"Sarah & Gerald" Cover Wins Award

I'm very happy to let you know Matt's cover design for my book "Sarah & Gerald" a novel of Paris in the 1920s, won this month's e-book cover design award for fiction! How cool is that? You can read more about the awards and other winners here.

And now...

Three goat butts, courtesy the Arizona State Fair.

Icky Origins

Of course, no really good music has come out since the war -- World War Two, that is. With the exception of Gloria Estefan and a few keen dance pieces of the 1990s, the world of music has been nothing but a vast wasteland.

Before the war, there was a kind of dance music called "swing" that bred a style of dancing called "the jitterbug" danced by people who spoke a language known as "jive." Jive contained words like "cat," "licks," "on the cob" (as in corny) and the really great word "icky" which referred to sentimental music -- the kind that was preferred by the parents of jitterbuggers.

If you ever wanted to learn this obscure language, you can get a good start listening to this very rare circa-1933 excerpt of a radio program called "Inside Story" that attempted, in this episode, to help its audience understand just what their children were saying and doing.

So, all you hep cats and gators get ready to learn some jive!

Geese!

It's migration time in America for birds that fly south for the winter. Arizona seems to be along the migration route for many birds -- including starlings and Canada geese (shown). This morning while Matt and I were playing tennis, we were greeted with two flyovers of Canada geese. We always hear them, but rarely see them flying close by. It was really neat!

Books I Am Reading

Am reading this.

Just finished reading this.

I Wonder....

Did the male dog that played the female Lassie have gender identity issues?

The Day the Spoken Word Died

Fifty years ago tonight, the world changed forever: On this date came the end of the last two radio shows we in America consider part of the "Golden Age" of vintage radio drama and comedy. Just like vaudeville before it and silent film before that, the world saw the end of one extremely popular form of entertainment as it was replaced by another (in this case, television).

While radio broadcasts had been around for several years, commercial broadcasting did not begin until 1920. The few stations that existed during that time had little idea of what to broadcast -- music being one of the first ideas. Stations began experimenting with other subjects, broadcasting radio versions of popular plays, then original plays, finally coming up with the concept of the variety show (some music, some spoken works). Programming continued erratically for most of the decade.

With the advent of the 1930s (and the conveniently timed Depression), radio content exploded. Families unable to afford other forms of entertainment saved their scarce money and purchased a radio -- the source of otherwise free entertainment as well as much-needed news and contact with the rest of the country.

The period from roughly 1930 to roughly 1955 is considered radio's Golden Age. Literally thousands of actors from vaudeville began appearing on radio, with a not-insignificant number becoming huge stars, helping to redefine the idea of "entertainment." The power of radio was unquestionably understood the night of 30 October 1938 with the airing of the innocent (but quickly infamous) dramatization of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" by the then-scarcely-known (but quickly infamous) Orson Welles.

By then, radio was certainly ubiquitous: news, sports, weather, farm reports, music -- as well as the more famous comedies and dramas -- were everywhere. Newspapers feared for their survival owing to the reductions in revenue as advertisers moved their money to the juggernaut that was radio.

(Other countries, as well, hopped on the radio bandwagon with productions in England, France, Germany, Australia and many others.)

Radio grew up with the advent of war (Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from war-torn Britain). Radio played two major roles in the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor: the Japanese bombers pinpointed Hawaii from far out in the ocean by latching onto the broadcasts of a Hawaii radio station; and radio brought the first news of the attack to America and the world.

Inevitably, television became the dominant entertainment medium in the home, and radio slowly faded away -- although quite a number of early television programs were versions of popular radio shows. For example, the most popular comedy on television ever, "I Love Lucy," was a variant of Lucille Ball's popular radio program "My Favorite Husband."

After the end of the Golden Age, there were attempts to bring back radio drama in America including the unsuccessful Theater Five (1964–1965), and the highly successful CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974–1982).

While such a wealth of radio drama and comedy will never be prominent in America again, we can still enjoy the richness of radio owing to transcription disks capturing performances (to be broadcast at "this more convenient time"); and many groups and clubs that occasionally produce live-versions of vintage radio or even new scripts.

For your enjoyment, here are the final episodes of "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar" and "Suspense" that aired 50 years ago tonight:

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar

Suspense

Happy Birthday, Maggie Cheung!

Birthday greetings go out to the most beautiful woman in the world (pictured).

A Bit of Orson Welles

For many years, I've had a saying that goes something like this: "It's one thing to think you know everything, it's quite another when you actually do." I use this when referring to people who present themselves as larger-than-life know-it-alls (actors, writers, other people with talent) who come off as pompous but who really are as good as they think they are.

Probably the first time I used this phrase was in referring to the "boy wonder" of radio, theater and cinema: Orson Welles (pictured) -- one of the very few creative talents of the 1930s and 1940s who was all those things he said about himself and so much more.

It's hard to argue the perfection of his first film "Citizen Kane" (1941) -- especially once you become familiar with the history of the period, the story behind the movie (William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies) and the fury this film caused in Hollywood. You don't piss off that many people with a single movie unless you've done something pretty amazing with it. (It has since come to be considered the most perfect example of filmmaking in the 20th century.) In his later years, he began to believe too much of his own blustery puffery and started down a long path toward creative oblivion; but there was a window when he was brilliant and we are lucky so much of his creative output from that time survives.

As you know, I'm a huge fan of vintage radio comedy and drama (especially from the 1930s and 1940s); one of my favorites being (arguably the best of the lot) "The Jack Benny Show." Recently, I've been listening to a group of episodes from March and April 1943 -- a period of weeks when Benny did not appear owing to his severe illness. (On the show they refer to the illness as a cold, but it seems he actually got a very bad case of pneumonia from touring the military camps with his show.)

Welles was asked to appear on the show in place of Benny in what became one of the greatest examples of radio work in all the annals of broadcasting. In these four consecutive episodes, Welles is presented as a character who is all the things people said about him derisively: vain, perfect, multi-talented, perfectionist, know it all. I doubt Welles was really like this (just as Benny himself wasn't a penny pincher in real life); but the Welles character created in these episodes is brilliantly funny. (And all the other regulars in the cast rise to the occasion and are fantastic.)

Here are links to all four of these episodes so you can hear how the character is introduced and then how his pomposity builds and builds. It's a tribute to the talented writers (Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow, in their last year with Benny) who were able to take his temporary loss and create some fantastic episodes of comedy.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Books I Am Reading

Am reading this.

Just finished reading this.