Author: NewMexiKen

April 2nd was the birthday

… of Larry Coryell. He turned 63.

As one of the pioneers of jazz-rock — perhaps the pioneer in the ears of some — Larry Coryell deserves a special place in the history books. He brought what amounted to a nearly alien sensibility to jazz electric guitar playing in the 1960s, a hard-edged, cutting tone, phrasing and note-bending that owed as much to blues, rock and even country as it did to earlier, smoother bop influences. Yet as a true eclectic, armed with a brilliant technique, he is comfortable in almost every style, covering almost every base from the most decibel-heavy, distortion-laden electric work to the most delicate, soothing, intricate lines on acoustic guitar. (AllMusic)

… of Linda Hunt. The actress won an Oscar for playing a man in The Year of Living Dangerously. She did not play a woman posing as a man, like Barbra Streisand in Yentl. She actually played a male part. Ms. Hunt turned 61 yesterday. NewMexiKen liked Hunt particularly as the barkeep/saloon-owner in Silverardo.

… of baseball hall-of-famer Don Sutton. He, too, turned 61 yesterday. Sutton had 324 victories, 3,574 strikeouts (fifth best all-time) and a career ERA of 3.26. Sutton never lost a turn in the starting rotation due to illness or injury. (That’s impressive.)

… of Emmylou Harris. She was 59 yesterday.

Though other performers sold more records and earned greater fame, few left as profound an impact on contemporary music as Emmylou Harris. Blessed with a crystalline voice, a remarkable gift for phrasing, and a restless creative spirit, she traveled a singular artistic path, proudly carrying the torch of “Cosmic American music” passed down by her mentor, Gram Parsons. With the exception of only Neil Young — not surprisingly an occasional collaborator — no other mainstream star established a similarly large body of work as consistently iconoclastic, eclectic, or daring; even more than three decades into her career, Harris’ latter-day music remained as heartfelt, visionary, and vital as her earliest recordings. (AllMusic)

… of SVU Detective Elliot Stabler. Actor Christopher Meloni was 45 Sunday.

The French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was born on April 2 in 1834. He is the creator of the Statue of Liberty. The statue’s face is said to be that of Bartholdi’s mother.

Union troops

… entered Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, on this date in 1865. The Confederate government and army had fled the night before. According to historian James M. McPherson, “Southerners burned more of their own capital than the enemy had burned of Atlanta or Columbia.”

The following day, April 4, President Lincoln, who had been “vacationing” at City Point, Virginia, near the front since March 24, toured Richmond (much of it on foot) with his 12-year-old son Tad (it was Tad’s birthday). At the capitol, Lincoln sat in Jefferson Davis’ chair.

Lincoln returned to Washington on April 9th (the date of Lee’s surrender). He was assassinated just five days later.

24 Hours in Durango, Colorado

NewMexiKen took the 210 mile (each way) trip to Durango, Colorado, over this past weekend intent on seeing some form of winter before it disappeared entirely. (In NewMexiKen’s view, winter is something better “visited” than “endured.”) As expected, Durango was as charming as ever and the San Juan Mountains provided the winter. [You may click on each photo to see a larger version.]

Durango was established in 1880 by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad when it extended a line north to Silverton and its silver mines. The mural on the corner of College Drive and Main Avenue depicts downtown circa 1890. The photo below shows the view (looking south along Main) in April 2006. Durango Mural

Downtown Durango

Strater Hotel Constructed in 1887, and still in service, the Strater Hotel as it appears today. The hotel is depicted in the mural above.
Durango Depot A highlight in Durango is a ride on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad to Silverton (45 miles north into the San Juan Mountains). The trip to Silverton is only possible May-to-October, though a shorter round trip runs most days the rest of the year. NewMexiKen saw the steam-powered locomotive in action Sunday, but alas no ride this time and no photos. Here’s one of the lovely Durango Depot though.

