Posts Tagged ‘history’

28 items.

Waking Sleeping Beauty

by Colleen Doran on August 21st, 2010
Posted In: Blog, Culture, Culture, Film and Television

I have been dying to see this and it has not screened anywhere near me. I guess I will have to wait for the dvd. The official website is here.

By the mid-1980s, the fabled animation studios of Walt Disney had fallen on hard times. The artists were polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old timers not yet ready to relinquish control. These conditions produced a series of box-office flops and pessimistic forecasts: maybe the best days of animation were over. Maybe the public didn’t care. Only a miracle or a magic spell could produce a happy ending. “Waking Sleeping Beauty” is no fairy tale. It’s the true story of how Disney regained its magic with a staggering output of hits – “Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast ,” “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” and more – over a 10-year period.

This is the kind of film that should be screening at comics conventions.

I’ve only done a few jobs for Disney, but I will always remember it as the best learning experience of my entire career. I don’t think the average Joe realizes just how incredible the artists in that studio are.

The pay was not great, I owned nothing.

The training was invaluable.

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Happy 41st Anniversary, Apollo 11

by Colleen Doran on July 20th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, Science

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David Alan James Rathkey

by Colleen Doran on September 11th, 2009
Posted In: Blog

98572port David Alan James Rathkey, a United States resident since 1981, was born in 1954 in Eton, England and raised in Maidenhead, Berkeshire.

A thirteen-year resident of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, he was the father of twin sons Matthew and Ian, and a beautiful daughter Emma. He was also a soccer player on a team for people over the age of 40, and soccer coach for his daughter’s team the Mountain Lakes Electrics. An IQ Financial Systems sales executive, previous employers include Digital Equipment Corp, and Arbat Systems, the company where he met his lovely, intelligent wife Julia.

“David has had an impact on our lives, he was truly a remarkable person. He often spoke of his children, even told me of the day trips this summer with the children. David was always a pleasure to speak with as I write this I can smile because I know I’ve known a truly remarkable person, ” colleague Debbie Razak wrote in this fond remembrance of David, with whom she worked for five years.

Described by fellow residents of Mountain Lakes as “an English gentleman,” David Rathkey was beloved by his community, which sponsored a “duck race” in his memory, and in the memory of fellow Mountain Lakes resident Alayne Gentul. The community of only 4,000 people raised $100,000 at the event.

David Alan James Rathkey was on the 80th floor of the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001. His last words were to his wife Julia, with whom he was speaking on the phone when the South Tower collapsed.

Emma Rathley’s struggle to deal with the loss of her father was the subject of this article in New York Mag.

Julia Wilcox Rathkey wrote a best selling book called What Children Need When They Grieve. The Four Essentials: Routine, Love, Honesty, and Security. You may learn more about Julia Rathkey and her book at her website.

On June 28, 2006, Julia Wilcox Rathkey married Gregg Richardson “…founder of Pittsylvania County Youth Sports, a recreation center for poor children in Virginia.” Their wedding announcement is here.

This remembrance of Mr. Rathkey is part of The 2996 Project.

These posts celebrate the lives of those who are now immortal in memory, and the lives of those who are forever changed by the power of that memory.

With respect and love to the family of David Alan James Rathkey.

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Art and Literature Links

by Colleen Doran on September 3rd, 2009
Posted In: Blog, Culture, Culture, Literature

We’re having some server problems so the site is slow and posting is difficult. My apologies. We should be on a new machine, soon.

Here’s some interesting things I saw this past week.

In the new National Geographic, New York when Henry Hudson first saw it in 1609:

Apparently, author Somerset Maugham was not a very nice fellow. Noel Coward called him “The Lizard of Oz”.

Gerald also preyed on housemaids, debutantes and married women, and liked to boast that while in Siam he had bought a 12-year-old girl for a tin of condensed milk.

Another remembrance of Dominick Dunne, this one from the LA Times.

Like Truman Capote, another social chronicler, Dunne often bit the well-manicured hands that fed him. A friend of Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale of the department store fortune, he turned Alfred’s relationship with his mistress, Vicki Morgan, into a roman a clef, “An Inconvenient Woman” (1990). Similarly, Dunne, who had been a guest at the 1950 wedding of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel, turned his theories about the culpability of Ethel’s nephew, Michael Skakel, in a long-unsolved slaying into another novel, “A Season in Purgatory” (1993). Skakel ultimately was tried and convicted. His cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., blamed Dunne for the conviction and told talk show host Larry King that the writer was “not a journalist. He’s a gossip columnist.”

My very dear friend Jozef Szekeres of Black Mermaid makes incredible dolls.

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You can order them here.

I’m not a doll collector, but this is the word of a lady who has a dozen dolls. Including Jozef’s.

A wonderful website with a very entertaining gallery of propaganda posters.

propaganda204

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Godwin’s Law Links

by Colleen Doran on July 16th, 2009
Posted In: Blog

With the invocation of Hitler, this entire blog is invalidated.

Articles I read.Thought you might find them interesting.

Coco Chanel’s links to the Nazi occupiers of France:

But Chanel was unequivocal. She decided to place herself snugly in the enemy’s bosom, conveniently near to her shop. After the Paris invasion she fled to the country, but returned a year later to demand back her room at the Ritz, which had been commandeered by the Germans. There, aged 56, she shacked up with von Dincklage, a German playboy officer 13 years her junior, who may have been a spy and was known frivolously as “Spatz” or sparrow.

Horizontal Collaborators: the Brothels of Occupied France. Not safe for work pic.

The Nazis published an official guide to the houses, with guards posted outside the major ones when senior Nazis such as Goering were visiting.

Fees paid to the madams in charge were some of the highest in the history of the sex industry, with single visits often costing the equivalent of a senior officer’s weekly pay.

More than that, all visitors were encouraged to bring champagne, chocolates and cigarettes for their favourite girls, to maintain a sense of decorum in places which, on the surface at least, could project the image of a gentlemen’s club.

Awful Adolph up close in a Life Magazine photo essay.

Hitler’s Holocaust Helpers:

What led Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu and his generals, soldiers, civil servants and farmers to murder 200,000 Jews (and possibly twice that many) “of their own accord,” as historian Armin Heinen puts it. Why did Baltic death squadrons commit murder on German orders in Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine? And why did German Einsatzgruppen — paramilitary “intervention groups” operated by the SS — have such an easy time encouraging the non-Jewish population to wage pogroms between Warsaw and Minsk?

Touching tale of lost love on the eve of D-Day.

Now 81, Monica remembers her first sighting of the U.S. servicemen, newly arrived in Wiltshire. She says: ‘They were the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division and they were nicknamed the Screaming Eagles after the bird of prey embroidered on their arm badge.

And, though we didn’t realise at the time, they were the elite. They had to undergo incredibly rigorous training, both mentally and physically. It broke those who were not up to it.

‘They were slim and fit and had flat-top crew cuts. And, of course, they were all so smart. Even the privates looked like officers in their beautifully tailored uniforms, cut from fine cloth which made the rough serge of my dad’s Home Guard uniform look homespun.’

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