When Legends Gather #271

Salvador Dali and Man Ray
An Ongoing Series of Cultural and Personal Observations;
by Tom Sutpen, Stephen Cooke, Richard Gibson, Kimberly Lindbergs and Greg Ferrara

Sidney Korshak
This was posted by Tom Sutpen
for the series:
American Mouthpieces,
Friends and Family

The Presentation in the Temple
(St. Demetrius' Church; Zhohatyn, Poland)
(15th Century)

David Cregan, Jack Shephard, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Page, John Osborne, Christopher Hampton, Joan Plowright, Peter Gill, Jill Bennett, Victor Henry, Edward Bond, Kenneth Haigh.

Fūryū genji yuki no nagame
(A modern version of the Tale of Genji in snow scenes)
(Toyokuni Utagawa; 1853)

Every morning, the Southern runs hundreds of trains into London. Virtually all are crowded. Some are jam-packed. Yet, at the same time, an equal number of trains are running almost empty. They are travelling out of London, against the flow.
This was posted by Richard Gibson
for the series:
From the Southern Travellers Handbook for 1965/66

I'm sitting in that office, playing with a dead fly and in pops this dowdy little item from Manhattan, Kansas, and chisels me down to a shopworn twenty to find her brother. He sounds like a creep but she wants to find him. So with this fortune clasped to my chest, I trundle down to Bay City and the routine I go through is so tired I'm half asleep on my feet. I meet nice people, with and without ice picks in their necks. I leave, and I leave myself wide-open too. Then she comes in and takes the twenty away from me and gives me a kiss and gives it back to me because I didn't do a full day's work.
So I go see Dr. Hambleton, retired (and how) optometrist from El Centro, and meet again the new style in neckwear. And I don't tell the cops. I just frisk the customer's toupee and put on an act. Why? Who am I cutting my throat for this time? A blonde with sexy eyes and too many door keys? A girl from Manhattan, Kansas? I don't know. All I know is that something isn't what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let's not go into that. You're not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I'm an ectoplasm with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
-- Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

A congress of Black Mask authors
(yes, that's Dashiell Hammett on the upper right)

Raymond Chandler ponders petting his cat Taki.

Bernadette Lafont and Claude Chabrol
(immense thanks to Jeff Duncanson of Filmscreed for this nurturing image)

Marlene Dietrich, Basil Rathbone, David O. Selznick and Irene Mayer Selznick

Sigesh - Apache (1907)
This was posted by Tom Sutpen
for the series:
The Native-Americana of Edward S. Curtis

Vito Genovese and Salvatore Giuliano
This was posted by Tom Sutpen
for the series:
Friends and Family,
When Legends Gather

Rainer Maria Rilke

Miss Mackay's Pageant, Children of Sunshine and Shadow, as presented at
Washington Irving High School (1916)

Irene Dunn
No. 17 in a series of 50 from Player's Navy Cut Cigarettes
"Born in Louisville, Kentucky on July 14th, 1904, Irene Dunne was destined for a musical career. After her education at a St. Louis convent, she studied at the Chicago College of Music, graduating in 1926. Taking up a stage career, she became famous in musical comedy; her delightful mezzo-soprano voice also won her a place in the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York. In 1929 she began her screen career, and later was acclaimed as a dramatic actress in Cimarron, with Richard Dix. Among her latest are Behold We Live, This Man is Mine and Stingaree. She is married to Dr. Griffin of New York."

For those of you in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Guatemala and Cambodia and Colombia and East Timor and Nicaragua and Cuba and . . . ) who don't know nuthin' about our kinda Democracy and keep dragging your heels everytime we try to show you, this here is July the Fourth; the day in 1776 when our forefathers (the ones who owned property, anyway) declared us independent from the tyranny of British colonialism.
Big deal, you say? Well, as this 1819 oil painting by John Trumbull documents, it was a solemn occasion. But that doesn't prevent us in 2007 from celebrating our first birth of freedom . . . there was a second in 1865, and I keep waitin' for the third, but there's no sign of it happening . . . with as much alcohol and fireworks, dammit, as the law lets us get away with.
Happy July 4th ever'body!

Jack Dempsey and Gov. Jimmie Davis
(author of 'You Are My Sunshine' and 'Tom Cat and Pussy Blues')

Ogden Nash

Don Miller, Elmer Layden, Jim Crowley and Harry Stuhldreher
(aka, The Four Horsemen)

Come gather 'round, childrens, wherever you roam . . .
If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, beginning Monday, August 6, we here at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger . . . will be following the time-honored tradition of the proverbial rat race by leaving behind the hectic toil of our daily lives and going on a week's vacation. God knows we knock ourselves silly the other 51 weeks of the year, dragging them what visits us to, fro, across, up, down and around every area of time, tide and culture our perfervid brains can conjure, so while we're resting our wearied bones, we'll turn to you to do the job.
All of which is just a protracted way of announcing . . . Guest Contributor Week!!
(insert fanfare here)
Yes that's right, fans. Guest Contributor Week. Seven whole days wherein all content . . . all images, all text and all things Charlie Parker . . . will be provided by you, our visitors. Some of you may have noticed from time to time we're wont to post material sent in over the transom, as it were, by friends, fans and full-throttle aesthetes who get what we're doing. It's our hope that, between now and August, we can gather enough such contributions to make a full week of it.
So if you've never sent us an entry, or if you've sent them in the past, or if you only just thought of it upon seeing this notice, here's your opportunity to participate in a true communal blogospheric event . . . with full credit an' everything! Contributors can send in entries for any series they wish, as many entries as they wish (consult the sidebar), provide whatever text they like; the whole shot. All I'll do is post them (what, you really thought I was going on vacation? Moi??). Everyone is welcome (truly) to toss their goods into the pot. I can't promise I'll post everything we receive, but unless we get images we've already run, the chances are better than likely they will blossom in these pages.
All you need do is send your contributions (images, text, etc.) to our new and cleverly-named email address:
gunslingerbird@gmail.com
And if you have any questions, shoot them my way (tomsutpen@gmail.com) and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
The ball, now, is in your court!