Sunday In New York Sans A Cup Of Joe

While still waiting patiently for Mrs. B's replacement column for Joe (she's busy buying decking or faucets online for you know what) I took it upon myself to come up with something suitably special-no political rants, no history education, no yankee fanzine. Anyway while searching for Si Zentner music (what I lamely listened to in the 60's instead of Dylan) I hit on some old Bobby Darin favorites (in the ultra-lounge category). Darin was great (Dream Lover was my 1959 love theme for Nancy Bueller), but I couldn't bare seeing the egotistical, closeted Kevin Spacey hamming it up as him in the bio film. Anyway, some interesting stuff on Bobby, from Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin by David Evanier: Born Walden Robert Cassotto, to an impoverished single mother and a father who skipped away without even learning of the pregnancy, Darin was raised in the tenements and housing projects of Harlem and New York's Lower East Side by his maternal grandmother, a would-be singer turned morphine addict whose husband, a two-bit hood called Big Sam Curly, died in prison while serving time for petty larceny. Darin grew up thinking that his mother was his sister (late in his life, when he was considering a run for political office, she decided to tell him the truth before reporters looked up his birth records). Having been stricken with rheumatic fever as a child, he suffered from a weak heart that precluded horseplay, alienated him from his peers on the street, drew him inward, and threatened to cut short his life. His family doctor expected him to live no more than sixteen years—perhaps twenty-one, with luck.
More: In 1967 the bodies of ten prisoners, who had been shot dead, were discovered secretly buried on a farm in Arkansas, in a scene that could have come straight out of the Paul Newman film, ‘Cool Hand Luke’. Back then, prison farms were expected to be self-supporting. Thus, trusties took the place of salaried guards, the whipping of prisoners with four-foot long straps was sanctioned by law and torturing them by electricity or old-fashioned pliers was sanctioned by custom. In 1968 an anti-government song, ‘Long Line Rider’, in memory of the slain prisoners was written. The man who wrote that song was boohed off the stage when he tried to perform it. He was also prevented from singing it on the Jackie Gleason television show in the USA and walked off the set. That man was fifties’ teenage idol Bobby Darin.
So, nu? What's so special about that say the hard to please. Well, I made a slide show taking the "Sunday In New York" song that was a Darin hit
(unfortunately I can't locate the Darin version on my numerous hard drives now, so instead it's the capable Etta Jones) and combined it with web cam stills of NYC this Sunday. Come to think of it using web cam stills would be an interesting assignment to ask kids to capture an assortment of them and write their impressions of their sense of what is going on at that snapshot of time and place.