Five years ago today, Bernard Madoff was finally arrested for his decades of fraud. So remember: when you rip off people, make sure that they are poor! Of course, ol’ Madoff had already had 70 really good years of life. This is far more than most people get. So he has to spend the rest of his life in prison. Big deal. Not a very big punishment as far as I’m concerned. If someone gave a baby the option, which do you think it would take? First option: you can have a great life of wealth and influence where people bow before you and treat you like royalty and then during the last couple of years of your life, you will not be thought well of and you will be in jail. Second option: you will work your whole life and no one will really appreciate it and then you will retire where you’ll live a sad, lonely, and poor life. I think Madoff did very well for himself!

On this day in 1856, the Russian revolutionary Georgi Plekhanov was born. Although he was a huge figure in the Russian Revolution, he did not like the Bolsheviks. He was a Marxist and a social-democrat. After the revolution, he left for Finland where he died of tuberculosis. Even though he was an opponent of the Soviet system, Lenin and his successors held him up as a hero. You know, the way Republicans hold up Martin Luther King as a hero today. Nothing like a great man you hated after he is dead.

The great physicist Max Born was born in 1882. He is one of a group of people who developed quantum mechanics. He worked closely with Heisenberg on the matrix formulation of the theory. In fact, generally speaking, Born has kind of been left out of the credit for this work, even though Heisenberg was very clear about his contributions.

The great modernist composer Elliott Carter was born in 1908. He is absolutely one of my favorite of the recent composers. He was also an amazing theorist. Here is the “Allegro Scorrevole” from his Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei from very late in his career (although he lived to be 103):

Other birthdays: polymath Francesco Algarotti (1712); father of the Bill of Rights George Mason (1725); physicist David Brewster (1781); poet Alfred de Musset (1810); brewer John Labatt (1838); astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (1863); actor Jean-Louis Trintignant (83); singer Rita Moreno (82); pianist McCoy Tyner (75); singer-songwriter David Gates (73); singer Brenda Lee (69); actor Teri Garr (66); and cartoonist Peter Bagge (56).

The day, however, belongs to blues writer and singer Big Mama Thornton who was born on this day in 1926. Her music is just a lot of fun and we could all use a lot more of that. Here she is doing her version of “Hound Dog”:

Happy birthday Big Mama Thornton!

Randy Newman is 70 years old today. As a movie composer he is middling. But as a singer-songwriter, he is great. His first couple of albums are just great. Two in particular, were very important to me: Randy Newman Live and Sail Away. Later, he lost me, but there is no doubt that he is great. I remember seeing him live when I was in college. Before doing the song “My Life Is Good,” he remarked, “This is unfortunately autobiographical.” I believe him; he’s always struck me as a dick, but one who has a sense of humor about it. Here is one of my favorite of his songs, “Last Night I Had a Dream.” I love the evocative anxiety dream about the impending break up. “I said, ‘You know what my name is.'” It gives me chills. (Also: great guitar part by Ry Cooder!)

Hooray! Dick Morris is 65! Hopefully, we will never again have to hear him make pathetically obtuse electoral predictions. A mainstay of last year’s election coverage on Fox News, Morris was a big guy in the Clinton White House. What more do you need to know about conservatism in the New Democratic movement?

Judd Nelson is 54 today. A big happy birthday to him! Look, I thought it was very funny when Bill Maher made a joke about how Reagan was the movie star equivalent of Nelson. But the truth is that this is unfair to Nelson. He is actually quite a good actor. And while Reagan was only ever a B-movie star (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Judd Nelson really was a star when he was young. And of the “brat pack,” he has gone on to have one of the best careers—an actor’s career. So it’s all fine to throw his name out because he isn’t the big star he once was. But the man deserves our respect. And he gets mine.

Jon Stewart is 51. He really has found his place at The Daily Show. Because here’s the thing. He wasn’t a very good stand-up comic. He was okay. But really, Jerry Seinfeld seemed edgy next to him. I’m not saying he wasn’t funny. And I know that my younger sister was rather fond of him. But it was never clear to me why anyone would pay money to see him. But he took The Daily Show that was pretty good under Craig Kilborn, and turned it into something great. Here is his take on the conservative media freak out about Obama’s Thanksgiving address two years ago (you remember: when he didn’t mention God):

Sam Seder is 47. He’s a comedian of sorts. But mostly, he is a political observer. He does the daily podcast The Majority Report. At this point, there is no one I agree with as reliably as him. What’s more, he is as out of it about pop culture as I am. He often makes literary references that I’m totally in tune with, but which his (younger) producers kid him about. What’s the big deal?! We are in our late 40s. We’re supposed to be out of it and interested in more enduring works of art.

