EVEN GREEN PEOPLE GET THE BLUES

By now you know that Lena Horne has passed away. And I’m embarrassed to say that I’m not all that familiar with her music, apart from “Stormy Weather” and, well, her Sesame Street gigs.

On the other hand, listen to her give some class to “Bein’ Green”, one of the best songs ever to originate from a kids show.

Watch on YouTube

Anyway, I know Horne more for her role in tearing down racial barriers in Hollywood. This paragraph from the Washington Post obit is worth passing around:

In other films, she shared billing with white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South.

"Mississippi wanted its movies without me," she told the New York Times in 1957. "So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut."

It takes courage to stand up to a system like that. Respect.

Fight the power,

This is dF

FRANK FRAZETTA PAINTED WITH FIRE (AND ICE)

Meanwhile, many of you already know that Frank Frazetta is gone as well.

And of course, there’s any number of pop-culture touchpoints I could raise here – Conan, John Carter Of Mars, Vampirella, Meat Loaf, anti-smoking ads, Battlestar Galactica, etc.

But for me, when I think of Frazetta, the first thing I think of (besides Molly Hatchet) is this:

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I had this on CED videodisc a hundred years ago, and I watched it constantly. And I’d be lying if I said part of the attraction wasn’t watching Teegra run around in a thong (and really, isn’t that 60% of the secret of barbarian fantasy’s popularity right there?), but I was also a fan of both Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi, and I was fascinated by the process of rotoscoping and its potential.

Nowadays, of course, we have digital motion-capture, and Bakshi’s rotoscope films look clunky in comparison. At the time, though, I was pretty knocked out by it. (And hey, if rotoscoping is good enough for Tom Waits, it's good enough for me.)

As for the film itself, well, it depends on how silly you find the barbarian fantasy genre, I suppose. I wasn’t that much into it even then (sorry, but Conan never did much for me), and I haven’t seen it in 20 years. But as I remember it, the story is cliched but okay as barbarian fantasies go, and at least works as a vehicle for the animation and the artwork.

Anyway, it’s no disgrace on Frazetta, though I’m curious to know if it gets a mention in the documentary on him a few years ago.

So long Frank, and thanks for all the art.

Putting the “broad” in “broad brush”,

This is dF

AS LONG AS MODESTY IS ON OUR SIDE, GOOD WILL SURELY PREVAIL

Well, damn it.

Looks like we’re going for the celebrity death hat trick this week: Peter O’Donnell died a few days ago.

Whether he counts as a celebrity may depend how familiar you are with Modesty Blaise, which he created and wrote for its entire 40-year run as a comic strip.

He also wrote 11 Modesty novels, one of which I recently reviewed here.

So I’m a fan, yes.

I first encountered Modesty in novel form – I was in a train station in Germany in the mid-80s and in need of something to read, and with a limited English-language section available, I picked up The Xanadu Talisman. I was knocked out by the idea of a tough female criminal mastermind turned part-time secret agent, and the story was fine, well-paced British pulp. I also liked the intimate but platonic relationship between Modesty and her lieutenant, Willie Garvin.

Great name, too. Daft, but distinct. 

I’ve read the majority of the books since then, but not too much of the comics, which weren’t easy to find in the US (or at least in Middle Tennessee and southern Illinois) until recently. Now that we have Amazon.com, I’ve been doing a little catch-up on the comic strips – in fact I was looking into ordering a new volume just now, and then O’Donnell’s obit came up.

Not a big shock, of course, as he was 90. Still, I thought you should know.

And I’ll definitely be buying that new Modesty Blaise collection I was looking for.

PRODUCTION NOTE: The headline is from a song by Sparks called “Modesty Plays”. It’s about her, yes. Listen.

Watch on YouTube

The world is running out of heroes,

This is dF