Monkee Man

Facebook friend Andrew Sandoval has pointed out this profile of Micky Dolenz, the last surviving Monkee.

And speaking of Andrew…

Being a band created for a TV show, the Monkees were controversial in their day. Twenty years later, Andrew encountered some trouble himself for being a young fan of not only the Monkees, but the Beach Boys.

Cancel Culture Wars

Following up on a mention by mih of Carl Orff’s crowd-pleasing “Carmina Burana”, the opening poem is the one that’s familiar to most everybody.

Orff was a German who remained in Germany throughout the war. I was thinking I touched upon this difficult subject not very long ago, but it was longer ago than it takes to get a Bachelor’s degree. Slow down, space/time! Slow down!

Sweden’s Neglected Composer

Herbert Von Karajan’s career didn’t suffer after the war. Perhaps it isn’t surprising I was unable to find a Karajan recording of Orff’s composition.

After a 1941 performance of the popular Carmina Burana, the composer himself said admiringly, ‘the orchestra under Karajan sounds fantastic’.

https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/karajan-herbert-von/

https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/orff-carl/

Separating artists from their art isn’t always easy. Sometimes it isn’t possible, but their work must at least be put into context of time and place. Whether for a musical figure, or a cartoonist like the Belgian Georges Remi, aka Hergé, who was accused of Nazi collaboration.

For decades, Robert Crumb’s uninhibited portrayals of women and Blacks were both celebrated and controversial. Today, Crumb’s name is political poison and, rightly or not, he is seen by many as a toxic misogynist and racist. Space/time continues, freeing some in the process while trapping some others.

Driven to Distraction

Another favorite memory that, after 50 years, still seems like a fantasy. It happened the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, after attending the 1972 New York Comic Art Convention, which was made possible by mih.

That was the first time I met Joe Sinnott. It was also the first time Joe met Jack Kirby. In the past it was widely stated that Joe and Jack met for the first time at the 1975 Marvel Convention, but that is incorrect.

That isn’t, however, the memory that seems like a fantasy. The story you are about to read is true. The two names in it have not been changed.

After returning home from the convention, I attended a driver’s ed class that was held at the high school, paying for it myself. The first part was classroom instruction, before taking the learner’s permit test. For those who passed, driving lessons would be scheduled.

There were 10-12 kids in the class, evenly split between boys and girls. At the end of the last classroom session, the instructor said he needed to speak with me.

“Mr. Pratt, we have a problem,” he said. I had absolutely no idea what that could possibly be.

“Every one of the girls in the class has requested to go practice driving with you.”

“Uh… what? All of them?” I would have been stunned if even one girl had made such an unlikely request!

“Yes, and to avoid disappointing the ladies I have assigned you a rather difficult schedule. I’m sure you don’t mind.”

I swear this really happened, and I’m not making it up! I was, to use the British expression, gobsmacked. It was as if I’d been suddenly made aware of an entirely different plane of reality, where high school sports stars and bad boys with motorcycles existed. But I was just a nerdy, glasses-wearing, comic book fanboy.

I actually did mind knowing why the instructor had given me a crazy schedule, because I was extra nervous every time I was in that AMC Hornet sedan, thinking about the girls in the car with me. I was either behind the wheel with two of them in the back seat, or I was in the back sitting next to one of them! I remember quite vividly that I was so distracted seeing Diane and her friend Cindy in the rearview mirror I almost drove through a stop sign. The instructor had to slam the secondary brake pedal installed on the passenger side.

There was no such distraction when I was ready to take the driving test. I recall the RMV guy told me to go the wrong way down a one-way street. Are trick questions supposed to be part of the test? Anyway, I passed, and that was — gulp! — fifty years ago.

Palmer Art

Tom Palmer was as much a commercial artist and painter as he was a comic book inker. Here are a few examples.

I love these hard-boiled, cheesy magazine covers.

From short-lived Skywald Publishing, where Sol Brodsky continued in the tradition of his old Magazine Management boss, Martin Goodman.

From Marvel in 1978, this is the cover to the second comic book telling of the Beatles story. Joe Sinnott illustrated the first one, in 1964.