Calendar: August 28

A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of August

Smokin’ Guns

August 28, 1925 was the birthdate of American dancer, singer, and actor Donald O’Connor.

Donald O’Connor was born in Chicago to parents Effie Irene Crane and John Edward O’Connor, both vaudeville entertainers. He began performing in movies in 1937 at the age of eleven, making his uncredited debut in the Columbia Pictures’ film “It Can’t Last Forever”.  O’Conner, then twelve, signed a contract at Paramount Studio and appeared in two films in 1938: “Men with Wings” playing a younger version of Fred Mac Murray’s character, and in “Sing You Sinners” appearing as Bing Crosby’s character’s younger brother.

Donald O’Connor appeared in eight more films between the years 1938 and 1939. He appeared as Huckleberry Finn in the 1938 “Tom Sawyer, Detective” and in the 1939 “Boy Trouble” playing an orphan boy with ill with scarlet fever. O’ Connor received fourth billing in “Million Dollar Legs” with Betty Grable and played Gary Cooper as a young boy in the 1939 “Beau Geste”. In 1940, having outgrown child roles, O’Connor returned to the vaudeville stage.

On his eighteenth birthday in August 1943, O’Connor was drafted into the army. Before he reported for induction in February 1944, Universal Studio, with whom he had signed in 1941, already had seven O’Connor films completed. With a backlog of these features, deferred openings at the theaters kept O’Connor’s screen presence uninterrupted during the two years he was overseas.

In 1949, he played the lead role in the film “Francis”, the story of a soldier befriended by a talking mule. The film was a huge success. As a consequence, his musical career was constantly interrupted by production of one “Francis” film per year until 1955. O’Connor received an offer to play Cosmo the piano player in the 1952 “Singin’ in the Rain” at MGM. This earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Comedy or Musical. The film featured his widely known rendition of “Make ‘Em Laugh” and the notable scene during a dance number when he runs up a wall and does a flip.

The most distinctive characteristic of O’Connor’s dancing style was its athleticism, for which he had few rivals. Yet it was his boyish charm that audiences found most engaging, and which remained an appealing aspect of his personality throughout his career. In his early Universal films, O’Connor closely mimicked the smart alec, fast-talking personality of Mickey Rooney of rival MGM Studio. For “Singin’ in the Rain” however, MGM cultivated a much more sympathetic sidekick persona, and that remained O’Connor’s signature image.

Jon Atkinson, “Casa Batlló”

Jon Atkinson, “Casa Batlló”

Jon Atkinson is a wildlife and travel photographer.

Casa Batlló was designed by Gaudí for Josep Batlló, a wealthy aristocrat, as an home. Gaudí used colours and shapes found in marine life as inspiration for his creativity in this building e.g. the colours chosen for the façade are those found in natural coral.

Wave Rider

Photographer Unknown, (Wave Rider)

A wave demands your attention. It is very difficult to be somewhere else, in your mind, when there is such a gorgeous creation of nature moving your way. Just being close to a wave brings us closer to being mindful. To surf them is the training ground for mindfulness. The ocean can seem chaotic, like the world we live in. But somehow we’re forced to slice through the noise – to paddle around and through the adversities of life and get directly to the joy. This is what we need for liberation.”
― Kia Afcari

Alfonso Casas Moreno

illustrations by Alfonso Casas Moreno

Alfonso Casas Moreno was born in Zaragoza, Spain in 1981 and studied teaching and later fine arr, specializing in illustration. For the last seven years, he has lived and worked in Barcelona.

Alfonso Casas has worked as an illustrator for several companies including Vodafone, Reebok, ING and others. He is the author of several books, including “Amores Minúsculos”. He is also the illustrator of “No Without My Beard” , written by Carles Suñé and published by Lunwerg Publishers in 2015. Alfonso Casas’ illustrative work has appeared on the poster for the Teatro Lara Theater  in Madrid.

Calendar: August 27

A Year: Day to Day Men: 27th of August

Stretching to the Right

August 27, 1665 was the date of the first documented staging of a play in North America.

In 1665, the performance of a play was a crime, as was violating the Sabbath. Defaming the person or character of his/her majesty or their representatives in the colony was also a crime on the books.

The first documented staging of an English-language play in North America was presented on August 27, 1665 at Fowkes Tavern in Accomac County on the eastern shore of Virginia. After the first performance, the play, which has no credited playwright and was rumored to have been of a political nature, was closed by the local authorities for “showing forth profane”. Edward Martin, an Accomac County resident thought to be a Quaker, brought a complaint against the actors, resulting in all three actors in the performance arrested and charged.

The case was tried two weeks later in the very same room of the tavern where the performance occurred. To prove the charge of being profane, the presiding judge had the offending performers reenact the play before the court. The judge, apparently, found nothing especially offensive with the play and actually thought it “entertaining”. Consequently, the judge ruled the performers not guilty of the charges and freed them; he also ordered the critic Edward Martin to pay court costs for wasting the court’s attention in the first place.

The play in question was entitled “Ye Bear and Ye Cubb” , and was likely the invention of the three offending presenters: Cornelius Watkinson, Philip Howard, and William Darby. It took veiled aim at the mother country Britain’s punitive trade laws. Unfortunately, no copy of the play survives, only the public record that documents this curious little bit of very early American theatre history. This play remains the earliest known performance of a play in the British North American colonies and the first one to receive a very poor review.

