own weight afloat, his giant pillow-stomach sinking to the ground. he readjusts himself a few times, enjoying the spare seconds of peace where his outfit stays intact, only for the same charade to repeat. fun eye takes and volumetric animation from volney. it’s no coincidence that he was one of tashlin’s best animators.

the crowd shots in this cartoon are not to be overlooked--kudos and apologies for the poor people who had to ink and paint all of that! the crowd dances along to the stylings of porky’s music, including a pair of kangaroos and their joeys slow dancing together.

back to the little penguin waiter from before, tinkering along to deliver a drink. a spare trombone sucks up all of the goods in the glass, prompting a hilarious grimace from the penguin who just stands still, silently glowering before traipsing backwards (mickey mouse timing and all) to refill. 

cut to porky, who appears much more jovial. a clever pan out reveals that he’s enlisted in the help of a car jack to keep his extra weight afloat. and, with that, curtains (animation reused from the introduction to tashlin’s porky’s romance) close out on the pig. applause from the audience.

next up, “guy lumbago and his boiled kanadians”, a not-so-flattering nod to guy lombardo and his royal canadians. porky, dressed as a canadian mountee, directs “cryman lumbago”. carmen lombardo, brother to guy, was often poked fun at for the excessive vibrato in his voice--people would liken him to sounding like an old man on his last legs. not only that, but even by the ‘30s, guy lombardo’s music was often dismissed as slow, sappy “old person’s music”. the 1954 woody woodpecker cartoon, real gone woody, also makes fun of lombardo, also dubbing him as “lumbago” and calling him a square.

indeed, cryman lumbago is a decrepit old man with--you guessed it--lumbago, singing in a hilariously obnoxious vibrato. even the dancers in the crocadero stagger along to his vibrato, their dancing stuttering. the benign facial expressions of the crowd, despite all of this, is the perfect cherry on top. one wonders if guy/carmen lombardo ever saw this cartoon, and how they reacted to it...

just as the gag threatens to overstay its welcome (and, admittedly, it has), a screwball assistant who looks like a relative to another random screwball in porky’s duck hunt scoops lumbago into a wheelchair and wheels him off stage. the audience applauds, and there’s a feeling that they aren’t just applauding the music.

cue the most controversial, uncomfortable, yet also complex part of the cartoon: a tribute to cab calloway, or, as he’s dubbed here, cab halloway.

for today i’ll spare you the imagery, but we’re greeted by a (thankfully) rare anomaly in the porky pig-verse: porky and his orchestra are dressed in blackface, conducting a rousing rendition of “chinatown, my chinatown”.

obviously, any and all blackface is abhorrent, but this is an interesting case. it’s clear that this was meant to be an homage and celebration of cab calloway’s music. a certain level of care seems to have been put into this sequence—it’s not a cheap throwaway “haha blackface” gag purely just for laughs. the animation is FILLED with a surprising amount of energy and vitality, and the vocals of the calloway impression are eerily spot on. analyzing the animation from a technical standpoint, it’s VERY skillful. it is NOT easy to convey such high energy and such elasticity. the animation is vivid, rapid, and invigorating. for 1938 especially, such energy is jarring. this feels more like the climax of a 1945 bob clampett cartoon, not a run of the mill 1938 porky pig cartoon.

BUT, with that said, it’s still extremely uncomfortable--blackface is blackface, and just because the techniques behind it are good doesn’t mean the material being animated is good. as i mentioned, the intentions don’t entirely feel as nasty as other examples we have/will seen, but that doesn’t negate the harm it does. you can have affectionate homages to cab calloway and his music without blackface--look at betty boop’s snow white. plus, because the song is “chinatown, my chinatown”, any nuance this scene had is discredited when porky switches from blackface to dressing up as a stereotypical chinese man. uncomfortable and unnecessary--THAT is a cheap throwaway gag. 

nevertheless, it’s not in my place to preach about what is racist and what isn’t. speaking purely from a technical standpoint--the techniques and processes that went into the animation itself--this is a very impressive performance. high energy in both music and animation. the elasticity, speed, all of it is very impressive. the content BEING animated, however, has aged like rotten milk. though this isn’t as meanspirited as other instances that we’ll explore, it still absolutely has its problems and definitely encourages mindful thinking.

regardless, the number ends to uproarious applause, and porky successfully lives his dreams of being a bandleader. the cartoon closes on the penguin waiter, once more peddling a drink. just as the offscreen trombone threatens to steal his drink, the penguin swallows it all in one go and blows a raspberry to the trombone as we iris out.

an interesting entry for sure. frank tashlin’s talents cannot and should not be understated--his speed and timing of the cartoon are certifiably one of the most impressive aspects of the cartoon. indeed, a lot of fun music in this one, whether that be underscores or otherwise. the design of the cartoon holds up very well--tashlin’s streamlined backgrounds and layouts are always a treat to look at. porky is very endearing, especially in the beginning with his imitation of all of the bandleaders, and the incomprehensibility of the walrus is too funny not to laugh at.

of course, the elephant in the room is the ending tribute, which we already discussed. from a technical standpoint, the vivacity of the animation should absolutely be commended and appreciated, especially this early on. the music is VERY fun. but blackface is blackface, and it just hasn’t aged well and comes off as uncomfortable--at least--regardless.

with that, whether you choose to watch this cartoon is up to you. i think this is definitely one of tashlin’s best porky cartoons, and despite its gags and references that have now become dated, it still serves as an enjoyable watch. the whole blackface thing, however, is why this isn’t a cartoon i frequent often. i would trepidatiously recommend this, either skip the calloway sequence or watch it with an open mind. in all, a fun cartoon that i unfortunately can’t quite appreciate to its fullest extent.

with all that said, here’s a link!

[go2harsha-blog]

Celebrating Woodstock - Part 1

With the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock festival round the corner, Harsha Prabhu looks back to visiting the US  for the 40th anniversary

A Fairy Tale of New York

Parrots for Peace, Ecofest, Central Park, NYC, Oct 2009. Pic: Hans Lovejoy

Blog 1 on the Rainbow Dreaming US tour, covering NYC and Ecofest.  Rainbow Dreaming is a photodocumentary on the alternative culture of the rainbow region of NSW, Australia. The curators were invited to set up the exhibit for the Woodstock 40th. See more at http://www.rainbowdreaming.org

Which Woodstock?

“Don’t even bother about coming to Woodstock for the festival in August,” said Nathan Koening, our host at the Woodstock Museum. “It’s mostly expensive hype. Come in October, when the weather is better and there will be more Woodstock-related events to celebrate the Woodstock legacy. And you can set up the Rainbow Dreaming exhibit.”

Woodstock Museum, Saugerties, NY, October 2009. Pic: Emi Iizuka

The Woodstock Museum were partners in setting up the historic Nimbin-Woodstock Connection in the mid-nineties, a rainbow bridge linking the alternative communities of Nimbin in north eastern New South Wales, Australia, with the whole hippie tradition of Woodstock. We had sealed the relationship by sending the Woodstock Museum an earlier exhibit from Nimbin, called Some Children of the Dream.

It’s now some fifteen years down the track. Walking down the main strip in Byron Bay I spy Hans Lovejoy sitting in a cafe, sipping on a latte. Hans, musician and journalist for the Byron Shire Echo, was in-between assignments.

“Fancy a trip to Woodstock?” I asked him.

“Which Woodstock?” he asked, undoubtedly knowing there were many: Woodstock, the town; the original Woodstock festival in 1969, which was held some 100 kms away; and the many, commemorative events down the years, held wherever the required permits could be obtained and the producers and sponsors lined up with the dollars.

“Not the festival,” I replied, “It’s a celebration of the Woodstock legacy.”

“Why not,” he said.

Lords of the Material Universe

The first signs were auspicious.

At Brisbane airport, waiting to catch the flight out to LA, we bumped into Elizabeth Thorpe and Debbie Lee. Elizabeth and her partner Ray, proprietors of Happy High Herbs, were the principal sponsors of Rainbow Dreaming and Lee, artist and designer, is an old connection from Nimbin. Elizabeth and Lee were headed for USA to open Happy High’s first US store, in Arizona. And Hans and myself were headed for New York, bringing with us the stories and pictures of life in the rainbow region.

From the plane, the New York nightscape glowed and flickered like some gigantic circuit board. “The lords of the material universe have nice real estate here”, said Hans. Towers of ivory, streets of gold. Would the lords be kind to us? Would they let me in, with my Indian passport?

At immigration, there was a blip: Had my passport ever been stolen? Why was it registered as Australian? The question in my head went something like: So this is what it feels to be at the mercy of dodgy databanks and the mood of the assessment officer. But it turned out ok. After a few questions, Officer Pena waived me through.

Did I have anything to declare, the customs man asked? Don’t touch my bag if you please, I have a haversack full of rainbow dreams, I mused to myself.

At the airport, the smiling face of Benny Zable, waiving a rainbow flag, greeted us. Benny, Nimbin’s ambassador to Woodstock, was the kingpin in the rainbow bridge to Woodstock and beyond. Benny had arranged for us to stay in Brooklyn, at the studio of Traci Mann, a New York tap dancer.

Disoriented by jet lag, Hans had left his laptop on the airport bus. That first night, with the El roaring past our window, we fell into a troubled sleep, woken by the clatter of the El and the cries of children at the daycare centre below.

Through a Glass

Our first pilgrimage in New York was to the Yippie Museum in Greenwich Village. The Village was the bohemian hangout par excellence in the sixties. It still has a funky, if gentrified, look. Jazz bars and restaurants dot the streets.

The Yippie Museum resembles the Nimbin Museum, with a stage for performances. One night, we caught some fine performance poetry. It’s the headquarters of New York’s hemp legalization campaign. They knew about Nimbin. They were also involved with a global linkup of cities for 2010.

1st Oct saw the launch of Mark Roselle’s book “Tree Spiker”. Mark Roselle is the founder of Rainforest Action Network. He’s also the man who infiltrated a Nevada test site. The day was also Benny’s birthday, Benny, an agent provocateur with his rainbow flags. The Yippie Museum was a happening place, true to its name of promoting green(sic) issues through direct action.

