daily reference

SNL: The Wonderful Wizard of Ass

rerun from May 9, 2010 also see this

this may be a temporary link

NICHOLAS LEICHTER DANCE + MONSTAH BLACK
THE WHIZ: OBAMALAND
June 16-19 | 8 pm

Ease on down the road to recession and back from the brink of fantasy in Nicholas Leichter Dance and Monstah Black’s take on The Wiz/ard of Oz for the Obama generation. Featuring choreography by Leichter, and a brand new commissioned score by Black with added musical selections, The Whiz is a full-spectrum original show of song, dance, and theatrical extravaganza. The 75-minute work showcases an array of different dance, performance, and music styles — house, funk, postmodern, drag, hip-hop, contemporary, and psychedelic — that traverse a landscape of hopes, fears, dreams, and home.

There’s No Place Like Home
Billie Burke, the actress who went on to play Glinda in the Wizard of Oz, was Twain’s last visitor in 1908. He had her inaugurate the new guest book he was given that Christmas by Mary Rogers. Below her signature and her home town of Yonkers, he wrote, “Billie Burke, the young, the gifted, the beautiful, the charming.” He remarked that the pre-printed aphorism on this page was an apt one, in light of her visit. “The magic of her personality clears the spirit of such as come within its influence of nagging weariness and depression,” he wrote. “Her name is a pleasant one to close a pleasant year with.”

from http://documents.nytimes.com/the-comings-and-goings-at-mark-twains-last-home-as-told-by-the-guest-book#document/p20/a14

We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.

In fact, Topeka Google Mayor Bill Bunten expressed it best: “Don’t be fooled. Even Google recognizes that all roads lead to Kansas, not just yellow brick ones.”

http://www.wizards-of-os.org/archiv/wos_3/sprecher/l_p/armin_medosch.html

from: National Geographic, December 2009. “South Georgia rises sheer and stark from the sea”, by Kenneth Brower

South Georgia sometimes seems like a time-lapse film of weather – one of those frantic abridgments in which clouds boil across the sky while a stroboscobic flickering of light and shadow passes over the land. You sail into a bay in bright sunshine and air scrubbed clean by the ceaseless circumpolar wind. You really can see forever. The steep headlands are in intense, improbable green. Depth of field is infinite, from the kelp beds in the foreground to the snows of the peaks beyond. A glacier, cradled in its high cirque, sends a skein of streams down the rock wall, icy rivulets glittering so bright they hurt the eyes. Then, moments later, like Dorothy whirled back to Kansas, you look out on that same emerald Oz rendered suddenly in gray halftones. A new front has blown in. The sun is just a dimly glowing patch of cloud across which flurries of snowflakes swirl and eddy, dark patterns against the glow. South Georgia suffers from a meteorological version of bipolar disorder.

9 weeks on the list: THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young. (Marvel Entertainment, $29.99.) Dorothy travels to the land of OZ, graphic novel style.

clicks – a lot.

“Click my heels togehter 3 times and I’m back in Kansas – could it be that simple?”

from http://www.psychedelicchick.com/

This image shows a page from Lynne Heller’s comic book “The Adventures of Nar Duell in Second Life.”
This is Lynne’s website: http://www.lynneheller.com/

“Pandas, Lions, and Dragons, oh my!”: How White Adoptive Parents Construct Chineseness
Andrea Louie
Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, October 2009, pp. 285-320

Jeffrey Baer, chanel 11 pledge drive: the Harlem Globe Trotters are not from Harlem, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is not from the North Pole, and the Wizard of Oz is not from Kansas – they are all from Chicago.

By Edward L. Glaeser, NYT, September 1, 2009

Perhaps the most famous example of economics-in-the-enchantment is “The Wizard of Oz,” which has been interpreted by Henry Littlefield and Hugh Rockoff as an allegory about the monetary policy debates of the populist era. According to this view, the Scarecrow represents the farmer, the Tin Woodsman is the working man, the Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan, the Wicked Witches of the East and West are Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, and the Wizard, associated with green money and ounces of gold (Oz), is Marcus Alonzo Hanna himself.
read the article

from a Facebook invitation sent by Area Chicago:
Bars, Businesses, Benefits, Oh MY!
To all guests of Bars, (da) Business & Benefits

This evening, as part of AREA Chicago’s ongoing More Money Issues event series, we will continue our conversation with leaders from Mucca Pazza, The Hideout, Backstory Cafe, Epiphany Church, Kuma’s Corner, Quennect 4, and Danny’s Tavern, among others, about the important role that independent business can play in raising consistent resources for activist and non-profit communities.

http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/episodes/2006/12/29

pay no attention to the glacier behind the curtain

Nova – Car of the Future – Click and Clack go to a geothermal field in Iceland: “where are we? I don’t know, we are not in Kansas anymore.”

” I just came back from a trip to Oz”, Meshach Taylor as Hollywood Montrose in “Mannequin: On the Move”, after wearing the mannequin’s necklace for a few moments.

Myth in Material

An image

from today’s NYT

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102438008

Kelsey Grammer in the episode ‘Fortysomething’: “I’m sort of like the Wizard of Oz.” (1994)

wizard of oz quiz

Obama’s Gift to Brown Irks Media
... go to timecode 1:53 …