Saturday the weather was rainy in Durango at 6,500 feet but, 15 miles north along Highway 550 at 8,500, it was nearly whiteout conditions. We turned around even before reaching Purgatory (and the Durango Mountain Resort).

Sunday the sky was blue and sunny, the road clear and the snowy scenery beautiful, but once again, no photos. (FYI, the snow has been light this year in the San Juans; just 50 percent of average.)

While still beautiful and with a strong feeling for its historical past, Durango is growing rapidly. The highway north is lined with new homes, condos and golf courses and in-town home prices seem to have reached the $250-300 a square foot range. One assumes only its relative isolation (350 miles from Denver, 450 from Phoenix) has kept it even this controlled.

This photo was taken from the hotel room balcony Saturday evening. That’s the Animas River flowing right-to-left (north-to-south) through town. The proximity to the river is in striking contrast to Albuquerque and the Rio Grande. Here our river’s beauty is hidden and walking along the bank is impossible. Animas River, Durango

The original Spanish name for the Animas is the Rio de las Animas Perdidas, the River of Lost Souls.

The Pony Express

… began operation on this date in 1860.

Pony Express Station

The Pony Express National Historic Trail was used by young men on fast paced horses to carry the nation’s mail across the country, from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California, in the unprecedented time of only ten days. Organized by private entrepreneurs, the horse-and-rider relay system became the nation’s most direct and practical means of east-west communications before the telegraph. Though only in operation for 18 months, between April 1860 and October 1861, the trail proved the feasibility of a central overland transportation route, and played a vital role in aligning California with the Union in the years just before the Civil War.

Most of the original trail has been obliterated either by time or human activities. Along many segments, the trail’s actual route and exact length are matters of conjecture. However, approximately 120 historic sites may eventually be available to the public, including 50 existing Pony Express stations or station ruins.

Pony Express National Historic Trail

It’s the birthday

… of Doris Day. She’s 82 today. Day had three number one hits on her own and was the vocalist with Les Brown for one of the great hits of all-time, “Sentimental Journey.” Her most famous other single, “What Ever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)” was a number two song in 1956. Day was nominated for the best actress Oscar for Pillow Talk.

… of Marsha Mason; she’s 64. Mason is a four-time Oscar nominee for best actress — Cinderella Liberty, The Goodbye Girl, Chapter Two and Only When I Laugh.

… of Wayne Newton and Billy Joe Royal. They’re both 64. Each had exactly one top ten hit — Newton with “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” (reached number 4 in 1972) and Royal with “Down in the Boondocks” (reached number 9 in 1965). Of the two, Newton has surely done the better job of hanging on.

… of Richard Thompson. He’s 57 and he’s never had a top ten hit, however:

One of Britain’s most gifted guitarists and songwriters; Richard has been the mainstay of the folk rock scene for over 30 years. Whatever the size of his record sales, he has a reputation among his peers that is second to none. (BBC – Music)

… of Alec Baldwin. He’s 48.

… of David Hyde Pierce. Frasier Crane’s brother Niles is 47.

… of Eddie Murphy. He’s 45. Murphy was 19 when he started with “Saturday Night Live.”

What he said

Nice to read some other Pac 10 fans out there, like this by Bob Somerby:

Let’s face it. It will be plenty hard for Coach Howland tonight—hard to get his UCLA kids “up” for another SEC foe. Let’s face it—the NCAA tournament has clearly shown that Washington and UCLA were America’s top teams, followed closely by Arizona, which was eliminated when, for the second straight year, it narrowly lost a road game against a Number 1 seed. (This year, against Villanova, on one of Nova’s home courts. Last year, against Illinois, in Chicago.) And yes, when a team has played in the PAC-10 all year, it’s hard to get them “up” to play an endless string of SEC foes. (UCLA has already defeated Alabama and LSU in the tourney.) For that reason, we give Florida a chance tonight, although order has clearly been restored on the court. Despite the tourney’s scheduling machinations, it’s already clear who’s Number 1—despite what may happen tonight.

