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Good morning WA2K.

Wishing a Happy 76th to Dean Jones and 69th to Etta James:



Poet Robert Burns and authors W. Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf were born on this date, too.

Well, there's our Raggedy with her famous photo's.

We're looking at Dean and Etta. Great, PA

I adore Somerset Maugham, especially his very humorous piece called "The Luncheon." That short story is quite a deviation from his usual writings.

Here's a great song from Etta James:

~ Etta James

At last
my love has come along
my lonely days over
and life is like a song

Ooh At last
the skies above are blue
well my heart was wrapped up in clover
the night I looked at you

I found a dream
that I could speak to
a dream that I could call my own
I found a thrill
to press my cheek to
a thrill that I have never known

well

You smile
you smile
oh and then the spell was cast
and here we are in heaven
for you are mine at last

I found a dream
that I could speak to
a dream that I
could call my own
I found a thrill
to press my cheek to
a thrill that I have never known

well

You smile
you smile
oh and then the spell was cast
and here we are in heaven
for you are mine at last

ooo yea
you are mine
you are mine
at last
at last
at last
at last

W. Somerset Maugham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Born: January 25, 1874
Paris, France
Died: December 16, 1965
Nice, France

Occupation(s): Playwright, novelist, short story writer
William Somerset Maugham, CH (January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was one of the most popular authors achieving recognition as the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s [1].





Childhood and education

Maugham's father was an English lawyer handling the legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris[2]. Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, Robert Ormond Maugham arranged for William to be born at the embassy, technically on British soil, saving him from conscription into any future French wars[3]. His grandfather, another Robert, had also been a prominent lawyer and cofounder of the English Law Society,[4] and it was taken for granted that William would follow in their footsteps. Events were to ensure this was not to be, but his older brother Frederic Herbert Maugham did enjoy a distinguished legal career, becoming Lord Chancellor between 1938-1939.

Maugham's mother Edith Mary (née Snell) was consumptive, a condition for which the doctors of the time prescribed childbirth. As a result Maugham had three older brothers, already enrolled in boarding school by the time he was three and Maugham was effectively raised as an only child. Sadly, childbirth proved no cure for tuberculosis, and Edith Mary Maugham died at the age of 41, six days after the stillbirth of her final son. The death of his mother left Maugham traumatized for life, and he kept his mother's photograph by his bedside until his own death[5] at the age of 91 in Nice, France.

Two years after his mother's death, Maugham's father died of cancer. Willie was sent back to England to be cared for by his uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. The move was catastrophic. Henry Maugham proved cold and emotionally cruel. The King's School, Canterbury, where Willie was a boarder during school terms, proved merely another version of purgatory, where he was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father.

It is at this time that Maugham developed the stammer that would stay with him all his life, although it was sporadic and subject to mood and circumstance[6].

Life at the vicarage was tame, and emotions were tightly circumscribed. Maugham was forbidden to lose his temper, or to make emotional displays of any kind -- and he was denied the chance to see others express their own emotions. As a quiet, private but very curious child, this denial of the emotion of others was at least as hard on him as the denial of his own emotions.

The upshot was that Maugham was miserable, both at the vicarage and at school, where he was bullied because of his small size and his stammer. As a result, he developed a talent for applying a wounding remark to those who displeased him. This ability is sometimes reflected in the characters that populate his writings.

At sixteen, Maugham refused to continue at The King's School and his uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. It was during his year in Heidelberg that he met John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior, and with whom he had his first sexual experience[7].

On his return to England his uncle found Maugham a position in an accountant's office, but after a month Maugham gave it up and returned to Whitstable. His uncle was not pleased, and set about finding Maugham a new profession. Maugham's father and three older brothers were all distinguished lawyers and Maugham asked to be excused from the duty of following in their footsteps.

A career in the church was rejected because a stammering minister might make the family seem ridiculous. Likewise, the civil service was rejected -- not out of consideration for Maugham's own feelings or interests, but because the recent law requiring civil servants to qualify by passing an examination made Maugham's uncle conclude that the civil service was no longer a career for gentlemen.