It took us a while to work out what ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ meant in the subway, but we had worked it out by the time we left New York!

Hans slipped out one night for a dose of jazz; the girls went on a harbour cruise; Benny was beavering away at the Ecofest office. My jet lag meant that I saw the city as if through a glass darkly. One image remains: a black, immaculately dressed saxplayer, doing “In a Sentimantl Mood” in the subway at 50th St.

Ecofest

Ecofest, Central Park, NYC, Oct 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

The Ecofest office, off Broadway, was a hive of activity, presided over by Nanci Callahan, queen bee and director/producer of New York’s signature ecological fair, now in it’s 21st year.

We walked to Central Park to check out the site for this year’s Ecofest, passing Strawberry Fields and ‘Imagine’, the mosaic tribute to John Lennon. On park benches huddled New York’s homeless, shrouded in grey, under the shadows of the tall towers ringing the park. The Dakota apartments where Lennon had been shot were across the street. “Yoko Ono pays for the maintenance of this section of the park and the homeless are permitted to sleep here,” Benny explained. I thought of our homeless in Byron, chased from bus shelters, their beach humpies a mark for rangers. In this instance, New York seemed to have a heart.

Sunday 4th Oct was a fine day. The Ecofest site began to fill up with vedors and exhibitors, including the latest hybrid cars from Toyota and Ford.

Rainbow Dreaming at Ecofest, Central Park, NYC, Oct 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

We had been assigned the outer wall of the conference tent to set up the Rainbow Dreaming exhibit. Space restrictions meant only half the exhibit could be accommodated. We punched holes into the exhibition panels and strung them out on twine like washing on a line. It worked! Sayaka Nakao, Rina Terasaki and Saya Minami, our Japanese friends from Byron Bay, who had flown in the previous day via Tokyo to help with the exhibition tour, assisted us in this improvisatory task. Ever enthusiastic, our petite helpers were worth their weight in gold. Hans and I would have struggled to manage the show on our own.

Over 25,000 visitors streamed through Ecofest that day and, as we were positioned at the entrance, many of these stopped by to check the exhibit. Among these was Nirmala, Gina Lakosta’s daughter, who was in New York to perform a burlesque show, under the stage name La Viola Vixen. Another was a couple from Goonengerry, amazed to stumble upon a slice of life from the rainbow region in the heart of New York.

Tap dancers, including the amazing Mabel Lee, Traci Manns’s former teacher, all of 80; soul singers; stiletto heeled models strutting eco fashions; Rick Ulfik from We the World, the global peace network; Parrots for Peace from the Amazon rainforest; ending with a sing along with the legendary Pete Seeger, 90 years old and still singing his peace and environmental anthems.

Jam session, Central Park, NYC, Oct 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

The sun shone down on Benny Zable’s rainbow flags; children fed ducks in the pond; whole families happily picnicked under the trees; frisbees flew in the air. Catching the last of the sunset, the tall towers seemed to shower us with riches and green fields became fields of gold.

The evening ended with drumming. Three drum circles – Cuban, Haitian and African – rang out in the Park. The moon was full and so were our hearts.

Postscript: Hans’ laptop, lost on our first night, was returned to him by the New York City Transport Authority on our last morning in New York, in a fairy tale ending to our stay in the Big Apple!

Van Gets Ripped, or The Long Sleep of Unreason

Blog 2 on the Rainbow Dreaming US tour, taking in New York’s 13th Harvest Festival & Freedom Rally, Hancock, NY; and Woodstock Museum, Saugerties, NY.

Ma & Pa Woodstock, NY Harvest Fest & Freedom Rally, Camp Minglewood, Hancock, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

New York Harvest Fest & Freedom Rally

Marijuana legalisation activists and their supporters on the East coast were to meet at Camp Minglewood in the Catskills, a couple of hours north of New York, for the Harvest Festival & Freedom Rally, on 9 Oct.

Rainbow Dreaming crew at New York Harvest Fest & Freedom Rally, October 2009

It was an opportunity too good to be missed. Our hosts from the Woodstock Museum, Shelli Lipton and Nathan Koenig, had booked us a spot at the Festival. They had also booked us into a bunkhouse, with 10 bunk beds. By now we had mushroomed to a party of 10.

It wasn’t pot, but potties that preoccupied us the three days we were there. The toilets were blocked. Much time and energy was spent agonizing over the situation and negotiating the portaloos well before the happy horde that had descended on the Camp trashed them every morning.

Harvest Fest, the child of Hemp activist and performance poet Rob Robinson, was now in its thirteenth year. The legal situation with pot in the US is complex and confusing. Some states (California) allow the medical use of marijuana. Others will bust you for possessing rolling papers. The talk at the Camp was all about the bust of a long-time hemp activist, who had been caught with a whole lot of pot that he was bringing to the festival. Regardless, the pot was plentiful.

Camp Minglewood, Hancock, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

From pot to politics. I met Kurt Shotko, a member of the Greens party. Kurt was of the opinion that the Republicans and Democrats were cut from the same cloth, manufactured by big business. “Look at what Obama’s doing in Afghanistan. He’s sending more Americans to die there. We need an alternative to the main players. We’ve got to wake up to the reality that the American dream has been a nightmare for a lot of Americans and for the rest of the world, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have been asleep for too long. We need a revival of common sense. Only a massive program of self education is going to do it.”

Then he quoted from the Populist Program, published in 1892: “They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds for the millionaires.”

1892! The sleep of unreason had been a long one.

But Kurt was hopeful of the next generation. That’s why he set up camp at festivals across the US. And that’s partly why we were there too.

Benny Zable in front of archival pic from Rainbow Dreaming, NY Harvest Fest & Freedom Rally, Camp Minglewood, Hancock, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

The Rainbow Dreaming exhibit was attached to a wall in the main music hall. Thus many, mostly young, punters got to see the exhibit. This was where The Wailers played on Saturday. I caught the Wailers when they played in Byron and I’m happy to report that they are still wailing away.

But what struck me most about the music at Harvest Fest was the pervasive influence of the Grateful Dead, the legendary sixties psychedelic band from San Francisco. From Cabinet, an established US indi band that played the main stage, to camp fire songs at 4 am, the Dead were everywhere, on so many t shirts and stickers, in so many riffs and improvisatory moments, as a psychedelic glint in so many eyes.

George Clinton & Funkedelic, NY Harvest Fest & Freedom Rally, Camp Minglewood, Hancock, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

I spoke with Jane, an artist from New York, who had a stall selling Dead memorabilia. She had grown up in San Francisco and was still a Deadhead. Her eyes misted when she spoke of Jerry Garcia: “You could see so much love pouring out of him. It was a love affair that lasted and lasted and it’s still going strong even when he’s gone.”

Minglewood Moment: across from the festival site, two lovers sit on the steps of a boat ramp. The dying sun paints purple tints on the tops of the maple and elm; waterfowl break the surface of the lake. A band is playing the Dead’s “China Cat Sunflower.”

Woodstock: The Town that Time Forgot

In Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving’s story, a man who wanders off into the Catskill Mountains, meets some rather strange companions who serve up a suspiciously heady brew, and falls asleep under a tree. When he wakes up, he finds that some 20 years have gone by and his world has changed.

Woodstoock, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

The town of Catskill is 30 minutes away from Woodstock. Some 40 years have gone by after the infamous Woodstock festival of 1969. And the world has changed since those heady days. But walking around Woodstock, the town that gave a name to the festival, (which happened in the neighbouring town of Bethel, some 100 kms away), you could be forgiven for believing that it’s still in the thrall of those halcyon days of hippiedom.

Woodstoock, October 2009. Pic: Emi iizuka

Our first port of call was the Woodstock Town Board meeting that night. Benny Zable, Nimbin’s ambassador to Woodstock, presented letters from Nimbin and the crew made a presentation on the Rainbow Dreaming exhibit and its relevance to the whole Woodstock legacy.

The meet was dominated by a spirited discussion over rezoning issues, something very familiar to us on the north coast. Would Woodstock go the way of other small towns and be besieged by rampant development, or would it stay true to its alternative legacy?

That night we also visited the Bearsville Cultural Centre (set up by Albert Grossman, one-time manager of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Band) and Alchemia Café to catch some live music, including a spirited set by Adam, a young musician we had met at the Byron market drum circle!

Guided around by Benny, on our very first day in Woodstock, we met some representatives of Woodstock’s hippie past: Jogger John, the local village savant, who used to jog everywhere, but, due to his advanced age is now is on a bike; Day A, the village barber, who runs a soup kitchen for the Rainbow Family in town; Grandpa and Grandma Woodstock, an elderly couple, dressed the part, almost town mascots. Woodstock itself is full of funky cafes and art galleries. Turn a corner and spy a Zen garden, complete with waterfall and pergola.

Peace Pole, Woodstock, October 2009. Pic: Emi Iizuka

In the centre of Woodstock town is the village green and the peace pole, with peace messages in several languages. We bumped into Fr John, a priest and peace activist. When he heard that two of our crew, Sayaka Nakao and Rina Terasaki, were from Tokyo, he beamed at them and said: “ Let’s set up a peace link between Woodstock and Tokyo. All it takes is five people. Five is the magic number. Can you find five friends in Tokyo who may be interested?”

Hippie Church, Woodstock, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

Fr John also runs the Hippie Church, on the hill overlooking Woodstock. This was the very church where Bob Dylan was rumoured to have married the love of his life, Sarah, his sad eyed lady of the lowlands. The church wears the patina of age, its icons fading in the dim, dank light streaming through stained glass windows.

Path to Buddhist monastery, Woodstock, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

In stark contrast is the Buddhist monastery next door. Set up in 1975, the monastery is linked to the 10th century Tibetan Kagyu lineage. Its halls are huge and lushly decorated with tankas, its massive Buddha is gold-painted, its prayer lamps cast a beatific glow on meditating monks and visitors; its gift shop bulges with merchandise, all a tribute to Buddhism’s growing influence in the new world.

Prophesy

The next morning, my very first snowflakes, fine and feathery.