Other birthdays: the great poet William Blake (1757); philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820); anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908); singer-songwriter Bruce Channel (73); actor Ed Harris (63); actor Martin Clunes (52); and model Anna Nicole Smith (1967).

The day, however, belongs to the great Berry Gordy who is 84 today. As the founder of Motown Records, he is arguably responsible for more joy than any other person in the 20th century. Usually, people like him don’t get recognized. He’s the semi-sane guy in the center of a creative hurricane. Think: Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Show. And just like Kermit, Gordy is a creative guy: a songwriter and producer. In fact, before Motown, he co-wrote a number of hit songs, including the great Jackie Wilson song “Lonely Teardrops.” In fact, let’s listen, shall we?

The story of Berry Gordy and the history of Motown Records has been told much better than I could, notably in Motown 40: The Music Is Forever. Here is the start of it:

Happy birthday Berry Gordy!

Afterword

Here is a nice playlist “100 Greatest Motown Songs.” Great Thanksgiving music!

On this day in 1503, the great Italian Mannerist painter Bronzino was born. I love his work, but I’m especially taken with his name. Because “Bronzino” was not his last name. His actual name was Agnolo di Cosimo. He apparently went by Bronzino because of his dark skin. It’s like if John Boehner were a painter, he might sign them, “Orange Man.”

The mathematician August Ferdinand Mobius was born in 1790. He is best known for the Mobius strip, which is a three-dimensional object that has only one side. When people are introduced to it in grammar school, it is usually referred to as “one sided piece of paper.” Mobius was a student of Gauss, which is generally enough to make anyone famous. But of course, most of his work was highly technical and not really suitable for children or basically anyone educated in the United States. His main work was in projective geometry and number theory. He also apparently did work in astronomy, but I don’t know what it was.

The great comedian Peter Cook was born in 1937. Here he is doing a great bit as a coal miner talking about his work, “My Experiences Down the Mine.” It is very funny:

The great film director Martin Scorsese is 71 today. I specifically did not give him the day because I don’t especially like him for the things that other people like him for. Most notably: Raging Bull and Goodfellas. I don’t like how Taxi Driver is widely misunderstood. But he’s directed some of my favorite films: Kundun and Bringing Out the Dead most especially. But what I most like about Scorsese is his appreciation of film. You can hardly watch a documentary about a film without Scorsese there saying the most insightful things. He really loves film—and in a way that resonates for me. If he had not been a filmmaker, he could have been a truly great film critic—like Roger Ebert in his love for the art form but with far greater insight. (Of course, he wouldn’t necessarily have been as good a writer; Ebert’s prose was really good.)

And just for JMF, Jeff Buckley was born in 1966. Here he is doing “Hallelujah”:

Other birthdays: Grace Abbott (1878); philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895); actor Lee Strasberg (1901); historian Shelby Foote (1916); actor Rock Hudson (1925); singer-songwriter Gene Clark (1944); actor Danny DeVito (69); television producer Lorne Michaels (59); baseball player Tom Seaver (59); actor Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (55); and actor Rachel McAdams (35).

The day, however, belongs to the singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot who is 75 today. I tend to like folk music of his type because I like stories. And he always sounds kind of sad and wrote “Rainy Day People.” In general, I can listen to him for a fair amount of time before he starts to annoy me. Now I’m going to play one of his big hits, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” But understand this: I think the song could have used a few more rewrites. The story itself is so compelling that the song works. But the lyrics are weak and the music could be a whole lot less plodding. So given that rousing introduction, here it is!

Happy birthday Gordon Lightfoot!

It’s a big day in drug history. Seventy-five years ago, Albert Hofmann synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD. I remember a story (possibly apocryphal) dating back to the 1970s. On the first day of Introduction to Chemistry, a certain professor would walk in and write “C20H25N3O” on the calk board. He would say, “This is the chemical formula for LSD. I don’t want to be asked for the rest of the year!” Of course, it would take at least another year of chemistry to gain the skills in organic chemistry to learn how to make it. In his way, Hofmann was as much an advocate for the drug as was Timothy Leary. And he was so right up to his death a few years ago at the age of 102.

On this day in 1907, the great actor Burgess Meredith was born. I don’t even know where to start in talking about him. I think that everyone knows and loves him. Here is a little gem. In 1961, Meredith starred in an American television version of Waiting for Godot with Zero Mostel as Estragon. It is done more as straight comedy, but I rather like it. Since then, Beckett’s notes of the play have become public and now everyone does it exactly the same way. This is a very different approach and it looks quite good, although I haven’t finished watching it. But go ahead, I’ll wait; it’s only two hours.

