Month: January 2018

Mitch Cullin

Mitch Cullin, “Los Angeles, California”,  2012

Born and raised in the American Southwest, Mitch Cullin is an artist based in Los Angeles. His books have been published internationally, including the novels “A Slight Trick of the Mind”(also known as”Mr Holmes”) and “Tiideland”, both of which were brought to the screen by directors Bill Condon and Terry Gilliam, respectively. With his photographs having appeared as artwork on several book covers, his images have also been exhibited in both New Mexico and Texas, and excerpts from his long-term photo essay “West Texas Footnotes” first appeared in The Santa Fe Literary Review.

Mitch Cullin’s site: https://www.mcullin.com

Please credit photographer when reblogging. Thanks.

Reblogged with thanks to http://optichron.tumblr.com

Standing Alone

Photographer Unknown, (Standing Alone)

“During the dark hours I felt my sick heart expand and beat more furiously, and I no longer made any distinction between pleasure and pain, but one was similar to the other; both hurt and both were precious. Whether my inner life went well or badly, my discovered strength stood peacefully outside looking on and knew that light and dark were closely related and that sorrow and peace were rhythm, part and spirit of the same great music.”
― Hermann Hesse

 

Calendar: January 23

Year: Day to Day Men: January 23

In a White Room

The twenty-third of January in 1570 marks the assassination of James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray. He was the regent of Scotland under his half-nephew, the infant King James VI. This was the first assassination of a head of government by the use of a firearm.

Born in 1531, James Stewart was the illegitimate child of King James V of Scotland and his mistress Lady Margaret Erskine, daughter of John Erskine, 5th Lord Erskine, and the wife of Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. On August 31st of 1536, Stewart received a royal charter that granted him the lands of Tantallon and its surrounding district. He later received an appointment in 1538 as Prior of St. Andrews, Fife, which supplied him with an annual income.

In 1558, Stewart attended the Paris wedding of his half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin of France, who became King Francis II of France. Stewart was a supporter of the Scottish Reformation, in which Scotland broke with the Papacy and became a predominantly Calvanist church; he was also a leader of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, a group strongly in favor of a Scottish-English alliance. Despite differences in both politics and religion, Stewart became one of the chief advisors to his half-sister Mary after her return from France in 1561.

In 1562, Mary, Queen of Scots, made Stewart Earl of Moray, a new earldom for the kingdom. Included in the wealthy Earl of Moray title was Darnaway Castle with a large medieval hall; a smaller house often used by his father near Leuchars in Fife was also in Stewart’s possession. Now the Earl of Moray, he led Mary’s army and defeated a rebellion by George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly, at the Battle of Corrichie. 

In July of 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married by Roman Catholic rites  Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who became king consort of Scotland. Lord Darnley was the second but eldest surviving son of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, and his wife Lady Margaret Douglas. Mary and Darnley’s son James, the future King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England, was born on the nineteenth day of June in 1566 at Edinburgh Castle. In August, Moray was appointed Regent of Scotland for the infant King James; this was confirmed by Parliament in December. 

By 1658, Scotland was in a state of civil war. Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced by Parliamental decree to abdicate the throne and Moray, as Regent of Scotland. was leading his army against supporters of Mary. From 1668 to the end of 1659, Moray challenged and defeated almost all the northern Lords who were supporting Mary. On the 21st of January in 1570 while at Stirling Castle, he sent letters to summon Alexander Home, 5th Lord Home, and James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, to a meeting in Edinburgh.

In the midst of his travel to Edinburgh, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was assassinated at the town of Linlithgow on the 23rd of January in 1570. James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, a supporter of the abdicated Mary, fatally wounded him with a carbine shot from the window of his uncle Archbishop Hamilton’s house as Moray was passing in the main street below. Moray’s body was shipped to Leith and then taken to Holyrood Abbey. He was buried in St. Anthony’s aisle at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. Moray was succeeded by his oldest daughter and heir, Elizabeth Stewart, 2nd Countess of Moray. 

Calendar: January 22

Year: Day to Day Men: January 22

The Bamboo Grove

The twenty-second of January in 1931 marks the birth date of American singer, songwriter and producer Samuel Cooke who, along with Ray Charles, became one of the most influential Black vocalists of the period after World War II. 