It was too cold to venture out. Emi Iizuka and Simeon Michaels, both from Byron, had joined us in Woodstock. We were toasty warm at the Woodstock Museum, hosted by Shelli and Nathan.

Under the tutelage of Shelli, the sacred Indian corn was brought out and inspected. Purple, yellow, orange, red and black, this was authentic Hopi corn. The girls played with the corn silk, good for medicinal tea and dress ups, fake moustaches and beards. They were transformed into imaginary characters, magical beings, the warrior princesses of Genghis Khan, dressed as men to pass unnoticed amidst the ripening corn. Shelli makes beautiful corn necklaces, a craft she learnt from Rainbow Weaver, a Mohawk Clan Mother.

Padmasambhava, Buddhist monastery, Woodstock, October 2009. Pic: Emi Iizuka

Nathan spoke about the connection between the Hopi and the Tibetans. “Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, said: When the iron bird flies and the horses run on wheels the Tibetans will be scattered over the face of the earth and the dharma will come to the land of the red man.”

Nathan went on: “The Hopi’s felt that this might have something to do with the dharma coming to the US. They have prophesies too. After the swastika and the sun, there would be another force, symbolized by the colour red. This force will wear a red cloak or red cap. Spiritual wisdom will come from the East. This spirituality must spread. If that does not take root, others with the red symbol will invade from the West and crawl over the land in one day. The Hopis think this could be the ‘red’ Chinese.”


“When the Tibetan Karmapa visited Hopiland in 1974, he said: We must have know each other before; your features, ceremonies and way of life are similar to our own. When we bought Hopis to the monastery in Woodstock in 1979, the two cultures again recognized each other, and the Hopis said that the Tibetans may very well be the long lost brother who left them at the beginning of time and went to the other side of the earth to balance the earth spiritually.” Said Shelli: “When the shit hits the fan, we won’t survive unless we cooperate with each other. That’s also what the Hopi prophecies speak of. The Hopis are known as the ‘peaceful ones’.”

While we spoke of prophecies, outside, in the gathering gloom, Tiago Guimaraes, a Brazilian artist, was busy carving out a statue of a man with a guitar, the quintessential hippie hitchhiker, his hand raised, his fingers flashing the peace sign.

Elliot Landy’s book on Woodstock

The Rainbow Dreaming opening at the Woodstock Museum on Sat 17 Oct was a modest yet sweet affair: local musos were in attendance and we joined the members of the Woodstock drum circle in a bongothon.

Rainbow Dreaming crew with Elliot Landy, Woodstock Museum, October 2009. Pic: Hans Lovejoy

The highlight of the evening was meeting Elliot Landy, the famous Woodstock photographer. Elliot was all praise for the exhibit, gave away signed copies of his book to all the crew and offered to help us find a publisher for a book on the exhibition. (Sadly, I was to leave my copy on the street in San Francisco while moving house.)

The Last Hippie, Woodstock Museum, October 2009. Pic: Harsha Prabhu

The last act of the day was raising the sculpture of the hippie hitchhiker and placing him on his pedestal: a symbol of Woodstock’s hippie past and a pointer to its uncertain future as a cultural pilgrimage centre.

Woodstock Earth, after the drum circle, October, 2009. Pic: Simeon Michaels

On our last evening in Woodstock, we participated in the Woodstock Earth drum circle. Some 30 drummers were gathered in the backyard at Day A’s house. In summer, the drummers gather at the village green and spill out onto the road. As the sound of the drums rose over the autumn dusk, we were again reminded of how lucky we were with our vibrant culture of communal drumming and dancing in the rainbow region.

Last days in New York: the Bangladeshi cigarette sellers; the African rickshaw pullers in Central Park; the old men and women carting large bundles of recyclable cans and bottles; the man in Times Square offering to sell me a 15 carat gold ring or Obama condoms.

While the crew went shopping and sightseeing I wandered back to Central Park. More than the statue of Liberty, than Ground Zero, than the suicide gulches and canyons of Wall Street, I was drawn to the spot with the Imagine mosaic and tribute to John Lennon. Park benches line the walkway, each with its dedication. I sat there, amidst the touros and derros, as the shadows lengthened.

Then I saw these lines from Dylan Thomas, carved on a park bench: “Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”

Celebrating Woodstock - Part 2 on San Francisco’s Westfest and the Beats to follow. Please check my blog...

by Harsha Prabhu

Rainbow Dreaming crew at Magic Mountain, Woodstock, October 2009

NOTE: An edited version of A Fairy Tale of New York was published in the Byron Shire Echo, October 2009. While the words and sentiments in the blogs are my own, this project has been a community cultural initiative, helped along by many hands, hearts and minds. Many thanks are due.

First up, Benny Zable, Shelli Lipton & Nathan Koening for setting up the Nimbin Woodstock Connection and the sister village link between the two communities. I would like to acknowledge the help and guidance offered by the Rainbow Dreaming crew – Benny Zable, Hans Lovejoy, Saya Minami, Sayaka Nakao, Rina Terasaki, Emi Iizuka & Simeon Michaels – on this amazing journey to the US. Thanks to our hosts in the US, including Traci Mann & Nanci Callahan in NYC; Rob Robinson at Harvestfest; Shelli Lipton & Nathan Koenig at Woodstock Museum; and Douglas Kolberg & Boots Hughston at Westfest. Thanks to our principal sponsor Happy High Herbs and our media sponsors Byron Shire Echo & Bay FM. Thanks to all those who donated to the community chest to make this project possible, including all the artist and performers from the rainbow region who helped raise funds for the US tour. And a big thank you to all the freaky people of the rainbow region, who are the inspiration for this project. And the writers and photographers who so generously donated their work. This project was auspiced by Byron Community & Cultural Centre, assisted by Lismore Regional Gallery and supported by Byron Neighbourhood Resource Centre and Mullumbimby & District Neighbourhood Centre. Rainbow Dreaming was curated & produced by Harsha Prabhu & Graeme Batterbury for the Rainbow Collective. More on Rainbow Dreaming, including how to get a copy of the book, at: www.rainbowdreaming.org

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Stephen Stills and Judy Collins, playing beautiful music together

Today's "Summer Song" features a duet by two singers with a personal history that spans the decades. With Anthony Mason we'll listen in:

They'd written songs about each other, but Stephen Stills and Judy Collins had never performed together. Now, five decades after they were lovers, they're finally musical partners.

"You have no idea how much fun it is to be on stage together," Collins said.   

"It's hilarious; Ma & Pa Kettle!" laughed Stills.

"No, no, we're still younger than springtime!"

Stephen Stills and Judy Collins.

CBS News

Stills, now 73, and Collins, 79, are touring together this summer, after releasing their first album, "Everybody Knows," last fall.

Stills said, "I find her voice thrilling. It's like discovering a unicorn!"

They first met in the late sixties. Stills had just had a big hit with his band Buffalo Springfield.

To hear "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield, click on the video player below:

For What It's Worth (Remastered Version) by Buffalo Springfield - Topic on YouTube

       And Collins had hit the Top 10 with a Joni Mitchell song.

To hear Collins perform "Both Sides Now" from her album "Wildflowers" click on the video player below:

Judy Collins - "Both Sides Now" - Hit Single Version by Rick Lear on YouTube

One night on L.A.'s Sunset Strip, Stills went to see Eric Clapton and Cream playing at the Whisky a Go Go, when he spotted Collins and her producer, David Anderle, in the corner: "They were sitting in the last booth. He said, 'Stephen, this is Judy Collins.' And I said, 'Oh, my God, I've loved everything you've done.' I kissed her hand very chivalrously.'"

The attraction at the beginning, Stills said, was "visceral."

Collins added, "We were meant to be together. I mean, there's no question about that."

Stephen Stills and Judy Collins in the 1960s.

CBS News

It ignited a tumultuous two-year, on-again, off-again affair. "Sometimes I say that the rumors lasted longer than the affair," Collins said. "But the truth was that it was a very important relationship ... well, for me."

"Profound," Stills added.

"And we survived it!" she laughed.

"We were both very fairly headstrong people."

Mason asked, "So, what were the points of conflict?"

"Anything and everything, and nothing," Stills replied.

Collins was recording her next album, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes," and Stills asked to play guitar in the sessions. 

After hours, alone in the studio, he cut the first demo of a song he was working on called "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes."

Playing the guitar he'd given Collins on her birthday in 1969, he sang "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" for her. Collins recalled, "And I said, 'That's so beautiful, but it's not gonna get me back.'"

"That's a pretty compelling case, though, to put forward," Mason said.

"Yeah! No, he always said he did everything he could think of!"

The seven-minute bittersweet valentine to Collins would become a classic breakup song – and in 1969, a hit for the new band Crosby, Stills & Nash:

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Remastered Version) by Crosby, Stills & Nash - Topic on YouTube

Tearing yourself away from me now you are free And I am crying. This does not mean I don't love you, I do, that's forever Yes and for always. I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are You make it hard.

Hearing it on the radio, Collins said, "I was blown away by the song. The fact that it was about me was not  …"

"After a while you forget that," said Stills.

"But it's pretty cool that it's about me!" she laughed. "It still is pretty cool. To this day."

The years passed, but they stayed in touch, and after a phone call in 1975, Collins wrote the song "Houses," about Stills and all his real estate ("Where the first fortunes went," he laughed):

Stills & Collins - Houses (Lyric Video) by Judy Collins on YouTube

When the winter finds you, you fly to where it's summer Rooms that face the ocean, moonlight on your bed Mermaids swift as dolphins paint the air with diamonds You are like a seagull as you said.

Mason said, "You've both been through a lot."

"We have. We have," said Collins. "Terrible and wonderful."

Collins battled alcoholism in her early years. After coming out of rehab in 1978, she planned to visit Stills in Florida on tour with his band: "And he said, 'Don't come. You'll never stay sober down here.'

"He knew how hard I had struggled with the alcoholism. He knew how miserable I was, how terribly unhappy I was."

"And he didn't want to see it happen again?"

"He wanted to see me get a chance."

That chance came the next week when she had her first date with Louis Nelson. "Timing is everything, isn't it?" Mason said.

"Timing is everything. I mean, that was my magic moment. I always say he was part of the angel group the surrounded me, that helped get me sober."

