I post a weekly diary of the historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I featured this past week in "Cheers & Jeers". For example .....
You know a potential Separated at Birth when you see a photograph of someone you know ... only to find out it is someone else ...
SEPARATED at BIRTH - Italian film star Elisabetta Canalis - George Clooney's former girlfriend, who will appear on Dancing With the Stars this season .....
... and Hilary Swank - the two-time Academy Award winner.
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
ART NOTES - an exhibition showcasing prints created under the Federal Art Project, a unit of the Works Progress Administration (or WPA) is at the Asheville, North Carolina Art Museum to September 25th.
YUK for today - you may have heard of the Boston accountant Harry Markopolos - who turned a simple request from his boss to determine whether the continuous positive returns from Bernard Madoff could possibly be real ... into a relentless quest to convince the SEC to investigate Madoff .. all to no avail. Now, with talks underway for a Hollywood film version: he is speculating on who they might cast. 'Mel Gibson obviously, he’s going to play Bernie.'
MONDAY's CHILD is Nyx the Cat - born without eyeballs and with a stubby tail, possibly due to an injury.
She watches over the Chesterfield County Public Library in Virginia and even has her own Facebook page.
RECENT ACTIONS by the conservative Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper include restoring the “royal” prefix to Canada's navy and air force - undoing actions taken by the Liberal Party years ago - but strikes at least one historian as being a throwback to colonial times.
JEERS to the xenophobic right-wing Swiss People’s Party who believe they have a winning advertising strategy (to overcome studies indicating Swiss women are less interested in politics than men). Their latest offering shows three women at a lakeside bathing area ogling a handsome man .... until lays out his blue European Union towel.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - film star Elizabeth Banks ...
... and TV host/best-selling author Chelsea Handler ......
..... and the two spoke on Chelsea Lately about being mistaken for each other.
AUCTION NOTES - a 110-strong guitar collection owned by the film star Richard Gere - which includes a 1958 Gibson Flying V once belonging to bluesman Albert King as well as a 1931 CF Martin D-28 acoustic guitar - will go on auction at Christie's in New York this coming October, with proceeds (expected to be around $1 million) to fund humanitarian causes globally.
ART NOTES - the exhibit Above Timberline: Engravings by Carl Rungius is at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to October 2nd.
YOU MAY HAVE HEARD of the Move Your Money campaign - to withdraw money from large, too-big-to-fail banks and invest instead with smaller community banks or credit unions.
In Australia this will be made easier next July under new rules to make banks - and not their customers - responsible for transferring all automatic debits and credits into a new account. If a customer authorizes their new financial institution to do so: it would be required to transfer all automatic transactions from the old account - including deductions for mortgage payments, rent, electricity and gas bills, gym memberships or childcare fees - and to contact creditors and debtors to give them account details, including informing an employer of the new account number for any automatic paycheck deposits.
TUESDAY's CHILD is Daredevil the Cat - a blind kitteh found last month abandoned in a deceased woman's California home - and was just adopted by a family with experience in caring for a blind cat.
IN a REVERSAL of policy: the nation of Finland will phase out its use of land mines - breaking with its long-standing policy that eliminating them would fundamentally weaken the country’s defense capability - and comply with the Ottawa Treaty banning them, joining 156 other nations that have done so already.
A COMMISSION investigating human rights abuses under the regime of the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet says there are nearly 10,000 more victims than previously documented.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - TV star Joseph Gordon-Levitt ("Third Rock") and the late Australian film star Heath Ledger.
FASHION NOTES - fears of turning up to a wedding or party and finding someone else in an 'identi-dress' – especially if they look better in it – may become a thing of the past in Britain as several stores are rolling out a 90-minute "seamless" delivery service of alternative apparel.
BRAIN TEASER - try this Weekly World News Quiz from the BBC.
ART NOTES - the exhibit Heavens: Photographs of the Sky & Cosmos will be at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri to November 13th.
FILM NOTES - a new Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (Aacta) has been launched to "celebrate screen excellence", with Academy Award-winner Geoffrey Rush as its first president.
TRAVEL NOTES - the nation of Romania will offer a tour on the life of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu - which will range from places where the Ceausescu couple have stayed to the site where they were executed (on Christmas Eve in 1989) following a quick trial.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is Deuce the Cat - an Oklahoma kitteh who lost his hind legs in (what is believed to be) a farm accident. But doctors have been amazed at his progress in learning to walk, and will go to a foster home, so the humane society can determine if he's adoptable.
HISTORY NOTES - green tides of potentially toxic seaweed that have clogged several beaches in Brittany appear to have spread to neighboring Normandy - threatening France's D-Day landing heritage beaches - but unlike in Brittany, where pig farming has been blamed: the problem in Normandy is linked to waste from stables and the use of pesticides, adding to the proliferation of algae.