Born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he was the fifth of eight children born to Reverend Charles Cook of the Church of Christ and Annie Mae Carroll. In 1933, the Cook family relocated to Chicago where Cooke attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School. At the age of six, Cooke sang in the choir of his father’s church and as a member of his siblings’ music group, the Singing Children. He joined the Highway Q. C.’s, an American gospel group, as lead singer at the age of sixteen.

In 1950 at age nineteen, Cooke replaced gospel tenor Robert H. Harris as lead singer of Harris’s gospel group The Soul Stirrers, who had just signed with Los Angeles’s Specialty Records. The group’s first recording under Cooke’s leadership was “Jesus Gave Me Water” in 1950. Other songs recorded by the group included Thomas Dorsey’s “Peace in the Valley” and Mollie Wilson’s “Jesus Paid the Debt”. Cooke was often credited with bringing a younger crowd of listeners to the genre of gospel music.

In 1957, Sam Cooke turned against the traditions of the Black musical community and decided to pursue pop music. To signal this new period in his life, he added the “e” to his surname. Cooke reinvented himself as smooth, romantic singer in the mold of Nat King Cole. He wrote many of his best songs, among which was his first hit “You Send Me” for Keen Records. In 1957, this song was number one on all the charts and established Cooke as a star. Between 1957 and 1964, Cooke had thirty songs in the top of the charts in the United States. Among these were “Chain Gang”, “Another Saturday Night”, “Wonderful World” and “A Change is Gonna Come”.

Cooke was one of the first Black performers and composers who administered the business side of music. He founded his own song publishing and management firm, Kags Music, in 1958 so he could own the copyrights to his music. Cooke also founded a record label, SAR Records, as a place where he could expand his artistic abilities and to give other struggling artists a venue to record. In 1963, he signed a five-year contract for businessman Alan Klein to manage both firms; Klein negotiated a deal with RCA Victor in which the company would get exclusive distribution rights in exchange for 6% royalty payments and payments for the recording sessions. Cooke, as a result, would receive preferred stock as an advance and yearly payments for the following four years. 

Sam Cooke, however, was killed on December 11th of 1964 at the Hacienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles. Answering reports of shooting and a kidnapping, police found Cooke’s body with a gunshot wound to his chest, later determined to have pierced his heart. The motel owner, Bertha Franklin, said she shot Cooke in self-defense. There were no other witnesses on the scene; however, the hotel’s owner, Evelyn Carr, said she was talking to Franklin by phone at the time and had heard a conflict and gunshot.

As Carr’s testimony corroborated Franklin’s account and both passed polygraph tests, the coroner’s jury ultimately accepted both accounts and returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. With that verdict, the case was officially closed. Many of Cooke’s family and supporters rejected the verdict. Singer Etta James wrote that she had seen Cooke’s body before the funeral and questioned the accuracy of the official version due to the injuries she saw on Cooke’s body. 

After two memorial services, one in Chicago and the second in Los Angeles, Samuel Cooke’s body was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. Cooke’s album “Shake” and two singles, “Shake” and “A Change is Gonna Come”, were released posthumously. Cooke received multiple posthumous awards which included a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and induction into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame. The title of his single “A Change is Gonna Come” is written on a wall of the Contemplative Court of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

Andrew Sibley

Andrew Sibley, “The Complete Trick”, 1983, Oil and Enamel Paint on Canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Andrew John Subley was an English-born Australian artist. Sibley has been commonly listed in histories and encyclopedias of Australian art as a significant figurative painter of the mid and late 20th century.  In 1944 Sibley was awarded a scholarship at Gravesend School of Art, where he studied with fellow students including English artist Peter Blake.

Sibley commenced his formal painting career in Brisbane during the latter half of the 1950s alongside notable artists such as Roy Churcher,Jon Melvin and Ian Fair-weather, Charles Blackman and Clifton Pugh. In 1960 Sibley had his first solo exhibition at Rowes Arcade Gallery. In 1962 Sibley received the Australia’s largest art award the Transfield Art Prize with his painting “The Bathers”.

In 2001, Andrew Sibley took part in an expedition to Lake Eyre in South Australia, along with nine other artists, which resulted in a book “William Creek and Beyond”, a film documentary and a touring exhibition. Sibley joined Kick Gallery in Melbourne in 2012, where he exhibited until his death in 2015.