Team of Rivals

NewMexiKen recommends Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals to all interested in the American Civil War, 19th century politics and Abraham Lincoln.

Though NewMexiKen has read many other books about Lincoln and long considered him to be the greatest of American presidents, Goodwin has put me even more in awe of this extraordinary human being.

His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” led to the rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match his political genius.

But beyond even that, as Tolstoy wrote:

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.

Goodwin tells the story convincingly — in 754 pages of text with 121 pages of notes. At times it moves slowly, but ultimately the detail proves valuable. There is much about Lincoln’s political rivals (who become his cabinet) and their families. William Henry Seward is shown as the great politician and gentleman he was. Mary Todd Lincoln comes off in a positive new light.

Caveat: Though it touches on the main battles and a few of the leading military personnel, this is not a military history. A reader looking for military history should look elsewhere. The best general history of the Civil War remains Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson. McPherson reviewed Goodwin’s book for The New York Times.

The best biography of Lincoln is, I think, David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln.

Stand-up comedy based on history

A review of HBO’s ‘Assume the Position With Mr. Wuhl’. It begins:

He confesses to having studied “nothing” while an undergraduate at the University of Houston. But last year, the comedian and actor Robert Wuhl decided that he wanted to become a college professor. Not a real one, but a humorous substitute, backed by an HBO crew, who would amuse a packed lecture hall with a curriculum proposing that American history was popular culture — and a lot of gossip.

“The key to history is who tells the story,” Mr. Wuhl said in an interview. “Tolstoy said, ‘History is a wonderful thing, if only it were true.’ If O’Reilly and Franken see the same event, you’ll get two different stories. A guy writes a book that says Lincoln is gay, so is he gay because someone says so?”

In “Assume the Position With Mr. Wuhl” (tonight at 10 on HBO), he asks a hall full of university students to consider the piffle perpetrated by Washington Irving in the early 19th century: that Christopher Columbus had discovered that the earth was round.

Or the nonsense that Paul Revere, and not the little-known postal rider Israel Bissell, deserved Longfellow’s lionization for warning about British troop movements. But, he says, Bissell, who galloped much farther than Revere, did not suit the poet’s stirring legend-making. He rights the wrong with a quick ditty about Bissell.

Take Mr. Wuhl’s quiz.

Imagine that

Not even the senior parents of Washington’s top health official are immune from headaches caused by the new Medicare drug plan.

Dixie and Anne Leavitt – parents of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt – recently were forced to change Medicare plans after learning that the one they chose imperiled their retiree medical coverage.

Salt Lake Tribune

Good advice from A. Lincoln

“Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”

Abraham Lincoln in a letter as quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.

It’s the birthday

… of hockey great Gordie Howe, NewMexiKen’s childhood sports hero. Mr. Hockey is 78.

… of actor Richard Chamberlain and actress Shirley Jones. They’re both 72 today. Miss Jones won the best supporting actress Oscar for Elmer Gantry.

… of trumpeter and record company founder Herb Alpert. He’s 71.

… of spooky two-time Oscar nominee Christopher Walken. He’s 63. Walken won the best supporting actor Oscar for The Deer Hunter. He was also nominated for Catch Me If You Can.

… of Al Gore. He’s 58 — and tanned and rested.

… of Carla Tortelli. Rhea Perlman is 58.

… of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ewan McGregor is 35.

What’s missing from this language?

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

That’s the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, formally adopted on this date in 1870.

What’s missing is on account of “sex.” That came about in the 19th Amendment, 50 years later.

Help for women

Can’t make a decision? South Dakota Senator Bill Napoli can help.

Napoli, if you don’t know, was the advocate for South Dakota’s draconian new abortion law who stated the following when asked who might be an exception to the prohibition:

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Link via Mind of Gutter, Mouth of Potty, who says she called to get help with the choices at lunch.