The singer and the designer have been together for 40 years now.

Mason asked Nelson, "Are you okay with her out on tour with an old flame?"

"I don't mind," he replied. "But sometimes it rubs!"

But he's read his wife's autobiography:  "So, I got to the end and turned to Judy and I said, 'Well, I guess I won!'"

Stills has a longtime partner, too: his wife, Kristen.

Stills said, "The secret of it is that we married other people. She's my best friend."

She concurred: "He gets me. And I get him."

On the road, Judy Collins and Stephen Stills have become so comfortable that he suggested maybe they should have skipped all that old romance stuff:  "And she just looked at me and said, 'No.'"

No?  "Because then he never would have written 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,'" she explained.

In the end, performing together has come very easily to them. "Oh yes, it's divine," said Collins.

"Actually, she's the best partner I've ever had," he laughed. 

Strange that it took half a century to happen. But who knows where the time goes.

To hear Stephen Collins & Judy Collins perform "Handle With Care," from the album "Everybody Knows," click on the video player below: 

Handle with Care by Judy Collins - Topic on YouTube

      For more info:

stephenstillsjudycollins.com | Tour dates & ticket information

Follow stillsandcollins on Facebook and Instagram

judycollins.com

Follow @TheJudyCollins on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube

         Story produced by Gavin Boyle.

This content was originally published here.

[lindsglenne]

It’s March and I have just determined my favorite book of 2019. How can I know so early? Because this book is THAT great. The hype is true and real. I want to shout my love from the rooftops, but all I have is this blog.

Okay so first, here is the Goodreads synopsis for some insight:

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.

This summary doesn’t even skim the surface of this incredible book. It’s a different kind of narrative style than a regular novel—it was written as an oral history of a fictional band, told by the members through interviews. It was like reading the transcript to an episode of Behind the Music. Some people would be turned off by this style, but I don’t think this story could have been told any other way.

The band and their journey together is very reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac, specifically the time period when they were recording their massively successful album, Rumours. The relationships, the fights, and the success is pulled straight from Fleetwood Mac’s own history, but Taylor Jenkins Reid made these characters her own. This book also reminded me of one of my all time favorite movies, Almost Famous. It centered on young reporter following a band-on-the-rise going on a major tour in the 70’s. Reading about the many famous LA clubs and hotels took me right back to that movie.

@beccasbooksandbeats on Instagram

The ladies in the novel are the definition of independent women. They know what they want and they aren’t going to settle for anything less. Now, they don’t always display the best judgement, but no one, especially no man, is going to tell them what to do. Daisy Jones perfectly embodies the saying: “Women want to be her, men want to be with her.” She is magnetic, all eyes are drawn to her the moment she walks into the room, and she doesn’t even realize she holds that kind of power. Karen, the keyboardist, isn’t going to bend for any man because she knows she’s talented and she knows the kind of career she wants and deserves. And then we have Camila, Billy’s wife, and she’s a total badass. She knows how it goes when you’re married to a rock star, and as long he is a good husband and a good father, nothing else matters.

It was so fun to have the bandmates giving all the different viewpoints on one situation, or how the two songwriters—Daisy and Billy—would interpret the meaning of a song. The imagery was fantastic. You aren’t getting a lot of prose because it is essentially just our characters telling what happened, but Reid does such an amazing job of painting a picture, it made me feel like I was on that tour bus or in the recording studio with Daisy Jones and The Six.

Reese Witherspoon already has the rights to do a mini series and I can’t fucking wait. God, I really love this book I could just burst! If I could, I would throw a copy of this book into the hands of every person I know. Strangers, even!

Daisy Jones and The Six It's March and I have just determined my favorite book of 2019. How can I know so early?

[dovebuffy92]

My 10 Favorite Women Characters in Aaron Sorkin TV Series

1. C.J. Cregg

2. Mac McHale

3. Sloan Sabbith

4. Donna Moss

5. Harriet Hayes

6. Maggie Jordan

7. Abbey Bartlet

8. Dana Whittaker

9. Jordan McDeere

10. Natalie Hurley

Runner Up: Leona Lansing

[chiseler]

An Interview with Joyce Meadows

In 1957, a then 22-year-old Joyce Meadows starred in her second feature, and what would turn out to be her only foray into science fiction. In the Nathan Juran-directed The Brain from Planet Arous, Meadows was cast as Sally Fallon, the high-spirited but long-suffering fiancee of an atomic scientist (genre stalwart John Agar) who finds himself possessed by an evil alien brain with some mighty diabolical plans for world domination. Things only grow stranger with the arrival of a benevolent alien brain from the same planet, who, in an effort to track down and capture the evil brain, possesses Meadows’ dog.

The Brain from Planet Arous is a delightful and wildly entertaining bit of Fifties sci-fi cultdom with some solid performances and a remarkable score. It’s the film for which Meadows is best remembered, and the reason she continues to be invited to science fiction conventions to this day. Although she was a film and television fixture in the Fifties and Sixties, looking back on an acting career that has now spanned over six decades, her onscreen work isn’t central in Meadows’ own mind.

Born Joyce Burger in Alberta, Canada in 1935, she spent her earliest years on the family farm, where the nights were often marked by music, singing, and dancing on the back porch. It was on that porch that a three-year-old Meadows would sing her first song in front of an audience, but dreams of becoming a professional performer were still years away.

“You have to understand,” explains Meadows, still vibrant, sharp and charismatic at eighty-three. “My mother’s side of the family came over from Europe. She was first generation. They were Russian and Romanian, and they were very musical. Grandpa played the squeezebox, my mother sang and danced, and my auntie taught me to sing when I was two, as soon as I could talk. There was no thought of showbiz, this was just who they were. Music was a part of life. It’s just what you did on the back porch at the end of the day after all the chores were done.

Not long after that, the family moved to the States, settling first in Montana, then in Oregon. It was in Montana, when she was eight, that Meadows saw her first motion picture.

“It was that one with Glen Ford and Rita Hayworth,” she recalls. “Gilda I think it was called. They usually showed two films back then, double features, but I forget what the second one was. An older cousin took me. She was fifteen or sixteen. After she sat me down in the seat, she told me to wait, because she was going to go get some popcorn. As I sat there I started wondering how these people on the screen could be talking. When my cousin came back, I wasn’t in my seat. I was very curious. I stood up and went to the front of the theater, then up the steps to the stage they had there. I was standing by the screen. I think the newsreel had come on. I reached out and touched the screen and thought, ‘This is just paper. How can they make paper talk?’ That’s how I was thinking. By then my cousin saw where I was, and the people in the audience were getting a little upset. You have to understand we had moved from a farm where we had no electricity, no running water. The house was lit with kerosene lamps, there was an outhouse. When we moved to the United States, I was just beginning to learn about all these high-tech things.”

A year later, when she was nine, the Burgers settled in Sacramento, California. It was in high school, after joining the thespian club, starring in several school plays, and forming a song and dance duo with a friend that Meadows first began looking ahead.

“That’s when I became interested in performing as a career. I realized you could make a living at it. You could get paid.”

The years following her graduation from high school were busy and tumultuous. She started acting in local theaters (sometimes by lying about her age), including an early turn as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. The local Chamber of Commerce also nudged her to enter the Miss Sacramento pageant.

“It wasn’t something I was considering, but it was suggested to me. I looked into it and saw there were a lot of opportunities, like free modeling lessons, so I entered.”

It was her singing as well as her looks that caught the judges’ attention in the Miss Sacramento pageant, and after winning that she was contacted by the owner of The Wagon Wheel in Lake Tahoe.

“He started bringing me up there on weekends to sing in the lounge. I was a kind of opening act for a lot of big names. Every weekend he would put a couple hundred dollars in an envelope and hand it to me. I was paid in cash, and it was a lot more than I was making working for the telephone company. My father was opposed to the idea of show business as a career, so arranged to get me a decent stable job. I worked for the telephone company during the week, then went to the Wagon Wheel on weekends, but had to be back in Sacramento in time for work Monday morning.”

At nineteen, after working in assorted theaters and singing in small venues around Sacramento, she set her sights higher. Leaving the phone company behind, Meadows moved to Hollywood, changing her name from Burger to Meadows somewhere along the line. She earned a scholarship to the famed Pasadena Playhouse, and later studied acting with the legendary Stella Adler.

“She was so good,” Meadows says of Adler. “I adored her. I studied acting with a lot of people, but she was my favorite. She’d gone to Russia and studied with Stanislavsky himself, then brought his technique back to the United States. She taught so many people, and changed the whole nature of stage acting here. People always talk about how Marlon Brando was a method actor—I guess some people use that term—and how he’d studied at The Actor’s Studio. But when his autobiography came out, he said he’d never been to The Actor’s Studio, that he learned everything from Stella Adler. Of course Brando had been born in a trunk. His mother was an actress. But I learned so much from Stella, and liked her much more than the others.”

Around 1954, Meadows career took another turn.

“It was pretty straightforward and technical,” she says. “This was about two years before the film came out. A casting director saw me in a play. He said he had a part in an independent film, and that I should come down an audition.”

Although she would always remain a stage actor at heart, Meadows went for the audition and got the role. The picture in question was the American International Western, Flesh and the Spur, directed by Edward L. Cahn. Released in 1956, the revenge picture starred Mike Conners (who at the time was going by the name “Touch”) and meadows’ future Brain from Planet Arous co-star John Agar.

“It wasn’t a very big role,” Meadows says in retrospect. “And I think I get killed off pretty early.”

I asked her about the learning curve involved in switching from theater to film.

“Oh, sure,” she says.”It’s a different process, but I think I learned a lot more on Brain.”

Less than a year following her debut feature, and after appearing in episodes of the TV series’ Highway Patrol and The Web, Meadows was offered the lead in The Brain from Planet Arous.

“You need to reign things in a little,” she continued about the transition from stage to film. “You need to learn about camera placement and where your mark is. ‘Mark? What’s a mark?’ And you need to keep moving. But with my background in theater that wasn’t an issue, because in the theater you’re moving all the time.”

And what about having to act with a talking dog who’d been possessed by an alien brain?