FASHION NOTES - recent finds from a Roman fort in England indicate the Romans had a surprisingly advanced textile industry - with dyes allowing the creation of color compositions popular with the Roman people - and these techniques grew into mass production of a type not seen again until the High Middle Ages, a millennium later.
ART NOTES - an exhibit entitled Made in Chicago is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. through January 2, 2012.
POLITICAL NOTES - President Goodluck Jonathan yesterday said his administration remains committed to the attainment of uninterrupted power supply in Nigeria before the end of its tenure in 2015.
IN a REVERSAL of the home-brewing beer revolution - sparked by President Carter's 1978 signing of legislation sponsored by Senator Alan Cranston legalizing the practice, leading to Americans producing ales (often) based upon British styles - now, sales of craft-brew lagers imported from the US have increased by 150% over the past year in Britain as they are rolled out in pubs, with the Tesco supermarket chain offering four of the most popular at 750 stores.
THURSDAY's CHILD is among many stray cats being rounded up to join a cat army - being put to work catching rats that infest pasture lands in western China.
THE IMAGE of the USA is often seen as haughty, and in a Communist country one might imagine it would be even more so. However, both online comments (as well as commentary in the China Daily newspaper) took favorable note of the actions of two high-ranking US government officials.
A photograph of the new US Ambassador to China Gary Locke ordering his own coffee (and carrying his own backpack) at a Starbucks in the Seattle-Tacoma airport - plus a visit by Vice President Joe Biden to a small inexpensive Beijing eatery (rather than a fancy restaurant) - resulted in praise for the informality of the two men, favorably contrasting them with status-conscious Chinese officials.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - TV star Vincent D'Onofrio and film star Mark Ruffalo ("The Kids are All Right").
CHEERS to the 85-year-old Sir David Attenborough - who will receive a lifetime achievement award from the International Broadcasting Convention in recognition of his 60-year career in television and natural history.
THIS PAST THURSDAY I hosted the Top Comments diary - focusing on six poems and short stories that still mean something to me, years later.
FRIDAY's CHILD is Felix the Cat - at 27 pounds, possibly the heaviest cat in Glendale, California .....
and who is now the star of a children’s book Fuddles which is based upon him.
......and finally, for a song of the week ............... there are not many post-British Invasion era songwriters who have become famous without being either a Broadway tunesmith or a popular touring musician themselves …. but Jimmy Webb has achieved this, while still managing to do some touring on his own, which may come as a surprise to people. But even if he never sold another concert ticket: the number (and variety) of people who perform his works around the world ensures his legacy many times over.
The Oklahoma native was born in Oklahoma in 1946 as the son of a Baptist minister, and was playing piano/organ in his father’s church by the age of 12. His father only allowed country and white Gospel music on the radio, and when Webb first started performing out of church, that’s what he played. But the sounds of Elvis crept into his playing, and as a 14 year-old in 1961 the first 45 he ever bought was a song entitled Turn Around, Look at Me (which was written by the songwriter Jerry Capehart) because he liked the voice of its performer. Jimmy Webb began composing 'answer records' to the many hits he listened to and – with his love of literature – felt he could routinely improve upon them.
The family moved to California in 1964 but – after the death of his mother the next year – his father decided to return to Oklahoma. Jimmy, now 18, decided he wanted to remain at San Bernardino Community College to pursue a songwriting career and – while his father felt his son’s career choice would break his heart – nonetheless gave him $40, saying ....... "It’s all I have".
Making the rounds of the Los Angeles studios and publishers, he found rejection after rejection until he finally took the elevator up to the 12th floor (in the the tallest building he’d ever been in) and walked up to the studios of ….. Motown Records (West). The receptionist was puzzled as to why this young white man was walking into a soul music label, but was intrigued enough to bring one of his tapes into the inner offices … and when a man stuck his head out the door and said softly, 'Would you come in here, please?' ….. Jimmy Webb considers that an allegorical moment "when the door opened for me"; that it was an African-American owned company that first hired him. And his first song ever recorded was "My Christmas Tree” by the Supremes in 1965. Among his work at Motown, he wrote one song that was tried-out with several singers .. but never sounded right for anyone.
The following year the musician/producer Johnny Rivers (of Secret Agent Man fame) heard Webb performing, convinced his management company Soul City to buy-out Webb's contract with Motown and Rivers recorded that leftover Motown song, achieving a modest hit with it. Meanwhile, the singer on that first record Webb ever bought (that was mentioned before) heard Rivers' version on the radio – and Glen Campbell’s 1967 version of By the Time I Get to Phoenix - which was partly based on Webb’s dating a cousin of Linda Ronstadt - became Glen Campbell's breakthrough hit.