The local doctor suggested the profession of medicine and Maugham's uncle reluctantly approved this. Maugham had been writing steadily since the age of 15 and fervently intended to become an author, but because Maugham was not of age, he could not confess this to his guardian. So he spent the next five years as a medical student in London[2].


Career

Early works

Many readers and a few critics have assumed that the years Maugham spent training to be a medical doctor were a kind of creative dead end. But Maugham himself felt quite the contrary. He was able to live in the lively city of London, to meet people of a "low" sort that he would never have met in one of the other professions, and to see them in a time of heightened anxiety and meaning in their lives. In maturity, he recalled the literary value of what he saw as a medical student: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief..."

There was then a vogue of books, most written by men and women living in comfort, describing the moral value of a life of suffering -- but Maugham saw clearly, again and again, how corrosive to human values suffering was, how bitter and hostile sickness made people, and he never forgot it. Here, finally, was "life in the raw" and the chance to see the whole range of human emotions.

Maugham kept his own lodgings, took pleasure in furnishing them, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly while at the same time studying for his degree in medicine. In 1897, he presented his second book for consideration. (The first had been a biography of Meyerbeer written by the 16-year-old Maugham in Heidelberg).

Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences, drew its details from Maugham's experiences as a medical student doing mid-wifery work in the London slum of Lambeth. The novel is of the school of social-realist "slum-writers" such as George Gissing and Arthur Morrison. Frank as it is, Maugham still felt obliged to write near the opening of the novel: "...it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story; the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue."

Liza of Lambeth proved popular with both reviewers and the public, and the first print-run sold out in a matter of weeks. This was enough to convince Maugham, who had qualified as a doctor, to drop medicine and embark on his sixty-five year career as a man of letters. Of his entry into the profession of writing he later said, "I took to it as a duck takes to water."

The writer's life allowed Maugham to travel and live in places such as Spain and Capri for the next decade, but his next ten works never came close to rivalling the success of Liza. This changed dramatically in 1907 with the phenomenal success of his play Lady Frederick; by the next year he had four plays running simultaneously in London, and Punch published a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his fingernails nervously as he looked at the billboards.


Popular success, 1914-1939

By 1914 Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 published novels. Too old to enlist when World War I broke out, Maugham served in France as a member of the British Red Cross's so-called "Literary Ambulance Drivers", a group of some 23 well-known writers including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings. During this time he met Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944 (Haxton appears as Tony Paxton in Maugham's 1917 play, Our Betters). Throughout this period Maugham continued to write; indeed, he proof-read Of Human Bondage at a location near Dunkirk during a lull in his ambulance duties[8].

Of Human Bondage (1915) initially received bad criticism both in England and America, with the New York World describing the subject of the main protagonist Philip Carey as the sentimental servitude of a poor fool. However the influential critic, also a novelist Theodore Dreiser rescued the novel refering to it as a work of genius, and comparing it to a Beethoven symphony. This criticism gave the book the lift it needed and it has since never been out of print. [9].

The book appeared to be closely autobiographical (Maugham's stammer is transformed into Philip Carey's club foot, the vicar of Whitstable becomes the vicar of Blackstable, and Philip Carey is a doctor) although Maugham himself insisted it was more invention than fact. Nevertheless, the close relationship between fictional and non-fictional became Maugham's trademark, despite the legal requirement to state that "the characters in [this or that publication] are entirely imaginary". In 1938 he wrote: "Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other."

Maugham returned to England from his ambulance unit duties to promote Of Human Bondage but once that was finalised, he became eager to assist the war effort once more. As he was unable to return to his ambulance unit, Syrie arranged for him to be introduced to a high ranking intelligence officer known only as "R", and in September 1915 he began work in Switzerland, secretly gathering and passing on intelligence while posing as himself - that is, as a writer.

