Monday, April 22, 2024
Like the man says — that anniversary is today! And I’d love to share a little article about it here with you…but for the fact that I’m presenting a talk on that very topic this Sunda…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:18PMTrue fact: over a period of 16 years, through 8,000 blogposts, I have only used the phrase “bad movie” on Travalanche eight times, and in most of those cases, I either put the phrase in …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:42AMSunday, April 21, 2024
The title of today’s post is to clarify that is not about the excellent recovery sit-com (2017-2020) starring Ron Livingston and my man Mat Fraser. Though it would be very hip to learn tha…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:42AMSaturday, April 20, 2024
For Harold Lloyd’s birthday, a new finding aid to help you navigate our nearly four dozen posts on the great silent comedian: Poster Boy for the 1920s (Main Biographical Post) Selected Sho…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:48AMFriday, April 19, 2024
I head this post with Rembrandt’s 1662 painting The Syndics of the Drapers Guild naturally because since 1911 the image has been used to represent Dutch Masters cigars, famously associated…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 04:24PMThursday, April 18, 2024
Comedian Conan O’Brien (b. 1963) has been in show business for about 40 years, and he’s been known to the wider public for about 30 of those. By rights, I ought to hate him more (I’ll …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:02PMWednesday, April 17, 2024
As I pen this, it’s the 500th anniversary of Verrazzano’s historic discovery of New York harbor, But I’ve already blogged about that, on my other blog. So now we treat of the screenwri…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:12AMTuesday, April 16, 2024
PBS’s Robert MacNeil (1931-2024) passed away back on April 12. On the Newshour, Jim Lehrer, like most of MacNeil’s friends and colleagues, used to call him “Robin”, but I’ll refrai…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:24PMWith the exception of the Marx Brothers (and there are five of them) Charlie Chaplin (1889-1975) is the stage and screen performer about whom I’ve written the greatest number of articles o…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:12AMMonday, April 15, 2024
We have a duel objective in giving the Travalanche treatment to Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his distinguished family this morning. The first is that the Peales figured in the Ameri…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:24AMSunday, April 14, 2024
On April 14, 1894, the first Kinetoscope parlor in the world opened, at 1155 Broadway in Manhattan, not far from Madison Square Park and the Garden. Originally, my headline was more specific…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:18AMSaturday, April 13, 2024
Word has just come down that the conjoined Schappell twins, Lori and George (b. 1961) passed away on April 7. Wait! You’re already a little confused, I bet. How can identical twins be diff…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:24PMWhen I was a kid, grown-ups spoke of a fabled time long before I was born when there were as many as FOUR American tv networks operating simultaneously, keeping me spellbound in much the sam…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:32AMFriday, April 12, 2024
April 12 was the birthday of the film actor known as Chief Thundercloud (1899-1955). As it happens, there is a “thundercloud” surrounding the actor’s true identity. His real name has b…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:06AMThursday, April 11, 2024
If I look crazy in the photos above it’s because I must be! I booked two very involved and very different events back to back in two geographical locations that are both far from my house …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:42PMWednesday, April 10, 2024
I went to my local woods to witness the eclipse a couple of days ago vaguely hoping something magical would happen. Something most assuredly did, though nothing so crassly obvious as, say, a…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:42AMTuesday, April 9, 2024
With the exception of Charles Manson, surely no public figure has ever looked so unhinged in so many photographs as Valerie Solanas (1936-1988). You can actually feel the simmering intensity…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:02PMMonday, April 8, 2024
I try, very consciously, never to glamorize guns, but this is the only picture of our subject I could find that made me pay attention to what I was looking at. John Gavin (1931-2018) was a v…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:02PMSunday, April 7, 2024
I’m fairly ecstatic at the advent at Morgan Neville’s new two-part documentary about Steve Martin, not just because it filled me with such mirth and pleasure to reconnect with memories o…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:42AMSaturday, April 6, 2024
The title of this post of course because yesterday in the Northeast we experienced an extremely rare earthquake that measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, which is roughly a once in a century e…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:24AMWarning: I include spoilers. Chronic back pain combined with the flu (ugh!) sidelined me yesterday so I took the opportunity to finally catch up with Killers of the Flower Moon. To my mind i…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:12AMApril 6 was the birthday of stage and screen actress Victory Bateman (1865-1926). She was named after the triumph of the Grand Army of the Republic over the Confederacy; Lee’s surrender wa…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:54AMFriday, April 5, 2024
A reference on Robin Williams’ 1979 album Reality…What a Concept was my first introduction to Lord Buckley (Richard Buckley, 1906-1960). Buckley was gone long before I came into the worl…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:48AML.A. Friends, this jumped out at me as something worth attending, and, as Wilford Brimley used to put it, “the right thing to do”. Today at 1pm Pacific time the remains of Hungarian-Amer…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:24AMThursday, April 4, 2024
We’ve had call to mention Craig T. Nelson (b. 1944) a half dozen times or more here — I’m an unabashed Craig T. Nelson super-fan and I don’t care who knows it! And, happily, I can op…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:02AMWednesday, April 3, 2024
Exciting news for lovers of sideshow and the variety arts! The Sideshow Hootenanny (previously known as the Southern Sideshow Hootenanny), now celebrating its tenth year, and making its NYC …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:12AMTuesday, April 2, 2024
The title of this post is to clarify that it’s not about Janicza Bravo’s terrific 2020 road movie with Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun, and Colman Domingo, which is highly…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:06AMMonday, April 1, 2024
There’s something highly appropriate about Edmond Rostand (1868-1918), having been born of an April Fool’s Day, given the holiday’s history in his native country and Rostand’s reviva…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:42PMSunday, March 31, 2024
March 31 was the birthday of blues piano player Big Maceo Merriweather (1905-1953), and 2024 (as I write this) marks the centennial year of when he moved from his native Georgia up to Detroi…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:42AMSaturday, March 30, 2024
A decade has passed since my initial stab at a post on Warren Beatty (b. 1937). It is focused on one of his more obscure movies, Mickey One (1965) mostly because this blog was narrowly focus…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:06PMGreta Thyssen (1927-2018) lived at the center of a Venn Diagram that included the overlapping categories of a) Hollywood blonde bombshells of the Marilyn Monroe / Jayne Mansfield/ Mamie Van …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 04:24AM 