“Talking to the dog was not a big deal. My mother always had a dog and a cat on the farm, and used to talk to them all the time. When we moved to California, the dog was just another member of the family, and we all talked to him as if he could understand us and respond.”

The decade between 1956 and 1965 was an incredibly busy one for Meadows. She appeared in a string of films ranging from Frontier Gun, in which she once again co-starred with Agar, to Walk Tall to Back Street to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In that same period, a quick scan through her filmography might give the impression she appeared in every TV show on the air at the time: 77 Sunset Strip, Wagon Train, Sea Hunt, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Tales of Wells Fargo, Maverick, and on and on, often appearing on these shows more than once. I asked what the atmosphere in Hollywood was like for a young and attractive female actor in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

“You mean creatively or the business end? The business was much tougher. There was a lot of politics involved, and back then…how do I put this? Let’s just say ‘sexual harassment’ didn’t exist. You couldn’t sue people for sexual harassment. So there were a lot of those ‘chasing around the desk’ scenes. But I was tough. I was surrounded by acting coaches and singing coaches and agents, and they knew people. It got to where casting directors would call my agent and say, ‘I have a role here I think would be perfect. It’s not a big role and it’s a new show, but it’s a way to get your foot in the door.”

“Back then,” she went on, “a lot of TV shows only had two or three main actors, so for every episode they had to bring in a lot of other actors who were prepared to play leads, which I was. That’s how I ended up on shows like Perry Mason or M Squad or 77 Sunset Strip three or four times. You look at TV shows nowadays, and they have eight or ten or twelve regular actors. The people they bring on are only going to get a small role—just one scene, or a few lines. A ‘Five or Under,’ they call it. I saw a show not long ago where Glenn Close had just one scene. And she’s a big actor! So in that way I feel fortunate to have been involved with the industry when I was.”

At the same time she was doing television, Meadows was also a member of The West Coast Ensemble , an L.A.-based theater troupe. It was an Equity waiver group, meaning they performed plays in theaters with fewer than ninety-nine seats, the actors were paid less than Equity scale, and non-union actors were welcome.

“I knew so many amazing actors there,” Meadows says. But few of them ever made the move to films or TV. There was one young woman, we were great friends. She was a great actor, a female Marlon Brando, but ended up becoming a mathematician at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. A lot of these people just couldn’t take the rejection. If you were an actor in a troupe like that, you were working. It was harder with TV, and they couldn’t deal with the rejection. If I had a lot of money and was producing, I wouldn’t even bother with a casting director. I’d just hand the scripts out to all these people.”

I asked if, after appearing in over 200 films and TV shows, any particular shows or productions were especially memorable.

“People ask me that,” she said, sighing a little. “But not really. I got to work with some very good people. I became good friends with John Agar and his wife. He was a wonderful man. Chuck Connors, too. I was a little scared of him at first, but when he saw I came prepared and knew my lines, we got along fine. One day this really beautiful woman walked on the set, not an actress. It turned out to be his girlfriend. They were the cutest couple of kids you’ve ever seen. I was a little scared of Lee Marvin, too, because he had this reputation for being really mean to other actors. But again, when he saw I knew my lines and was professional, we got along well. Just two actors working together.”

After appearing in 1970’s The Christine Jorgensen Story, about the world’s first sex-change operation, Meadows seemed to completely vanish from film and TV for nearly two decades.

People thought that since they didn’t see me on TV I wasn’t doing anything,” she explains. “I was having a difficult time in Hollywood back then. So in the Seventies I teamed up with a group of musicians, and we toured everywhere. All over the country. They had a female singer lined up, but it didn’t work out, so they contacted me. I have no idea how they found me, because they were all based in Vegas. We were called The New Ideas, we toured for most of the decade, and it was a wonderful time.

Meadows returned to acting in the early Eighties, joining The Company of Angels, LA’s first Equity waiver theater troupe, which had been formed in 1959 by Vic Morrow. Leonard Nimoy, Vic Tayback, and Richard Chamberlain. In the second half of the decade she stepped back in front of the cameras, appearing on episodes of Punky Brewster, L.A. Law, and Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, among others.

I got in touch with my agent, and he said ‘I thought you were dead.’ What a nice thing to say. But the roles were pretty good. I did a couple soaps. I was on Days of Our Lives, a five-episode storyline, and I was on another one that isn’t on anymore. I think it was called Santa Barbara. And then that other big one—it’s still around but I forget the name right now. And I gotta hand it to these soap actors. When you’re doing a film, you shoot maybe two pages a day, but these people are doing an entire script every day. I wasn’t having a very good time, so thought, ‘I don’t think I’ll do any more soaps.’ I did a lot of commercials, a few shows now and again, then quietly began to retire.

Having removed herself from the film and TV industry by the late Nineties, Meadows and a close friend, Shakespearean actor David Sage, just for fun, took it upon themselves to study and analyze all of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“We would get together once a week and take the sonnets apart, trying to figure out where they’d come from. We did this for two years, and it was one of the best times of my life. When we were finished, his wife asked us if we were planning on turning it into a show. Well, that idea had never occurred to us, but it was a wonderful idea. We wrote back stories for all the sonnets, stories about where they’d come from, and turned it into a two-person show. We’d perform the back stories, and the sonnets themselves were done as monologues. We had to memorize thirty Sonnets. And we began touring with that. We called it Will Will Fulfill: The Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the title coming directly from Shakespeare. We did that for about ten years. When David got too ill to go onstage, I did it myself. Turned it into a one-woman show and did it for a few more years.

Following that, she said, she heard from a friend who worked in a vocational center for the mentally disabled.

“If Universal had a few hundred envelopes that needed stuffing, they’d send them down there,” she says of the center. “It was work they could do, it was a job, and they’d be paid for it. She told me one day that a lot of the people down there  were interested in acting. They were from all ages, about sixteen to maybe forty-three.”

Meadows, who has also taught acting, could sense the potential there. At the time she was involved with another Equity waiver troupe.

“We rounded up some actors, had some scripts written, and we began working together. We did a Western melodrama, a vaudeville show, and a detective show. I had never had any dealings with the mentally disabled before—there were people with Down’s Syndrome and all sorts of things—but they were acting with us and we were acting with them.”

Under the name “The Meridian Theatre Academy Presents…,” the mix of professional and developmentally disabled actors staged productions in Burbank, Glendale, Newport Beach and elsewhere, usually before audiences of two or three hundred.

More recently, Meadows has become involved with a new ensemble, A Cup of Water, which she describes as “senior citizen actors performing for senior citizens.” But to Meadows personally, it’s much more than that.

“I always regretted not going to New York when I was younger,” she admits, “That was my real dream—to do musical theater on Broadway—but instead I stayed in Hollywood. Now we’re getting permission to cut these plays, like Guys and Dolls and South Pacific, down to an hour. And I’m finally getting the chance to sing all these songs I’ve always wanted to sing! I never had the chance to sing when I was doing television.”

She added that she was a little amazed at the sound that came out when she opened her mouth to sing for the first time after so many years. “It was pretty good. I didn’t sound like an old person. So I’m going to keep doing it. When the day comes I open my mouth and it’s just {growling} ‘rah-rah-rahr,’ then I’ll stop.

While for decades now, The Brain from Planet Arous has remained a perennial cult favorite among fans of classic low-budget sci-fi, more recently the resurrection of old TV shows on DVD, cable and the internet has cast a new light on Meadows extensive screen career.

“Someone told me the other day, ‘you had ten shows on last night,’ and I couldn’t believe it.”

The re-emergence and rekindled interest in vintage TV has also earned Meadows a new generation of fans.

“I get hundreds and hundreds of letters from all over the world,” she says. “Germany, Greece, Russia, Japan, even China. All these young people who have such nice things to say about my work. It’s very gratifying. It’s so cute to see them write, ‘I really love what you did in this movie or that TV show, and I’m sure you’re going to have a wonderful career.’”

For more information about Joyce Meadows, as well as autographed photos and other merchandise, please visit:

http://joycemeadows.net/

by Jim Knipfel

[touristicplaces]

10 Best Places to Visit in Florida 2020

10 Best Places to Visit in Florida 2020

When the majority think about Florida, they think about sunshine, theme parks, fruit crush and

alligators.But this former Spanish colony, that became the twenty-seventh state to enter the Union, is muchmore than that.Bordered by the ocean on one aspect and therefore the Gulf of North American nation on the opposite, it hasmile upon mile of white sand beaches.Its moderate climate makes it a well-liked tourer destination all year spherical.Here’s a glance at the simplest places to go to in Florida.

1-The Florida Keys.

The Florida keys square measure a one hundred twenty miles-long chain of tropical islands snaky around the base

of the FL dry land, connected to the dry land by a series of bridges.

The most spectacular bridge, the Seven Mile Bridge within the Lower Keys, has been oft

used as a location for films as well as True Lies and quick two Furious.

US route one, the “Overseas Highway” runs from Key Largo, Islamadora, Marathon, Lower

Keys and eventually to Key West, the foremost distant and most known of the Florida keys.

2-Miami.

One of the foremost spirited cities within the USA, Miami is best noted for its Latin culture

and sizzling nightlife.

Located in southeastern FL off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, Miami is additionally a significant

port town managing the world’s largest variety of traveler cruise ships.

Attracting tourists from everywhere the world, Miami could be a melting pot of ethnic cultures

with a large array of exciting attractions and activities.

One of Miami’s main attractions is its sunny beaches that vary from the family-friendly to party scenes.

Across the bay from Miami on an island is the city, noted for its artistic movement design

and glamorous South Beach.

3-Orlando.

Orlando is the theme-park town, having a lot of theme parks than anyplace else within the world.

There’s Disney World, Epcot Center, Universal Studios, SeaWorld and alligator Park,

to name a couple of, all of that brings fifty-one million guests a year to the present central FL town

of 2 million individuals.

This geographic area town doesn’t get hit by hurricanes the maximum amount as different elements of the state, which

makes it an excellent place to go to in FL.

One of American’s most visited cities, the metropolis is additionally home to the University of Central

Florida, that has the second-largest school enrollment within u. s.

4-Panama town Beach.