A Virginia Historical Marker, Marker #WY19, on Route 13 in Accomac, Virginia, shows the probable site of the Fowkes Tavern. 

Calendar: August 26

A Year: Day to Day Men: 26th of August

Fetish

August 26, 1986 marks the passing of American comedic actor Ted Knight.

After World War Two, Ted Knight studied acting in Hartford, Connecticut where he became proficient with puppets and ventriloquism. This led to steady work as a television kiddie-show host at WJAR-TV in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1950 to 1955. In Albany, New York, Knight hosted “The Early Show” for station WROW,  featuring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies.

Ted Knight spent most of his early years in Hollywood doing commercial voice-overs and playing minor television and movie roles. He had a small part at the end of Hitchcock’s movie “Psycho” playing the police officer guarding the arrested Norman Bates. Knight guest-starred in the episode “The Defector” of the 1961 season of the syndicated television series “Sea Hunt” which starred  Lloyd Bridges. He appeared frequently in all the popular television shows at that time including “Highway Patrol”, “The Outer Limits”, “The Donna Reed Show’, “Bonanza”, and”McHale’s Navy”, among others.

Probably Ted Knight’s most well-known role was his work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” which ran from 1970 to 1977.  His role as the WJM newscaster Ted Baxter brought Knight widespread recognition and his greatest success. The Ted Baxter character was the dim-witted, vain, and miserly anchorman of the “Six O’Clock News”. Baxter frequently made mistakes and was oblivious to the actual nature of the topics covered on the show, but considered himself to be the country’s best news journalist. Ted Knight received six Emmy Award nominations for the role, winning the Emmy for “Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in Comedy” in 1973 and 1976.

Ted Knight’s distinctive speaking voice brought him work as an announcer, notably as narrator of most of Filmation Studio’s superhero cartoons as well as voice of incidental characters. He was narrator of the first season of the “Super Friends” and other animated television series. Knight’s work included the voices of the opening narrator and team leader Commander Jonathan Kidd in the animated science fiction television series “Fantastic Voyage”.

A few months after the end of the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1977, Ted Knight was diagnosed with cancer for which he received various forms of treatment over several years. In 1985, the cancer returned as colon cancer which, despite rigorous treatment, eventually began to spread. Knight’s condition continued to worsen and he died on August 26, 1986, at the age of 62. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. His grave marker bears his birth name Theodore C. Konopka and, at the bottom, the words “Bye Guy”, a reference to his Ted Baxter catchphrase “Hi, guy!”.

Crawford Barton

 

Photography by Crawford Barton

Born in 1943 and raised in fundamentalist community in rural George, Crawford Barton, a shy and introspective boy, escaped family tensions when he received a small art scholarship at the University of Georgia. After his first love for a man was unreciprocated, he returned at the end of the first semester to the family farm. Barton enrolled, at the age of twenty-one, in an Atlanta art school, making new friends and releasing his energy in the city’s gay bars and clubs.

During his time in Atlanta, Barton received a gift of a used 35mm camera and learned the basic darkroom techniques, making photography his calling in life. He moved to California in the late 1960s, settling in the San Francisco area, to pursue his photography and life as an openly gay man. By the early 1970s Barton was a leading photographer at the emergence of the gay awakening, a participant as well as a chronicler of this time.

Many of Barton’s images documenting love-ins in the park, cross-dressers in the Castro, and leather men prowling at night have become classics of the gay world. He photographed street protests, some of the first Gay Pride parades, Harvey Milk campaigning in San Francisco and celebrities such as actor Sal Mineo and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It was, however, Crawford Barton’s circle of friends and acquaintances that inspired his most intimate photography, Considered as a single body of work, his photographs of his lover of twenty-two years, Larry Lara, dancing in the hallway of their flat, standing in a doorway, or nude in the hills of the Golden Gate Recreation Area, show the richness and complexity of the man he loved most. 

In the early 1980s, San Francisco and the gay community were devastated by the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, with its onslaught of illness and death. Larry Lara died from complications from AIDS and Crawford Barton later succumbed from AIDS at the age of fifty in 1993. 

In addition to his fine art photography, Barton photographed on assignment for “The Advocate”, the “Bay Area Reporter”,  “The Examiner”, “Newsday”, and the “Los Angeles Times”. The GLBT Historical Society, an archives, research center and museum in San Francisco, holds the complete personal and professional papers and studio archives of Crawford Barton. 

“I tried to serve as a chronicler, as a watcher of beautiful people — to feed back an image of a positive, likable lifestyle — to offer pleasure as well as pride.” – Crawford Barton

Top Insert Image: Crawford Barton, “Self Portrait”, circa 1970s

Bottom Insert Image: Crawford Barton, “Jason evans, San Francisco”, circa 1970s, Private Collection

 

Robert Buratti

Robert Buratti, “The Hierophant”, Date Unknown, Ink and Pen on Paper, 15.7 x 11.8 Inches

This work is part of the Arcana Series by Robert Buratti and was inspired by “The Hierophant” card of the Thoth tarot deck. Buratti’s work is chiefly concerned with the role of the spiritual within contemporary art, and the talismanic and transformational power of the image. Influenced by the approach and experimentation of artists such as James Gleeson, Andre Breton, Aleister Crowley, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, Buratti’s work seeks a balance between the seen and unseen, the technical and the intuitive.