united cocktail artists

In the early days of Hollywoodland, Mary Pickford, her swashbuckling husband Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Charlie Chaplin were among the first movie superstars. They drew in crowds, they made big money, and they decided to form United Artists in order to have more creative and financial control over their careers. They also apparently all had cocktails named after them. This post from Cocktailnerd's blog describes his liquid homage to all three, and he rates the results. I also noticed some post dialogue on epicurious.com about absolutely never substituting maraschino cherry juice for maraschino liqueur in your Mary Pickford. Clearly they are not the same. Instead mix, shake and pour out:

· 2 oz light rum
· 1 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
· 1/4 oz maraschino liqueur
· 1 dash of grenadine

I think I'm going to start ordering Mary Pickfords in various places and see if bartenders can handle it -- without consulting a manual.

the ball turret gunner

(WWII veteran John Gillard next to a B-24 with a ball turrett gunner. Click for link to original webpage.)

When I was in the 10th grade, we encountered a poem called The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner. It was in a heavy paperback anthology with very thin tissue paper pages that were always tearing, and there was a brief paragraph about World War II pilots and the American poet Randall Jarrell who had served in the War and how it had given him a great deal of writing material. We all read it, didn't understand it, then moved on. World War II was at that time something vague and past that our grandparents or older relatives talked about, and the men who'd fought never really confided what they'd been through unless it was privately to other men.

If you've been watching Ken Burns' The War on PBS and you saw the segment on the pilots who dropped bombs over France and Germany and fought in the air, The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner will make perfectly horrible sense. I don't know if they mentioned the poem during the show because I missed some of it and I am not living in the modern DVR world, but one of the veterans even noted how the ball turret area forced a soldier to be packed in with his knees up around his ears, in the belly of the plane, almost in a fetal position.

This same veteran interviewed said that they'd been fired on and the plane's pilot was killed, and he was in this strange ball turret section below bleeding for hours. His own blood froze because the temperature was minus 30 at such high altitude, and he wondered while floating in limbo like that whether he'd ever survive. His name was Earl Burke and as he was talking I remembered The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner from years ago and finally understood it. And maybe that's the function of a lot of poetry taught in high school -- to create a consciousness of something that you're not going to be able to fathom when you're 15, but it might just stay in your mental archives for however long it takes for someone else's words and your reality to intersect.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

So said John Singer Sargent, one of the great portrait artists and artists in general of the late 19th and early 20th century. He reportedly often considered painting portraits of the wealthy or prominent to be tiresome, since you always had to make the subject look appealing in order to keep a decent reputation. Though I doubt he lost this gentleman as a friend, since he made him look quite regal. This is the Portrait of Dr. Pozzi At Home (Hammer Museum), done in 1881. Beautiful red robe and skin tones there.

I read that mega-developer Steve Wynn purchased Sargent's Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife (might have been nice to use her actual name beyond her wifedom, but whatever) and is going to hang it in his new and lavish casino. Vegas seems like a bizarre place for Robert Louis Stevenson, Wife, and John Singer Sargent to end up, but life is bizarre sometimes.

** Blogger has The Sixty Minute Artist listed in their noteworthy blogs this week, and it a) is indeed worthy of note, and b) seems great for both artists and/or the art-inclined. I personally loved the Cherry Pop Tart painting.