[Update: the video is gone. Here is a short scene from it. -FM]

Other birthdays: Roman Emperor Tiberius (42 BC); mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717); the last king of Hawaii Kalakaua (1836); composer W C Handy (1873); playwright George S Kaufman (1889); libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick (1938); speaking of LSD, Terence McKenna (1946); actor Lisa Bonet (46); and actor Maggie Gyllenhaal (36).

The day, however, belongs to the great modern classical composer Paul Hindemith who was born on this day in 1895. I always thought of him as a really difficult composer. But as I went back and listened to some of his work this morning, I had a realization, “He isn’t difficult to listen to, he’s difficult to play.” That isn’t to say that he’s exactly easy listening. But it is quite fun. He uses counterpoint much more aggressively than most modern composers. A lot of his work has a distinctly Bach flavor to it. Here is Glenn Gould playing the fourth movement of Hindemith’s Piano Sonata Number 3. This is especially appropriate because Gould was renowned for playing Bach and this movement is (nominally) a fugue:

Happy birthday Paul Hindemith!

On this day in 1483, the religious reformer Martin Luther was born. I actually see him as a villain. Here I’m not just talking about his antisemitic views, which in fairness, were typical of the time. The whole protestant reform movement has done far more harm than good for the world. The Catholic Church of that time was hopelessly corrupt. But the fundamental idea of Luther that the religion was the Bible is an extremely dangerous thing. It naturally leads to fundamentalism. If there is no authority but the Bible, what are people to believe but that what it literally says (a fool’s errand regardless) is what it means. And what it leads to is things like the Jehovah’s Witnesses: a religion that started with a bunch of amateurs trying to figure out the Bible only to have their work ossify into a religion that is far less flexible than the Catholic Church. It also leads to a certain level of terror among Christians who feel they must be the ones to defend their faith—a task they are hopelessly unqualified for. Nonetheless, Martin Luther clearly had good intentions, but we all know where that paved road leads.

Mikhail Kalashnikov is 94 today. He is the inventor of the AK-47, probably the most important gun of the 20th century. It’s a dubious distinction given that almost unimaginable harm that has been done with the gun. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been the AK-47, it would have been some other gun. After all, guns don’t kill people; bullets kill people. In this case, the 7.62×39mm.

Other birthday: the novelist Winston Churchill (1871); actor Claude Rains (1889); actor Richard Burton (1925); songwriter Marilyn Bergman (84); actor Roy Scheider (1932); songwriter Tim Rice (69); film director Roland Emmerich (58); and comedian Tracy Morgan (45).

The day, however, belongs to the great composer Ennio Morricone who is 85 today. He is best known for his film scores of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. Of course, like most film composers, wrote the music for many films. Although it includes short films, the Internet Movie Database lists 517 films he has worked on. Here is the title sequence of A Fistfull of Dollars, which is just great:

Happy birthday Ennio Morricone!

Two of the greatest female physicists of the 20th century were born on this day. First up, Marie Curie was born in 1867. She is known for the discovery of both polonium and radium. I’m sure you know all about her. Second up, Lise Meitner was born in 1878. She was one of the people responsible for the discovery of nuclear fission. Like Rosalind Franklin, she is one of the great examples of the sexism of the Nobel Prize committee. Curie probably wouldn’t have got one if she had been working alone.

Russian revolutionary and thinker Leon Trotsky was born in 1879. Was he a great guy? I wouldn’t say that. But we hold him in high esteem because he was the anti-Stalin. He’s most notable for being against Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler. That was the last straw for most of the leftists who were still holding positive opinions about the Soviet Union. And then, of course, Stalin had Trotsky murdered.

Herman J. Mankiewicz was born in 1897. He was a major screenwriting hack in the 1930s and 1940s. But he is best known for co-writing Citizen Kane. In fact, he got an Academy Award for writing it—the only one the film received. That’s typical. All That Jazz lost to Kramer vs. Kramer. Pulp Fiction lost to Forrest Gump. Whatever.

Other birthdays: Baroque painter Francisco Zurbaran (1598); cartographer James Cook (1728); railroad builder Thomas Brassey (1805); philosopher Albert Camus (1913); nefarious Christer Billy Graham (95); trumpet player Al Hirt (1922); and pundit Lawrence O’Donnell (62).

The day, however, belongs to Joni Mitchell who is 70 today. She is an amazingly great singer and songwriter. I never tire of her. Here is one of her album Court and Spark:

Happy birthday Joni Mitchell!