Marilyn Monroe

One of the delights of summer is the HBO documentary series executive producer Sheila Nevins delivers. I have only seen the first two films this year, but I like them both. I love "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer," which launches the series at 9 tonight. It's a look inside the feminist Russian art collective, its "Punk Prayer" protest in a Moscow cathedral and the trial that followed. The film reminded me as nothing else has in the last 40 some years what it felt like to be 18 years old in 1968 and hear the siren call of a cultural revolution.

One of the delights of summer is the HBO documentary series executive producer Sheila Nevins delivers. I have only seen the first two films this year, but I like them both. I love "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer," which launches the series at 9 tonight. It's a look inside the feminist Russian art collective, its "Punk Prayer" protest in a Moscow cathedral and the trial that followed. The film reminded me as nothing else has in the last 40 some years what it felt like to be 18 years old in 1968 and hear the siren call of a cultural revolution.

The photo studio is virtually anonymous now, tucked away in a strip mall. Tom Kelley Studios offers little hint of its Hollywood heyday, when stars lined up to be photographed. None was bigger than Marilyn Monroe. She was not yet famous when Tom Kelley met her in 1949 when she was in a minor car accident. He gave her $5 for cab fare and an invitation to his studio, where the struggling actress eventually posed nude for the famous Red Velvet photos that helped make her a star. The studio moved from Hollywood to Ventura a decade ago. But Kelley's son has made a cottage industry of marketing those racy images of Monroe, now part of the studio's archives.

I'm tempted to send a mash note to George Stanley, the managing editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , who, Jim Romenesko tells us , has circulated a memo to the staff saying that they have been overusing iconic and it's time to stop. Bless his heart. Iconic is like legendary , dramatic , prestigious , and the other empty adjectives that are no more than upholstery. It's not only the writers of features sections who go in for this, though they are prime repeat offenders, but any writer trying to puff up the importance of a story by telling rather than showing will be prone to resort to such words.

This is not a real beach. If this were a real beach, we would need a very large umbrella for shade enough to let us hope to squint at the dim screen of our laptop computer. This is a virtual beach, where heat and humidity conspire against productivity, and brains, like computers, are most often in slumber mode.Here at Virtual Beach, the Sloth Police have banned all useful programs in the interest of assuring absolute nonproductivity. The only acceptable software here is the digital equivalent of "beach books," mindless, trashy and irrelevant.

To Noi Volkov, a simple faucet, a model of a Ford Thunderbird and photos of Marilyn Monroe and Woody Allen are more than just odds and ends. To him, they are the makings for a ceramic teapot. "I am trying to create a new, unorthodox style of ceramics," said the 60-year-old Owings Mills man. "It's a mixture of Renaissance and pop art. It has a little bit of Dali and some Picasso." The teapot uses the back of the T-bird model as a handle, the faucet as the spout, and images of Monroe and Allen on either side of the body.

LOS ANGELES - Marilyn Monroe would have both loved and hated her final resting place. The private Marilyn - the fragile Norma Jean, whose low self-esteem never jibed with the glamorous figure adored by millions, whose voluptuous body kept people from acknowledging the artist trapped inside, whose irrepressible fame doomed the one real chance she had at happiness, her marriage to Joe DiMaggio - would appreciate the plain, unadorned marble crypt in a...

Billy Pappas spent nearly 8 1/2 years on one drawing. He knows about obsession. "I can't just be an artist with modest success," he says about halfway through Waiting for Hockney, a documentary showing at this weekend's Maryland Film Festival, chronicling the near-decade he spent trying to commit a single image of Marilyn Monroe to paper. "I've got to be Michelangelo." How well Pappas compares to Michelangelo is for others, and for posterity, to decide. But Waiting for Hockney certainly paints a portrait of an artist with a singular, unique vision, and Pappas was willing to endure almost anything to realize it. To its great credit, director Julie Checkoway's film goes beyond the creative process.

NEW YORK -- The red stiletto heels were trouble, Russell C. Schalk Jr. could see that. Everybody in Christie's auction house last night could see that. Shoes like this are so much trouble there's a nickname for them that's so rude even the abbreviation can't be printed in a family newspaper.It gets worse yet: scarlet satin stilettos encrusted with matching rhinestones, designed by Salvatore Ferragamo and maybe perhaps possibly once slipped onto the glamorous, sad, poignant, mysterious and, of course, legendary tootsies of Marilyn Monroe.

Last March, Joyce Carol Oates and Ed Herendeen spent a day in Princeton, N.J., with Marilyn Monroe. To be exact, they spent the day immersed in Oates' new play about Monroe, "Miss Golden Dreams," which is making its world premiere, under Herendeen's direction, at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va., this weekend. West Virginia might seem an unlikely spot for Oates, a former National Book Award winner, to premiere a play. But the writer has a longstanding relationship with the 10-year-old festival, which has produced two of her previous plays and named her honorary chair of its project for commissioning new works.