Panama town Beach on the FL panhandle offers twenty-seven miles of white sand beaches on the

Emerald Coast.

The beach could be a well-liked destination for residents of the southern u. s. similarly as tens

of thousands of high school and school students at recess.

Besides having fun within the sun within the emerald inexperienced waters, this city of simply over twelve,000

permanent residents offer sports fishing on the gulf, many playing, marine parks

including one for alligators, amusement and water parks …in short, one thing for everybody

in the family.

5-Naples.

Naples could have had rustic beginnings, however, these days this Gulf of Mexico City is one amongst the

wealthiest cities within u. s., with homes mercantilism for over $40 million.

As on Sanibel and Captiva Islands, development on the boundary has been unbroken residential.

It got its name as a result of the bay it’s set on was aforesaid to be prettier than the Bay of

Naples in Italia.

Besides its lovely town beach, the near life refuges create it a well-liked traveler

destination.

The city conjointly has spirited arts and searching districts.

6-Sanibel Island.

Sanibel Island is found simply off town within the Gulf of United Mexican States.

It is connected to the dry land by a causeway.

It is referred to as a quiet, natural travel destination, well-suited for families.

Wildlife refuges take up over 1/2 this long slender island, whose beaches square measure

also well-liked as places to explore for shells.

This island of but seven,000 permanent residents could have harbored pirates within the days of yesteryear,

if native legends square measure to be believed.

Aside from beachcombing and looking out for life, attractions embrace a highly-rated historical

the museum, a beacon light associate degreed an arts center.

7-Fort Lauderdale.

No longer the recess destination of well-liked imagination, the city is these days

a sophisticated cultural center with associate degree more and more upscale social scene.

Located on the Atlantic Ocean concerning twenty-three miles north of the city it's conjointly referred to as the

“Venice of America” because of its expansive canal system.

The city has a formidable traveler infrastructure with many hotels, golf courses, marinas

and museums.

The city’s Port Everglades is one amongst the busiest cruise-ship ports within the world, with

mega-ships outbound daily for the Caribbean, United Mexican States and on the far side.

The most well-liked section of town beach is named “The Strip” with ingestion and

drinking institutions that lie the land aspect of the beach road.

8-Clearwater Beach.

Boasting miles of white sandy beaches, Clearwater Beach is separated by the town of Clearwater

by the Intracoastal Waterway.

USA these days readers in 2013 named it Florida’s Best Beach city.

Besides birth within the white sand and swimming within the clear water, there are several activities

offered like fishing, sailing, kayaking, and dolphin tours.

Clearwater Beach is additionally an occurrence place, with a range of events happening throughout

the year.

The metropolis Phillies hold their preseason camp here whereas the Clearwater Jazz

Festival, takes place in the Gregorian calendar month.

Or guests will soak up the weekly sunsetting competition at Pier sixty, a sports fishing pier.

9-Everglades.

One of Florida’s best natural treasures, the Everglades feature a singular combination

of ecosystems that embrace swamps, sub-tropical jungles, saw-grass prairies and also the largest

mangrove complicated within the hemisphere.

Much of the Everglades square measure protected among the Everglades parkland and supply shelter

to a large kind of birds, fish, and reptiles, as well as species just like the Yankee

crocodile and also the FL panther.

From the seashore traveler Center, guests will organize boat tours to the 10 Thousand

Islands, a labyrinth of flowering tree islands.

Other traveler centers supply ranger-led tours and programs.

An airboat tour is one of the foremost exciting ways to expertise the Everglades.

10-Tampa Bay space.

The Tampa Bay space, on the Gulf of United Mexican States, 

includes Tampa Bay, an oversized natural harbor

and the cities of point of entry and St. Petersburg.

Tampa is home to the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Family-oriented activities embrace Busch Gardens, a topic park aforesaid to possess Florida’s best

roller coaster rides similarly as an installation dedicated to animals from Africa’s Serengeti Plain.

As for beachcombing, St. Pete Beach can’t be beaten.

It was named the most effective beach within u. s. and fifth within the world by TripAdvisor

readers in 2012 due to its white-sand beaches and clear water.

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[gossipnetwork-blog]

Charles Manson Dead at 83

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Charles Manson Dead at 83

Charles Manson, the cult leader of the Manson family who masterminded the Tate-LaBianca killings of 1969 and one of the most reviled and fascinating figures in American pop culture, died Sunday night, CBS Los Angeles reports. He was 83. Manson had been rushed to a Bakersfield, California hospital from Corcoran State Prison earlier this month for an undisclosed medical issue.

Manson died of natural causes at Kern County hospital, according to a California Department of Corrections statement.

A career criminal, amateur musician, enigmatic cult leader and unrepentant racist, Manson became synonymous with the dark underbelly and ominous end of the Sixties. The two-day killing spree he orchestrated in August 1969 left seven people dead and, as legend has it, sprang from his mad interpretation of the Beatles’ White Album – specifically the song “Helter Skelter” – which he believed foretold a coming apocalyptic race war.

On August 9th, 1969, tired of waiting for that war to break out, Manson sent four members of his so-called Family to a house on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles with the order to “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can.” They killed the eight-and-a-half-month pregnant actress Sharon Tate, 26, wife of director Roman Polanski; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, 35; screenwriter Voytek Frykowski, 32; heiress to the Folger’s coffee fortune Abigail Folger, 25; and 18-year-old bystander Steven Earl Parent. The next night, Manson ordered the crew, with one additional member, to a different home on Waverly Drive, where grocery-store-chain owner Leno LaBianca, 44, and his wife, Rosemary, 38, were stabbed to death. At both houses, the culprits left words like “rise,” “piggies” and “helter skelter” scrawled in blood.

Manson and three other members of his Family – Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten – were found guilty of the murders and received death sentences, which were later commuted to life in prison. The trial became a spectacle in and of itself and Manson’s notorious legacy was cemented when he carved an X (later changed to a swastika) onto his forehead in protest of what he saw as unfair treatment by the law. Manson’s absence during the murders and the grip he maintained over his Family underscored one of the case’s most chilling aspects: Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten also carving Xs into their foreheads.

Three days before he ran away from Boy’s Town, Charles Manson poses in a suit and tie. Bettman/Getty

Manson was born in 1934 to a 16-year-old girl in Cincinnati. He never knew his father, and his mother was an alcoholic. He was raised in juvenile halls, reform schools and prisons, ultimately spending approximately 60 of his 82 years incarcerated. Prior to the Tate-LaBianca killings, he was an easy target for cops, bungling burglaries and carjackings, and failing as a pimp. He divorced twice, fathered and abandoned two sons and ultimately earned himself a stay in McNeil Island Prison in Washington for forging checks and transferring women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.

On March 21st, 1967, Manson was released on parole after seven years. He was 32, it was the Summer of Love and he headed to San Francisco. As Rolling Stone wrote in a 2013 profile, Manson “had the mystique of the ex-con, he had a good you-can-be-free metaphysical rap” — and he played the guitar. Within months, Manson had corralled several young women into his orbit, starting with the Berkeley librarian Mary Brunner, and soon after 18-year-old Lynette Fromme (later known as “Squeaky”), Ruth Anne Moorhouse, Sandra Good, Krenwinkel and Atkins.

That fall, Manson relocated his growing Family – both Atkins and Brunner would become pregnant – to Los Angeles, in part to chase a dream of rock and roll stardom. During this time, Manson recorded a handful of demos that producer (and one-time Manson Family roommate) Phil Kaufman released in 1970 as Lie: The Love and Terror Cult. Decades later, his songs would be covered by an array of artists including Guns N’ Roses, the Lemonheads, Devendra Banhart, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Rob Zombie, but at the time he was unable to score a record deal. 

Nevertheless, Manson managed to infiltrate the late Sixties Los Angeles music scene through a haphazard connection to the Beach Boys after Dennis Wilson picked up several Family members hitchhiking on Sunset Strip. Manson and the girls eventually moved in with Wilson where they mingled with other members of the Los Angeles scene, like producer and Beach Boys associate Terry Melcher. While Manson was never able to impress Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson, the group did record one of his songs, “Cease to Exist,” which they reworked heavily, renamed “Never Learn Not to Love” and released on their 1969 album, 20/20, and as the B-side to “Bluebirds Over the Mountain.” Manson did not get a writing credit.

In an extensive 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Manson spoke with David Felton and David Dalton about his music career (their notes from the interview are in italics). “I never really dug recording, you know, all those things pointing at you,” Manson said. “Greg would say. ‘Come down to the studio, and we’ll tape some things,’ so I went. You get into the studio, you know, and it’s hard to sing into microphones. [He clutches his pencil rigidly, like a mike.] Giant phallic symbols pointing at you. All my latent tendencies … [He starts laughing and making sucking sounds. He is actually blowing the pencil!] My relationship to music is completely subliminal, it just flows through me.”

In March 1969, after failing to get a record deal with the Beach Boys’ label, Brother Records, Manson decided to take his anger out on Terry Melcher. He went to the producer’s house on Cielo Drive, but discovered Melcher had moved out. Instead, new resident Sharon Tate was throwing a party.

In July of that same year, Manson and his Family perpetrated two other murders. First, they killed a drug dealer named Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe, whom Manson associate Tex Watson burned in a deal. Not long after, Manson joined his friend Bobby Beausoleil as he sought revenge on Gary Hinman, a member of the Straight Satans biker gang, over another bad drug deal. Several weeks later, Manson ordered the Tate and LaBianca murders.

For months, the Los Angeles Police Department treated the two killings as unrelated. In October, 27 people were arrested at the Manson Family’s home base, Spahn Ranch, for car theft, but it wasn’t until a month later that authorities got their first big break when Susan Atkins bragged to fellow inmates about the murders.

Charles Manson sits in the courtroom during his murder trial in 1970 in Los Angeles, California. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Manson entered prison on April 22nd, 1971, for seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1971 and was originally sentence to death. However, in 1977, Superior Court of California in the County of Los Angeles commuted Manson’s sentence to life in prison.