Meanwhile, the Soul City company had also signed the band The Fifth Dimension - and their recording of Webb’s song Up, Up and Away reached #7 in the Billboard charts. Between them, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Up, Up and Away" won eight Grammy awards and had established Jimmy Webb as a top-tier tunesmith.
By the time 1968 came around, Jimmy Webb realized the music scene was changing, with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds – and so he sought to create extended songs with more adventurous lyrics. The result was MacArthur Park – with the late Richard Harris singing it in a quite over-the-top style. This song came in at #1 on Dave Barry’s Worst Song list – and both the lyrics and Richard Harris’ singing are .... well, perhaps questionable – but it has been covered by people from Frank Sinatra to Chet Atkins to Aretha Franklin to the Four Tops … and was a Grammy country song winner for Waylon Jennings (in 1969) and Donna Summers’ 1978 disco-based version was the only Jimmy Webb song ever to reach #1 in the pop charts. Jimmy Webb noted that his earlier songs were up against the Beatles juggernaut, but says today that "I stand by MacArthur Park".
Meanwhile, Glen Campbell went on to record more of Webb’s songs, including "Where’s the Playground, Susie?" and Galveston – in the process, becoming the premier interpreter of Webb’s songs. At the same time, Jimmy Webb tried to break into musical theatre and films, and even began to revive his performing career (with the jazz guitarist Larry Coryell as a sometime sideman). But as the All-Music Guide’s Bruce Eder writes, Webb’s club performances were 'an acquired taste' and he never became an in-demand concert performer.
Yet his songs were recorded by many others besides just Glen Campbell. These include: "The Worst That Could Happen" (Brooklyn Bridge), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Judy Collins), "Didn’t We" (Frank Sinatra), "Easy For You To Say" (Linda Ronstadt), "Tennessee Woman" (Tanya Tucker), "Before There Could be Me" (Thelma Houston), "Just Like Always" (Joe Cocker) and "She Never Smiles Anymore" (Everly Brothers). A song he had written and recorded in 1977 – entitled Highwayman – became a #1 hit for Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash in 1985. Years later in 1994, he teamed up with Nanci Griffith to offer the song "If These Old Walls Could Speak" for the album Red Hot + Country – an AIDS benefit album.
In 1983, Jimmy Webb wrote the cantata The Animals’ Christmas which was premiered with Art Garfunkel as lead singer. He went on to write music for television (most notably on "ER") and in 1998 wrote the book Tunesmith – a memoir that focuses on the life of a songwriter. In recent years he recorded the album Cottonwood Farm – with his sons Christiaan, James and Justin (who tour as the Webb Brothers band) and his father Bob: who is still alive ... and (obviously) got a good return on his $40!
In 2010 Jimmy Webb released the album Just Across the River – with numerous guest appearances (including) Mark Knopfler, Lucinda Williams, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson and Vince Gill. He has rediscovered the Christianity of his youth but hastens to add that God is "bigger than any one particular denomination - I don't like it when people try to confine Him".
Jimmy Webb’s legacy is set even if he never writes another note. The performing rights organization BMI estimates that "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" – which Frank Sinatra declared "the greatest torch song ever written" – was its third most performed song from 1940 to 1990. Webb is the only person who has received Grammy Awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986 and is the subject of several performers' tribute albums. Webb cites Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim as his idols, and the All-Music Guide’s Bruce Eder believes he is "possibly the closest figure that the post-pop music generation has produced to approximate Hoagy Carmichael".
Jimmy Webb turned age 65 on August 15th, has an active touring schedule – which included a show in New York earlier this month – and will perform at venues such as Livermore, California next month.
Of all of his work: I still love the song that Glen Campbell requested that Webb write for him as a follow-up to "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" – and Campbell specified that it had to be about 'another place'. Webb came up with Wichita Lineman – which Rolling Stone ranked at #192 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. Oddly, Jimmy Webb says that he still kicks himself over the fact that (as shown below) "I need you for all time" is a false rhyme with "is still on the line". But when people meet him, they often tell him something different: that they consider that particular couplet among their favorite song lyrics of all time (if not their favorite).
At this link you can hear Glen Campbell’s Grammy-winning version – but below you can hear Jimmy Webb perform it himself – and thus you can judge for yourself about him as a performer.
I am a lineman for the county
And I drive the main road
Searching in the sun for another overload
I know I need a small vacation
But it don't look like rain
And if it snows
that stretch down south
won't ever stand the strain
And I need you more than want you
And I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman
is still on the line