It’s not just Earth Day, it’s Jack Nicholson’s birthday. He is 74 today.
Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award 12 times, eight times for best actor in a leading role and four times for best actor in a supporting role. He won for best actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1976) and As Good As It Gets (1998). He won for best supporting actor for Terms of Endearment (1984). Nicholson has been nominated for an Oscar for films made in the 60s (Easy Rider), 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s (About Schmidt).
The best actress Oscar went to a co-star each time Nicholson won — Louise Fletcher for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shirley MacLaine for Terms of Endearment and Helen Hunt for As Good As It Gets.
According to IMDB, Nicholson “was raised believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. The truth was revealed to him years later when a Time magazine researcher uncovered the truth while preparing a story on the star.”
Estelle Harris is 79 today. She played Estelle Costanza on Seinfeld.
Glen Campbell is 75 today.
Peter Frampton is 61.
Charles Mingus was born in Nogales, Arizona, on this date in 1922.
Irascible, demanding, bullying, and probably a genius, Charles Mingus cut himself a uniquely iconoclastic path through jazz in the middle of the 20th century, creating a legacy that became universally lauded only after he was no longer around to bug people. As a bassist, he knew few peers, blessed with a powerful tone and pulsating sense of rhythm, capable of elevating the instrument into the front line of a band. But had he been just a string player, few would know his name today. Rather, he was the greatest bass-playing leader/composer jazz has ever known, one who always kept his ears and fingers on the pulse, spirit, spontaneity, and ferocious expressive power of jazz.
Mingus died in 1979.
Pithecanthropus Erectus already on the CD player
And I just push that remote button to sublimity
And listen to the sweet sculptural rhythms of Charles Mingus
And J.R. Monterose and Jackie Mclean
Duet on those saxophones
And the sound makes it’s way outta the window
Minglin’ with the traffic noises outside, you know and
All of a sudden I’m overcome by a feelin’ of brief mortality
‘Cause I’m gettin’ on in the world
Comin’ up on forty-one years
Forty-one stoney gray steps towards the grave
You know the box, awaits it’s grissly load
Now, I’m gonna be food for worms
And just like Charles Mingus wrote
That beautiful piece-a music, ‘Epitaph for Eric Dolphy’
I say, so long Eric, so long, John Coltrane
And Charles Mingus, so long, Duke Ellington
And Lester Young, so long, Billie Holliday
And Ella Fitzgerald, so long, Jimmy Reed
So long, Muddy Waters, and so, long Howlin’ Wolf
“Woke Up This Morning” A3 (Alabama 3) [Longer version of The Sopranos theme]
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22nd in 1904. Oppenheimer headed the Manhattan Project.
A brilliant nuclear physicist, with a comprehensive grasp of his field, Dr. Oppenheimer was also a cultivated scholar, a humanist, a linguist of eight tongues and a brooding searcher for ultimate spiritual values. And, from the moment that the test bomb exploded at Alamogordo, N.M., he was haunted by the implications for man in the unleashing of the basic forces of the universe.
As he clung to one of the uprights in the desert control room that July morning and saw the mushroom clouds rising in the explosion, a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu sacred epic, flashed through his mind. He related it later as:
“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.”
And as the black, then gray, atomic cloud pushed higher above Point Zero, another line–“I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds”–came to him from the same scripture.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin was born on this date in 1870.
It is the 122nd anniversary of the Oklahoma Land Rush. Boomer Sooner.