Even after his conviction and sentence, Manson remained a prominent figure in American pop culture. Los Angeles deputy district attorney Vincent Bugliosi chronicled the case in his 1974 book Helter Skelter, which became the biggest selling true-crime book of all time. A year later, Manson acolyte Squeaky Fromme attempted, and failed, to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Meanwhile, Manson maintained a high profile from prison, granting interviews throughout the Eighties and Nineties. During one infamous chat with Diane Sawyer, he roared, “I’m a gangster, woman. I take money!”

When Hedegaard visited Manson in prison in 2013, he painted a picture of an old man with gray hair, bad hearing and bad lungs who walked with a cane. Throughout the interview, Manson maintained his innocence, saying he never killed anyone nor gave orders to kill anyone. He also denied the Helter Skelter race-war theory presented in Bugliosi’s book (“Man, that doesn’t even make insane sense!”) and downplayed the idea that he was any sort of leader: “Go for what you know, baby; we’re all free here. I’m nobody’s boss!”

Yet Manson was also frequently joined by a new companion, Star (real name Afton Elaine Burton), a young woman who moved to Corcoran, California for Manson, drawn by his stances on environmental issues. In 2015, Manson and Star were granted a marriage license, but it expired before they could marry. Nevertheless, Star devoted several years caring for Manson and attempting to rehabilitate his public image. She too carved an X onto her forehead.

In January, Manson was taken from Corcoran State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence, to a nearby hospital in California’s Central Valley for an undisclosed medical issue, per the Los Angeles Times. According to a source, Manson was seriously ill, but could not provide details. Officials from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation declined comment, saying inmates’ medical information must remain private.

Manson spent the majority of his life behind bars, but even he seemed to recognize it was where he belonged. In 1970, he told Rolling Stone, “Being in jail protected me in a way from society. I was inside, so I couldn’t take part, play the games that society expects you to play.” He even espoused his love of solitary confinement: “I began to hear music inside my head. I had concerts inside my cell. When the time came for my release, I didn’t want to go. Yeah, man, solitary was beautiful.”

Over forty years later, his opinion had not changed. During his interview with Hedegaard, he reiterated his love of prison, as well as his false claim that the Beach Boys’ song “In My Room” was based on his own tune, “In My Cell.” “Like all my songs, it’s about how my heaven is right here on Earth,” Manson said. “See, my best friend is in that cell. I’m in there. I like it.”

Listen to audio of Charles Manson from our December 2013 story on one of the darkest criminals in American history.

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[darbiblog-blog]

Health Organizations Warn of Better Costs if ACA Subsidies No longer Financed

New Post has been published on https://darbi.org/health-organizations-warn-of-better-costs-if-aca-subsidies-no-longer-financed/

Health Organizations Warn of Better Costs if ACA Subsidies No longer Financed

A coalition of eight Fitness Groups is making an instantaneous enchantment to the Trump administration and congressional leaders to fund the Lower priced Care Act’s value-sharing reductions for this year and subsequent, calling it “the most critical movement” that would be taken to stabilize health insurance exchanges.

Health Organizations

Men’s Health

The destiny of the bills has been a source of uncertainty for insurers, who are making ready their policy proposals for the ACA exchanges in 2018. Without extra information approximately whether or not they could receive the bills, which help low-income human beings find the money for out-of-pocket Health care costs, insurers say it is tough to develop top rate prices.

“A crucial priority is to stabilize the individual medical insurance market,” the Wednesday letter to President Donald Trump, administration officers, and lawmakers reads. “The window is quick last to properly fee character coverage merchandise for 2018.”

Alternate Agencies representing insurers, docs, and hospitals, in addition to the U.S. Chamber of Trade, signed the letters. While insurers have long been pushing for the subsidies to be funded, the difficulty has received renewed interest due to the fact that Republicans pulled a Healthcare bill in advance of a ground vote final month.

The subsidies are the focal point of a lawsuit brought with the aid of House Republicans against the Obama management. A federal decide dominated for the Residence that the management unconstitutionally funded the bills Without a particular appropriation from Congress. The Obama management appealed the ruling, which the Trump administration has now taken over.

The Trump administration has said it might hold to make the payments At the same time as the lawsuit is being litigated, however, has No longer decided what to do later on. House Speaker Paul Ryan has stated the Residence does Now not plan to drop the lawsuit as it addresses the wider difficulty of the separation of powers.

The Health Corporations paint a grim image for the man or woman exchanges Without the payments. They warn that No longer simplest would purchasers have fewer selections within the man or woman marketplaces because fewer insurers might provide regulations, but rates could upward push, potentially driving away middle-income individuals who don’t qualify for tax credits underneath the ACA. If extra people are uninsured, hospitals and doctors would need to provide extra uncompensated care, increasing Fees for absolutely everyone.

“We urge Congress and the management to take a short motion to ensure CSRs are funded,” they are saying. “We are committed to operating with you to supply the fast-term stability we all need and the Low-cost insurance and care that each American merits. but time is brief and movement is wanted.”

Volkswagen Ad Did not Get away Probing Eyes of Intellectual Health Agencies

Every other automaker became targeted by the suicide prevention Organizations for having commercials that advise suicide. Europe’s largest automaker and maker of famed Volkswagen performance parts, Volkswagen AG Failed to Escape the probing eyes of the suicide prevention Groups. Five Mental Health Corporations have currently demanded that Volkswagen scraps its new Tv spot that suggests a depressed man on a ledge who decides Not to leap off the building after he hears that Volkswagen is supplying 3 vehicles below $17,000.

In line with Keith charge, VW spokesman, the organization has no plan by any means of scrapping the Advert in view that “We see no purpose to prevent at this factor. We are willing to keep the dialogue. but controversy is not something VW has shied far away from its advertising.”

The complaints got here pouring in after Fashionable Motors has agreed to regulate the finishing of their First rate Bowl Ad that features a depressed robot that jumps off the bridge. Masterfoods USA, in addition, scrapped their Snicker’s Ad because homosexual activist Agencies complained that the response of the guys on the industrial is homophobic.

The Volkswagen’s business “Jumper” turned into first aired final Monday at NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The Advert becomes created via Crispin Porter + Bogusky and is also shown on YouTube. Before the Ad turned into aired, Suicide Prevention movement Community America has sent a letter to VW inquiring for its stoppage. Every other letter was sent to VW ultimate Wednesday asking for the stoppage of the Advert but this time it turned into from 4 Mental Health Groups: The yank Basis for Suicide Prevention, American Psychiatric Affiliation, Mental Fitness America and Countrywide Alliance on Intellectual Illness.

Organize your Life

Madison Street is feeling the increasing stress from activists who are eager in checking business contents. And that’s No longer all; it appears additionally that hobby Corporations truly have the strength to use stress even on some of the world’s biggest groups.

Barry Glassner, professor of sociology at the College of Southern California said, “There may be little that marketers or politicians can do if power advocacy Organizations coalesce towards them. In some instances, they’re vital corrective that society needs. In different cases, they go overboard.” but in this situation, Glassner is in aid of the advocacy Agencies.

Jerry Reed, executive director of Suicide Prevention movement Network United states of America additionally said, “There may be nothing pleasing approximately the general public Fitness tragedy of suicide.” This became seconded via Robert Gebbia, government director of The tank Foundation for Suicide Prevention pronouncing, “You should not use Intellectual ailments as a way to promote vehicles.”

however, In keeping with VW spokesman fee, the automaker Did not mean to harm every person with its business and in addition stated: “it turned into Now not designed or conceived to offend all and sundry” lamentably because of forces we can’t manipulate the entire Advert aspect got here out offensive to some humans. This becomes spoke back with the aid of crisis representative Jonathan Bernstein pronouncing that Volkswagen should dump the Advert absolutely, “VW should have discovered a lesson from GM. It is Not worth running an Ad that’s socially controversial.”

Health Group insurance Reductions

Medical health insurance businesses regularly price more for Organization policies. Many human beings expect that if they observe for his or her circle of relatives’ Healthcare insurance thru their agency or purchase as part of an Association that they’ll get a decrease monthly top rate. Even as this will be authentic at instances, this isn’t always commonly actual.

Human beings will regularly pay greater for a group health insurance plan whilst compared to what they could pay if they implemented as a person. You may be losing heaps of dollars per year if you have made the incorrect decision in this area.

Many clients are affected because of this misconception. This hurts folks that are self-employed. This raises the charges for households who have the selection to buy a collection healthcare policy from their process or a personal plan on their personal. Many human beings on COBRA may want to select to shop for a plan at once at a much lower price, but by no means get individual prices.

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COBRA is simply an enterprise primarily based medical health insurance coverage presented via your former job. in view that It is a group plan and in view that you may likely pay one hundred% of the fee, COBRA is usually very pricey. It Charges many purchasers hundreds of unnecessary bucks greater each and every month than the rates of a comparable own family plan.

The rates for a Fitness care insurance coverage is for the maximum component determined via the fee of medical claims of the human beings your coverage provider pals with you. In case you are placed within the Organization, this is composed of 23-yr olds, you’ll possibly pay lower rates than If you are linked with a collection of forty-one yr olds, However, In case you are grouped with 21-yr old women who have high blood pressure, you may pay more in your plan than In case you are grouped with forty two-12 months antique people who have lately exceeded a Fitness care underwriting technique with excessive marks.

Regularly In case you get Institution hospital treatment insurance you’ll No longer be asked any Fitness history questions and may be offered a medical insurance plan primarily based best on your gender and age. This is right should you’ve got pre-existing conditions. However, In case you are in right clinical, you will want to be grouped with the ones who’ve surpassed the carrier’s medical underwriting. Applying for a Fitness protection plan that asks Health records questions is the most effective manner to get into this Institution.

Most people believe that a group Fitness insurance plan will valueless because of the truth that, shopping for in larger quantity results in a lower value when it comes to most other matters. buying a -year subscription generally, fees less than shopping for two separate three hundred and sixty-five days subscriptions.

One extra motive people believe that Organization healthcare insurance is less steeply-priced is that during many cases an area of employment can pay a portion of 1’s medical care insurance charges. This results within the worker seeing a dollar quantity that is a great deal less than what your job pays to the insurance carrier.