I really enjoyed your article on Marilyn Monroe in Parade," serious author Lamar Waldron writes to me. "Had such a crush on Marilyn when I was seven years old. Clearly remember being devastated when she died; it ruined my young plans to grow up and marry her." Waldron has appeared before in this space. He is one of the leading exponents exploding and augmenting the various JFK-RFK-Cuba and the Mafia conspiracy theories. When his newest book, Legacy of Secrecy, comes out in November from Counterpoint Press, we'll be on the receiving end of new info about the Mafia's glamorous Hollywood villain, Johnny Rosselli, and also about how the JFK and RFK assassinations tie into James Earl Ray's murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The complexities of these many related killings and the fact that so many new revelations are being monitored by Waldron and others from sources the CIA and FBI kept covered up for years is all a bit too much for us to cover here in a mere column.

Billy Pappas spent nearly 8 1/2 years on one drawing. He knows about obsession. "I can't just be an artist with modest success," he says about halfway through Waiting for Hockney, a documentary showing at this weekend's Maryland Film Festival, chronicling the near-decade he spent trying to commit a single image of Marilyn Monroe to paper. "I've got to be Michelangelo." How well Pappas compares to Michelangelo is for others, and for posterity, to decide. But Waiting for Hockney certainly paints a portrait of an artist with a singular, unique vision, and Pappas was willing to endure almost anything to realize it. To its great credit, director Julie Checkoway's film goes beyond the creative process.

THE HOPE that there exists film of Marilyn Monroe having sex just won't die. In fact, it has recently regenerated in a big way. This hope is, in a way, a tribute to Monroe's arguable status as the supreme erotic symbol. Credence to the fantasy of Marilyn en flagrante was provided by Arlene Hunter, a B-movie actress and stripper. Hunter starred in a solo short called The Apple Knockers and the Coke, circa the late 1940s, which eventually came to be advertised - as much as such things could be back in the day - as "Marilyn Monroe's porno loop."

THE GOLDEN GLOBES didn't happen, for all intents and purposes - it was a news conference, for heaven's sake! But other events benefited from the lack of glitz at the Beverly Hilton. Over at the legendary Beverly Hills Hotel, the annual Diamond Information Center/InStyle luncheon attracted the likes of Sharon Stone in a skin-tight leopard print Cavalli cocktail dress and matching sky-high heels. This outfit did not say, "I'm just here to browse and have a bit of sushi, pay me no mind." Debra Messing was way over the top in a chic black satin party gown and a Stella McCartney bow-shaped diamond ring.

THE BUSINESS is changing. Nobody knows where it is going. They're doing more reality shows and less scripted shows ... so you need to create product for yourself. Use YouTube and MySpace to put yourself out there." Smart advice from Patricia Heaton, an Everywoman type of actress who struggled long and hard before she hit it big on Everybody Loves Raymond. Raymond is a show I never paid attention to during its long run. Now, in syndication, I love it, especially Heaton's snarky, exasperated Debra.

To Noi Volkov, a simple faucet, a model of a Ford Thunderbird and photos of Marilyn Monroe and Woody Allen are more than just odds and ends. To him, they are the makings for a ceramic teapot. "I am trying to create a new, unorthodox style of ceramics," said the 60-year-old Owings Mills man. "It's a mixture of Renaissance and pop art. It has a little bit of Dali and some Picasso." The teapot uses the back of the T-bird model as a handle, the faucet as the spout, and images of Monroe and Allen on either side of the body.

"Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean," by Donald Spoto. HarperCollins. 306 pages. $25He made only three movies before he died at the age of 24, yet James Dean's sullen image is indelibly etched into the public's mind's eye. Within nine months of his death, more than 400 fan clubs celebrated Dean's ephemeral career. "He was a limited talent," writes Donald Spoto in this rather limited biography. Dean had less interest in bucking the system than in drawing attention to himself; he represented "the safest kind of rebellion."

Good morning -- Joe Gibbs -- Back in the playoffs after all these years and you've still got to go up against a quarterback named Simms. Question of the day Will Texas quarterback Vince Young be successful in the NFL? Selected responses to today's question will be printed Tuesday on The Kickoff page. Please e-mail your answer (about 25 words) to sports@baltsun.com by 3 p.m.Monday. Include your name, address and a daytime telephone number for verification purposes. THEY SAID IT "No guts, no glory."

James Dougherty, 84, a retired Los Angeles detective who was the first to marry Norma Jeane Baker -- before she went to Hollywood and took the name Marilyn Monroe -- died Monday in San Rafael, Calif., of complications from leukemia. Mr. Dougherty married Ms. Baker in 1942, before he went to sea as a merchant mariner. She was 16 and set out to pursue a Hollywood career while he was gone. They were divorced in 1946, and Mr. Dougherty remarried twice. He worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for 25 years, serving as a detective and training the special weapons and tactics group.