As you can see, there's a statue/sculptor of songwriter and dramatist George M. Cohan in Providence. It's on Wickenden in the Fox Point neighborhood. I confess that Cohan to me is mainly the character that Jimmy Cagney won an Oscar for playing in Yankee Doodle Dandy. What kids who don't know who Cagney is either make of it I don't know. Nearby is George M. Cohan Boulevard, right on the edge of India Point Park. It feels much like a border street.
Another son of Providence, H. P. Lovecraft, has a marker in Wayland Square, near his birthplace. No statue, though. If there were, could they resist working tentacles into it?
2 comments:
It would be easy enough to find some comparisons between he and Charlie Chaplin as far as being music hall performers when they were very young. I'm sure their lives were hard in many ways but both of them overcame the odds and became great stars. Part of that certainly had to do with the fact that even though there was much tumult there was also time for them to work out their ideas away from the public eye. That's so much harder now that everybody is on social media of one kind or another, even making youtube videos. We know where a lot of that has led.
I feel kind of bad for kids who don't know about him or Cagney either. Life is richer when our references have some depth.
H.P. would likely be surprised to know he's become even more popular as the years have gone by. Cthulu had much to do with that. Tentacles would be an essential element of his memorial statue.
Oh yes, the world Chaplin and Cohan was much different. Much more unsupervised. When Chaplin was growing up the whole idea of capturing moving images on film was brand new, and probably rather distant. My generation grew up from birth with television as part of its environment, and those who came after have been even more media saturated, growing up on camera even if they're just regular members of the (vanishing) middle class. There are certainly those who come up with a grounded way to deal with it, but it's a warping environment. And schools that emphasize STEM studies over all else aren't helping.
I think HPL might appreciate something like the statue in Boston's Edgar Allen Poe Square, the jaunty way it incorporates the raven.
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