Makin’ Whoopee With Eddie Cantor
He’s not a household name today (though his character appears in episodes of “Boardwalk Empire”), but Eddie Cantor was the original renaissance man of the entertainment world in the early 20th century, conquering vaudeville, Broadway, records, Hollywood, radio and TV. Cantor began in vaudeville in 1907 in New York, moved to the Great White Way [...]
A Real Hollywood Flop
Developers of The Millennium Project in Hollywood are proposing to build two 50+ story twin skyscrapers — one on each side of the 12-story historic Capitol Records Building. It is designed to have over 400 apartments, 100,000 sq. feet of office space, as well as restaurants, sports center, a 200 room hotel, and retail space. [...]
Best DVDs of 2011
Here’s my annotated list of favorite films released to DVD in 2011 (with their theatrical release date in parentheses): “Beginners” (2011) by Mike Mills: Graphic designer Oliver (Ewan McGregor) must deal with the death of his father (Christopher Plummer) — who came out of the closet after the death of his wife — a new [...]
Washington’s Fiscal Shenanigans: Americans Take It on the Chin … Again
The People Fight Back: Storming the Tuileries (Paris), 1793 (Jacques Bertaux) Once again, the L.A. Times’ Michael Hiltzik has come to the defense of the middle and lower classes as the wealthy and corporate empowered special interests still call the tunes in Washington. Under the headline “The middle class languishes as the super-rich [...]
The Nude Marilyn
playboy-2 As some of you know by now, earlier this year I co-authored with another Los Angeles writer — under the pseudonym A.J. Laurence — The Hollywood Guide to Marilyn Monroe, a loving look at Marilyn’s life and films. The eBook includes a comprehensive timeline of Marilyn’s life; fascinating details about her films (both on [...]
The Beatles — Back on Record
beatles The Beatles are invading the U.S. again — returning Nov. 14 on vinyl in a massive set that has a $399.99 price tag at Amazon. Demand for these guys just never ends — like Marilyn Monroe, the Fab Four are embedded in our cultural consciousness. Here’s the press release for The Beatles Stereo Vinyl [...]
Late Nights With FM Radio and the Firesign Theatre
firesign In the late sixties — like so many kids of my generation who were “revolting” against the status-quo and the all-too-narrow and straight pre-fab lifestyle of our parents (and many friends our age, as well, who opted for marriage and family right out of high school) — I would listen to the then-new phenomena [...]
Grove Press Publisher Barney Rosset, Champion of Free Speech, Dies
In 1963 — still a fresh-faced high school student just beginning to feel the need to step out and express myself, to maybe “revolt” against the staid and stunting middle-class rules and regulations that governed my school and social life — I was working on my uncle Mort’s parking lots in Los Angeles and Beverly [...]
The End Is Near?
ocean-trash I don’t think the world will end in my lifetime — though it will end when I die — but maybe there was something to the fact that the Mayans’ calendar stopped at the end of 2012.* We humans are so messing up the earth that we might as well stop counting years going [...]
In Memorium: Sean Bonniwell, The Music Machine
Sean Bonniwell, iconoclastic lead singer/songwriter of Los Angeles’ proto-punk garage band the Music Machine, has died of lung cancer in Visalia, Calif. He was 71. Though much of the great rock ‘n’ roll of the late 50s and early 60s were made by garage bands, early punks or lone renegades (think Buddy Holly, the great [...]
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