Tag: Elvis Presley

Time Flies September 30

Departures:

1955 – On September 30th, 1955, James Dean was killed in a car crash in California.

The essence of “cool” has been around since long before Cheops the Pharaoh decided to redecorate the Nile with a pyramid.  It’s what makes us buy mortgages, build monuments and move mountains.  The pursuit of “cool” is the one activity shared by every single person on this planet.  When we’re young, it drives us to follow film, fragrance and fashion.  When we’re old, it compels us to dye our hair and dance at drunken parties.  It makes us dismiss “cool” because that’s even “cooler.”  Throughout history it is the one continuous immutable force and it will be around long after our children’s children have children.  But what is it?  What is “cool”?  James Dean!

This guy is so “cool” he’s got enough to share.  Just look at him!  He is the misunderstood in all of us.  He is our lonely soul at 4 o’clock in the morning.  He lives with us on the edge of outcast: unique in this universe mundane.  He is the poster child for beautiful, sensitive and restless. 

Crap!  The guy’s arrogant.  He’s got everything he wants, and he’s having fun.  He doesn’t play by his own rules; he just ignores the ones meant for the rest of us.  He’s the guy you hated in high school because all he ever did was never know who you were.  He’s always comfortable in his clothes, and he never had a zit in his life or a bad hair day.  But he’s still the most likeable person you know who isn’t you.

See what I mean?  James Dean is the perfect cross-pollination of movie persona and real-life personality. Forever frozen in time, he is the marriage of man and mythology.  Even the great Brando and Elvis himself cannot claim that kind of “cool.”  They both lived too long and ate too much.  Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin, all gone by their own hand – a very un-cool flaw.  Lennon — damaged by Yoko.  Kurt Cobain — unable to cope.   They just can’t compare.  No, it’s James Dean who leans, tres casual, on top of the pyramid of “cool,” looking down on the rest of us with those sensitive eyes and that know-it-all smile.

Time Flies September 26

Arrivals:

1774 – Johnny Appleseed.  This was a real guy!  His name was John Chapman and he did wander around the country, planting apple trees.  As a kid, I loved this story, but as an adult, I wondered where the hell he got the money from.  The fact is he was subsidized by the cider industry – very interesting. 

1933 – Donna Douglas, Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies.  She also played Frankie to Elvis Presley’s Johnny in the movie Frankie and Johnny.  And that’s about it.

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1957 – The first performance of West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s total rip of Romeo and Juliet.  It was a massive success on Broadway and in London.  It was made into a movie in 1961 and won 10 Academy Awards.  Elvis Presley was originally asked to play Tony, but he declined and the role was given to Richard Beymer who disappeared right after the movie and didn’t reappear again until 1990, on Twin Peaks.

1962 – The Beverly Hillbillies, the much laughed at television show, that laughed all the way to the bank, premiered on CBS.  Although these days nobody admits ever having watched the show, it consistently had a huge audience throughout its entire 9 year run on CBS.  It was the first of the “fish out of water” situation comedies that get resurrected every generation and have been successful ever since.

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Departures:

1820 – Daniel Boone, the first in a line of real American heroes.  He was followed by Davy Crockett (1786 – 1836), Kit Carson (1809-1868) and Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917).  After that, the frontier was closed and people settled down and started going to the movies.  Through the rest of the 20th century American heroes were made of fiction and celluloid finally culminating in Indiana Jones.  And in the 21st Century they have died out altogether.

2003 – Robert Palmer, a singer whose limited range and abilities came together, at exactly the right time, with the emerging giant MTV and the stylish art of Patrick Nagel to produce the hit “Addicted to Love” (1985).  Palmer and his managers knew a good thing when they saw it and repeated the combination with “Simply Irresistible” in 1988.