2013 marked the 100th year since the first film was made in Hollywood, and in that time one American neighborhood more than any other has consistently supplied the film and television industry with a seemingly inexhaustible pool of talent: Brooklyn, New York. From Clara Bow in the era of silent film to Gabby Sidibe in the digital – the talented sons and daughters of Brooklyn have made their way West and we have all been the beneficiaries.
Show me a good fellow backstage, and I’ll show you a lousy actor onstage famously stated W.C. Fields. The author, former Hollywood press agent David Hanna, proves the comedian’s point with numerous anecdotes drawn from both Broadway and Hollywood.
There is much that can be said about those unfortunate men whom life does not treat properly and to whom only death gives the glory they had so wanted to know…One finds them on thrones, in society, among artists, among bourgeoisie, and in the lower classes. Modigliani has his place on this list of grief. His name follows hard upon those tragic ones, Van Gogh and Gauguin.
A convergence of unhappy circumstances compelled Modigliani to live poorly and to die miserably.
An art review of the American painter, Grant Wood (1891 – 1942), and his efforts to illustrate a 1935 children’s book titled Farm on the Hill
Wood, a reigning member of the Regionalism School in American art, had come into the public eye some six years earlier with the creation of his painting, American Gothic, is quoted in this article concerning his creative process and the importance his vision of Iowa plays while painting:
…Mr Wood seceded from the neo-meditationists of Paris because when he began to meditate he realized that ‘all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.’
Click here to read a 1942 article by Rockwell Kent on the proper roll of American artists during wartime.
Here is a small article that appeared during the middle of the war saying that there were German parishioners within both Protestant and Catholic churches who offered food and shelter to the various assorted minorities (primarily Jews) who were persecuted by the Nazis.
This article makes a passing reference to a Soviet defector who jumped ship in 1937 in order to escape Stalin’s seemingly random purges, his name was General Alexander Barmine (1899 – 1987). In his READER’S DIGEST piece from October, 1944 (the article can be read here) Barmine declared that Soviet spies were rapidly filling up positions within the U.S. Government. His more alarming proclamation was when he wrote that FDR’s administration was protecting them – this implied that Red agents were already perched in the highest positions. When W.W. II ended (along with the Soviet alliance) both political parties in Washington agreed to weed out these moles – but they couldn’t agree as to how deep the infiltration was. The Democrats believed that by 1953 most of the Communists had been found, the Republicans felt otherwise.
Here is an article that discusses the surprising relevance that the music of Irving Berlin (1888 – 1989) was playing in the American music world of the 1930s.
Click here to read about Irving Berlin’s theatrical production during W.W. I…
In the attached 1914 magazine profile, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin (1851 – 1935) asked, Who is Goldberg? and then jumped right in and proceeded to answer that question. However, the reader should understand that in 1914 it simply did not take very long to give the answer. With so much good work yet to come, this article outlined the cartoonist’s earliest employment record while making clear that he was already well known for his invention gags, which had already appeared in many papers across the United States.
If you would like to read a 1930 article written by Rube Goldberg click here.
Click here to see an anti-New Deal cartoon that Goldberg drew in 1939.
A news column that is appropriately drenched in the gravitas of the day because it announced that the short-lived age of atomic security that brought W.W. II to a close had come to an end. A new epoch had arrived at 11:00 a.m., September 23, 1949, when President Harry Truman announced
We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.
With nuclear bombs must come a nuclear strategy:
click here to read about that…
Christian Dior, the Frenchman who covered up women’s legs with his post-war ‘New Look’, has now decided that the female bosom must go. In fact, if Dior has his way, the feminine figure itself will go – the bust flattened to the backbone, the wasp-waist a thing of the past, the fair curve destined to be replaced by the washboard look of the 20s.
