The 20th century produced so many great Southern chroniclers of crackerdom (William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee and childhood friend Truman Capote, James Agee, Katharine Ann Porter, Flannery O’Connor) you will perhaps forgive me for placing Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) at the back of the pack, near the likes of Margaret Mitchell and Erskine Caldwell. I remind you that this is a pack of “great Southern chroniclers”, so don’t get all huffy. Among the great, someone has to be less great, and surely you will admit that Warren was no William Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe, w ..read more

With late April and all of May clogged with events, your correspondent has been hard at work trying to get some events on the calendar for June. A couple of new book talks are in the works, but meantime, something else just fell into my lap, and I thought I’d announce it today for the benefit of readers who are variety performers. Auditions begin at 5pm today at the Hellenic Cultural Center in Astoria Queens, for a new variety series launching in that space on June 8! I’m to be one of the judges on that big show, and am very excited at the prospect. I’ve been watching Kong Show producers Powe ..read more

For obvious reasons, I was going to wait and launch promotion of my newest book at Marxfest next month, but, like a thief in the night, sales have already begun online, and today being World Book Day it seemed an appropriate time to inform the world (and also we’ll be giving away some free copies to lucky winners at Surf Coney Island this Saturday). The Marx Brothers Miscellany: A Subjective Appreciation of the World’s Greatest Comedy Team (2024) is comparable in length to my first two books (No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous and Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy ..read more

April 23, 1896 was a pivotal date in the histories of both live vaudeville and cinematic exhibition. On that day, Koster and Bial’s Music Hall topped off their presentation of six variety acts with six short projected films by the Edison Company. As we wrote here a few days ago, movies had been introduced in New York two years earlier in the form of self-serve kinetoscope machines. These were very profitable for Edison, but one couldn’t ignore the fact that over in Paris, the Lumiere Brothers were projecting films onto big screens for entire audiences, a potentially even more lucrative gambit ..read more

Like the man says — that anniversary is today! And I’d love to share a little article about it here with you…but for the fact that I’m presenting a talk on that very topic this Sunday April 28, at 3pm. I hope you will attend, because (as I mentioned in my video) we’ll have a panel of three special guests who attended the fair, all of whom are our kind of show biz folk. They are: David Adamovich, also known as The Great Throwdini, who worked the fair as an acrobat, plus old school entertainer Michael Townsend Wright (as seen on the Uncle Floyd Show), and the great teacher, clown and all-aro ..read more

True fact: over a period of 16 years, through 8,000 blogposts, I have only used the phrase “bad movie” on Travalanche eight times, and in most of those cases, I either put the phrase in quotes (indicating it’s a phrase that OTHER people use) or I’m using it to explain…well, what I’m explaining right now, which is that to me there is no such thing, not to the extent that they should be dismissed with so sweeping a condemnation. The phrase strikes me as dilettantish. There are certainly boring movies, inexpensively produced movies, and so forth, but all such creations are mixtures of good and b ..read more

The title of today’s post is to clarify that is not about the excellent recovery sit-com (2017-2020) starring Ron Livingston and my man Mat Fraser. Though it would be very hip to learn that co-creators Peter Farrelly and Bobby Mort named their Loudermilk after these other real-life Loudermilks. Ira Loudermilk (1924-1965) was born 100 hundred years ago today. With his younger brother Charlie (1927-2011) the Alabama Baptist formed the Louvin Brothers, a close harmony duo that sang a country/bluegrass/ gospel repertoire in a vein that reminds me of the Everlies. Their recording career began in 1 ..read more

For Harold Lloyd’s birthday, a new finding aid to help you navigate our nearly four dozen posts on the great silent comedian: Poster Boy for the 1920s (Main Biographical Post) Selected Shorts The Old Monk’s Tale (first movie, 1913) The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) Just Nuts: Harold’s Oldest Surviving Comedy (1915) Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers (1915) Court House Crooks (1915) A Submarine Pirate (1915) Peculiar Patients Pranks (1915) The Birth of Harold Lloyd’s “Glasses” Character (1917) Western Comedies (1918-20) Look Out Below (1919) Bumping into Broadway (1919) Harold Blows Himself Up With a B ..read more

I head this post with Rembrandt’s 1662 painting The Syndics of the Drapers Guild naturally because since 1911 the image has been used to represent Dutch Masters cigars, famously associated with the great Ernie Kovacs — a Hungarian who only smoked Cubans! There were a few different actors and suchlike I might have written about today but I found myself more jazzed about the fact that April 19 is Dutch-American Friendship Day. And as you no doubt anticipate, we never stray very far from pop culture anyway. The Dutch founded New York City, after all. Their influence on America and the world at l ..read more

Comedian Conan O’Brien (b. 1963) has been in show business for about 40 years, and he’s been known to the wider public for about 30 of those. By rights, I ought to hate him more (I’ll get to why), yet I don’t like him with any great mountain of enthusiasm, either. Long is the list of comedians and television hosts who amuse me or speak to me more. Perhaps Conan exists because the canvas needed a little red, I dunno. But he is there and April 18 is his date of birth. He must be reckoned with. Why ought I to hate him more? Because I value American show biz tradition, which historically was an a ..read more