Given that this is real, be certain that you are becoming the maximum tremendous price and insurance by checking with all of the Fitness care insurance alternatives to be had to you. You are probably eligible for a group plan at your location of employment with an element paid by way of your organization. Perhaps you could get a comparable deal out of your spouse’s company. You’ll be able to find a character hospital therapy insurance coverage from a good coverage service that sells to individuals and families.

warn act

Be satisfied that you take a look at out all of your options Before purchasing a medical insurance coverage. Preserving directly to the misconception that Group hospital therapy insurance is decreasing in fee than at once bought health care coverage might cost you a package deal each yr.

health questions

women’s health

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[kalachand97-blog]

New Post has been published on Globeinfrom

New Post has been published on https://globeinform.com/health-organizations-warn-of-better-costs-if-aca-subsidies-no-longer-financed/

Health Organizations Warn of Better Costs if ACA Subsidies No longer Financed

A coalition of eight Fitness Groups is making an instantaneous enchantment to the Trump administration and congressional leaders to fund the Lower priced Care Act’s value-sharing reductions for this year and subsequent, calling it “the most critical movement” that would be taken to stabilize health insurance exchanges.

The destiny of the bills has been a source of uncertainty for insurers, who are making ready their policy proposals for the ACA exchanges in 2018. Without extra information approximately whether or not they could receive the bills, which help low-income human beings find the money for out-of-pocket Health care costs, insurers say it is tough to develop top rate prices.

“A crucial priority is to stabilize the individual medical insurance market,” the Wednesday letter to President Donald Trump, administration officers and lawmakers reads. “The window is quick last to properly fee character coverage merchandise for 2018.”

Alternate Agencies representing insurers, docs, and hospitals, in addition to the U.S. Chamber of Trade signed the letters. While insurers have lengthy been pushing for the subsidies to be funded, the difficulty has received renewed interest due to the fact that Republicans pulled a Healthcare bill in advance of a ground vote final month.

The subsidies are the focal point of a lawsuit brought with the aid of House Republicans against the Obama management. A federal decide dominated for the Residence that the management unconstitutionally funded the bills Without a particular appropriation from Congress. The Obama management appealed the ruling, which the Trump administration has now taken over.

The Trump administration has said it might hold to make the payments At the same time as the lawsuit is being litigated, however, has No longer decided what to do later on. House Speaker Paul Ryan has stated the Residence does Now not plan to drop the lawsuit as it addresses the wider difficulty of the separation of powers.

The Health Corporations paint a grim image for the man or woman exchanges Without the payments. They warn that No longer simplest would purchasers have fewer selections within the man or woman marketplaces because fewer insurers might provide regulations, but rates could upward push, potentially driving away middle-income individuals who don’t qualify for tax credits underneath the ACA. If extra people are uninsured, hospitals and doctors would need to provide extra uncompensated care, increasing Fees for absolutely everyone.

“We urge Congress and the management to take a short motion to ensure CSRs are funded,” they are saying. “We are committed to operating with you to supply the fast-term stability we all need and the Low-cost insurance and care that each American merits. but time is brief and movement is wanted.”

Volkswagen Ad Did not Get away Probing Eyes of Intellectual Health Agencies

Every other automaker became targeted by the suicide prevention Organizations for having commercials that advise suicide. Europe’s largest automaker and maker of famed Volkswagen performance parts, Volkswagen AG Failed to Escape the probing eyes of the suicide prevention Groups. Five Mental Health Corporations have currently demanded that Volkswagen scraps its new Tv spot that suggests a depressed man on a ledge who decides Not to leap off the building after he hears that Volkswagen is supplying 3 vehicles below $17,000.

In line with Keith charge, VW spokesman, the organization has no plan by any means of scrapping the Advert in view that “We see no purpose to prevent at this factor. We are willing to keep the dialogue. but controversy is not something VW has shied far away from its advertising.”

The complaints got here pouring in after Fashionable Motors has agreed to regulate the finishing of their First rate Bowl Ad that features a depressed robot that jumps off the bridge. Masterfoods USA, in addition, scrapped their Snicker’s Ad because homosexual activist Agencies complained that the response of the guys on the industrial is homophobic.

The Volkswagen’s business “Jumper” turned into first aired final Monday at NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The Advert becomes created via Crispin Porter + Bogusky and is also shown on YouTube. Before the Ad turned into aired, Suicide Prevention movement Community America has sent a letter to VW inquiring for its stoppage. Every other letter was sent to VW ultimate Wednesday asking for the stoppage of the Advert but this time it turned into from 4 Mental Health Groups: The yank Basis for Suicide Prevention, American Psychiatric Affiliation, Mental Fitness America and Countrywide Alliance on Intellectual Illness.

Madison Street is feeling the increasing stress from activists who are eager in checking business contents. And that’s No longer all; it appears additionally that hobby Corporations truly have the strength to use stress even on some of the world’s biggest groups.

Barry Glassner, professor of sociology at the College of Southern California said, “There may be little that marketers or politicians can do if power advocacy Organizations coalesce towards them. In some instances, they’re vital corrective that society needs. In different cases, they go overboard.” but in this situation, Glassner is in aid of the advocacy Agencies.

Jerry Reed, executive director of Suicide Prevention movement Network United states of America additionally said, “There may be nothing pleasing approximately the general public Fitness tragedy of suicide.” This became seconded via Robert Gebbia, government director of The tank Foundation for Suicide Prevention pronouncing, “You should not use Intellectual ailments as a way to promote vehicles.”

however In keeping with VW spokesman fee, the automaker Did not mean to harm every person with its business and in addition stated “it turned into Now not designed or conceived to offend all and sundry” lamentably because of forces we can’t manipulate the entire Advert aspect got here out offensive to some humans. This become spoke back with the aid of crisis representative Jonathan Bernstein pronouncing that Volkswagen should dump the Advert absolutely, “VW should have discovered a lesson from GM. It is Not worth running an Ad that’s socially controversial.”

Health Group insurance Reductions

medical health insurance businesses regularly price more for Organization policies. Many human beings expect that if they observe for his or her circle of relatives’s Healthcare insurance thru their agency or purchase as part of an Association that they’ll get a decrease monthly top rate. Even as this will be authentic at instances, this isn’t always commonly actual.

human beings will regularly pay greater for a group health insurance plan whilst compared to what they could pay if they implemented as an person. You may be losing heaps of dollars per year if you have made the incorrect decision in this area.

Many clients are affected because of this misconception. This hurts folks that are self employed. This raises the charges for households who’ve the selection to buy a collection healthcare policy from their process or a personal plan on their personal. Many human beings on COBRA may want to select to shop for a plan at once at a much lower price, but by no means get individual prices.

COBRA is simply an enterprise primarily based medical health insurance coverage presented via your former job. in view that It is a group plan and in view that you may likely should pay one hundred% of the fee, COBRA is usually very pricey. It Charges many purchasers hundreds of unnecessary bucks greater each and every month than the rates of a comparable own family plan.

The rates for a Fitness care insurance coverage is for the maximum component determined via the fee of medical claims of the human beings your coverage provider pals with you. In case you are placed within the Organization this is composed of 23-yr olds, you’ll possibly pay lower rates than If you are linked with a collection of forty one yr olds,. However, In case you are grouped with 21-yr old women who have high blood pressure, you may pay more in your plan than In case you are grouped with forty two-12 months antique people who have lately exceeded a Fitness care underwriting technique with excessive marks.

regularly In case you get Institution hospital treatment insurance you’ll No longer be asked any Fitness history questions and may be offered a medical insurance plan primarily based best on your gender and age. This is right should you’ve got pre-existing conditions. However, In case you are in right clinical, you will want to be grouped with the ones who’ve surpassed the carrier’s medical underwriting. Applying for a Fitness protection plan that asks Health records questions is the most effective manner to get into this Institution.

Organization healthcare care rules regularly Prices more because of this. A carrier will pay extra claims for the Organization it wasn’t allowed to investigate.

Most people believe that a group Fitness insurance plan will valueless because of the truth that, shopping for in larger quantity results in a lower value when it comes to most other matters. buying a -year subscription generally fee less than shopping for two separate three hundred and sixty five days subscriptions.

One extra motive people believe that Organization healthcare insurance is less steeply-priced is that during many cases an area of employment can pay a portion of 1’s medical care insurance charges. This results within the worker seeing a dollar quantity that is a great deal less than what your job pays to the insurance carrier.

given that this is real, be certain that you are becoming the maximum tremendous price and insurance by checking with all of the Fitness care insurance alternatives to be had to you. You is probably eligible for a group plan at your location of employment with a element paid by way of your organisation. Perhaps you could get a comparable deal out of your spouse’s company. You’ll be able to find an character hospital therapy insurance coverage from a good coverage service that sells to individuals and families.

Be satisfied that you take a look at out all of your options Before purchasing a medical insurance coverage. Preserving directly to the misconception that Group hospital therapy insurance is decrease in fee than at once bought healthcare coverage might cost you a package deal each yr.

[dovebuffy92]

My Top Ten Favorite Male Character in Aaron Sorkin TV Series

1. Jed Bartlet

2. Will McAvoy

3. Leo McGarry

4. Josh Lyman

5. Toby Ziegler

6. Charlie Skinner

7. Matt Albie

8. Danny Tripp

9. Charlie Young

10. Neil Sampat

Runner Up: Casey McCall

[steene83]

Saddest day ever when they cancelled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip!!!

Matt Albie: Are you people using the confidential information that Danny failed a drug test to force him into taking over Studio 60 to deflect attention from what happened on the air tonight? Jack Rudolph: [long pause] ... He failed a drug test? Jordan McDeere: Yeah, actually Matt, I was the only one who knew about that. Shoulda trusted me a little, Danny. Matt Albie: [to Danny] Sorry about that, that one was all me. Danny Tripp: Yeah. Matt Albie: [to everyone] Ironically, I'm the one who's high as a paper kite right now, but legitimately. I had back surgery Tuesday. L5 S1, if that means anything to you. Stop talking now? Yeah, you bet.

Started watching my SSOTSS DVD over the weekend and felt we needed a fresh blog/post b/c this show is too awesome not to aknowledge on a daily basis   miss it so much!!!!