InstaPunk Returns

Clockwise from top left: Jimmy Stewart, William Holden, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood, David Niven, Glenn Ford, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Michael Caine, Gregory Peck, Sean Connery .   I posted this pic at Facebook yesterday. I keep looking at it, knowing that I know a little something, sometimes more, about all of them. Thought I should share with you all. Let’s take them in reverse order. Sean Connery . Everybody’s James Bond. The best, the only. He was a movie star, emphasis on the word ‘star.’ I remember somebody wisecracked, “He’s the biggest star who never made a great movie.” We laughed, but it’s not quite true, as is usually the case with easy generalizations. Like Bruce Willis, whom we’ll be hearing about under Honorable Mentions below, he was at ease with his baldness, donned a toupée when required and went about his bald-being in real life like a real man. Truthfully, he was not right for the Bond role. He was not English but cheerfully Scottish and never...

  He was the greatest American writer in history. He died at 40. Mark Twain, Nathanael Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway were nowhere near his equal. I tried to write about him in 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth. He and Lincoln were born about a month apart. Lincoln is revered. So is Poe, but not in the land of his birth. Here he is remembered as a horror writer, grist for a movie mill starring Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Christopher Lee, not one American among them. I screwed up. I was trying to prove the multimedia case. Gathered up tons of YouTube links. He’s the king of all that, you know. Trying to explain him is so daunting I’m already tired of trying. Type his name in a YouTube and see what you get.  The Poe Search You get what looks like everything but is everything but. You get Vincent Price and bunches of Raven art  but you don’t get Stephane Mallarmé .You know, the leader of French modernist poetry — a movement that included Charles Baudelaire, Paul Ve...