June 8th 2013
Live from the Oriental Theater in Denver CO, small print for olds, Bon Jovi: Because We Can, half the year is over, elevate your situational awareness, The Denver Rescue Mission, The Spike Guys Choice Awards, the return of Hip Hop/Country, Ask Jonathan, Happy Birthday Kanye, Safetytat, Horse/Weed/Mind's Eye, National Make A Will Month, even sluts hate sluts, George Wendt on Celebrity Ghost Stories, the most ordered dessert items, AFV is still on the air, Archie heads to the big screen, Chinese Product Recalls, The E.T. Landfill, sleep deprived dudes get horned up, "Am I the dad that you need me to be?", we need more DEET, give it up for SC Johnson, Adam Levine tweets, artisanal popsicles, the white boy shit of Denver, and trying to solve the problem of human fear.
May 20th 2013
Doors co-founder and keyboardist Ray Manzarek died today in Rosenheim, Germany, after a long battle with bile duct cancer. He was 74.
Manzarek grew up in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to study film at UCLA. It was there he first met Doors singer Jim Morrison, though they didn't talk about forming a band until they bumped into each other on a beach in Venice, California, in the summer of 1965 and Morrison told Manzarek that he had been working on some music. "And there it was!" Manzarek wrote in his 1998 biography, Light My Fire. "It dropped quite simply, quite innocently from his lips, but it changed our collective destinies."
"Morrison required all three of us diving into his lyrics and creating music that would swirl around him," Manzarek told Rolling Stone in 2006. "Without Jim, everybody started shooting off in different directions. . . The Doors was the perfect mixture of four guys, four egos that balanced each other. There were never any problems with 'You wrote this' or 'I wrote that.' But [after Jim died] the whole dynamic was screwed up, because the fourth guy wasn't there."
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April 12th 2013
Tallchief, a leading figure in 20th century dance, whose career spanned the years 1942-1965, and who at one time was both wife and muse to choreographer George Balanchine, died of pancreatic cancer at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago on April 11. She was 88.
Born Elizabeth Maria Tallchief in Fairfax, Oklahoma in 1925, her mother was Scots-Irish, but her father, Alexander Tallchief, was a chief in the Osage Nation, and her great-grandfather, Peter Bigheart, was crucial in negotiating oil revenues for the Osage tribe.
Although a ballet career was a challenge for a Native-American girl of her day, the Tallchief family moved to Beverly Hills, California, in 1933, and Maria, who also was a gifted pianist, began studying ballet there. At the age of 12 she became a pupil of Bronislava Nijinska, the dancer, choreographer and sister of the fabled Vaslav Nijinsky.
By 17, Tallchief was in New York auditioning. She joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and performed with the company from 1942-47, quickly rising to featured soloist. Balanchine joined the Ballet Russe in 1944, and he and Tallchief married two years later. In 1947 she accompanied her husband to the Paris Opera where she appeared in his “Serenade,” “Apollon musagete” and “Baiser de la Fee.” Then, back in New York, Balanchine began creating what would become the New York City Ballet, and Tallchief became his leading ballerina.
In addition to her daughter, Tallchief is survived by her son-in-law Stuart Brainerd and two grandchildren, Stephen and Alexandra.
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