Although Maugham's first and many other sexual relationships were with men, he also had sexual relationships with a number of women. Specifically his affair with Syrie Wellcome, daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo and wife of American-born English pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome, produced a daughter named Liza (born Mary Elizabeth Wellcome, 1915-1998).[10] Henry Wellcome then sued his wife for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent. In May 1917, following the decree nisi, Syrie and Maugham were married. Syrie became a noted interior decorator who popularized the all-white room in the 1920s.

In 1916, Maugham travelled to the Pacific to research his novel The Moon and Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin. This was the first of those journeys through the late-Imperial world of the 1920s and 1930s which were to establish Maugham forever in the popular imagination as the chronicler of the last days of colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific, although the books on which this reputation rests represent only a fraction of his output. On this and all subsequent journeys he was accompanied by Haxton, whom he regarded as indispensable to his success as a writer. Maugham himself was painfully shy, and Haxton the extrovert gathered human material that Maugham steadily turned into fiction.

In June, 1917 he was asked by Sir William Wiseman, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (later named MI6), to undertake a special mission in Russia[11] to keep the Provisional Government in power and Russia in the war by countering German pacifist propaganda [12]. Two and a half months later the Bolsheviks took control. The job was probably always impossible, but Maugham subsequently claimed that if he had been able to arrive six months earlier, he might have succeeded.

Quiet and observant, Maugham had a good temperament for intelligence work; he believed he had inherited from his lawyer father a gift for cool judgement and the ability to be undeceived by facile appearances.

Never losing the chance to turn real life into a story, Maugham made his spying experiences into a collection of short stories about a gentlemanly, sophisticated, aloof spy, Ashenden,a volume which influenced the Ian Fleming James Bond series.[13]

In 1922 Maugham dedicated On a Chinese Screen, a book of 58 ultra-short story sketches collected during his 1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, to Syrie, with the intention of later turning the sketches into a book. [14]

Syrie and Maugham divorced in 1927-1928 after a tempestuous marriage complicated by Maugham's frequent travels abroad and strained by his relationship with Haxton.

In 1928, Maugham bought Villa Mauresque on twelve acres at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, which would be his home for most of the rest of his life, and one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and 30s. His output continued to be prodigious, producing plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. By 1940, when the collapse of France forced Maugham to leave the French Riviera and become a well-heeled refugee, he was already one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world, and one of the wealthiest.


Grand Old Man of letters

Maugham, by now in his sixties, spent most of World War II in the United States, first in Hollywood (he worked on many scripts, and was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations) and later in the South. While in the US he was asked by the British government to make patriotic speeches to induce the US to aid Britain, if not necessarily become an allied combatant. Gerald Haxton died in 1944, and Maugham moved back to England, then in 1946 to his villa in France, where he lived, interrupted by frequent and long travels, until his death.

The gap left by Haxton's death in 1944 was filled by Alan Searle. Maugham had first met Searle in 1928. Searle was a young man from the London slum area of Bermondsey and he had already been kept by older homosexuals. He proved a devoted if not a stimulating companion. Indeed one of Maugham's friends, describing the difference between Searle and Haxton, said simply: "Gerald was vintage, Alan was vin ordinaire."[15]

Maugham's love life was almost never smooth. He once confessed: "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed... In order not to hurt their feelings, I have often acted a passion I did not feel."

Maugham's last years were sadly marred by several quasi-scandals which can probably be set down to an itch for attention mixed with cloudy thinking from approaching dementia. The younger Maugham was far too wise and discreet to have made such basic errors in judgement. The worst of these quasi-scandals, and one which cost him many friends, was a bitter attack on the deceased Syrie in his 1962 volume of memoirs, Looking Back. In his last years Maugham adopted Searle as his son in order to ensure that he would inherit his estate, a move hotly contested by his daughter Liza and her husband, Lord Glendevon, and which exposed Maugham to much public ridicule.


Achievements

Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could.

Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.

It seems equally likely that Maugham was underrated because he wrote in such a direct style. There was nothing in a book by Maugham that the reading public needed explained to them by critics. Maugham thought clearly, wrote lucidly, and expressed acerbic and sometimes cynical opinions in handsome, civilized prose. He wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and won critical acclaim. In this context, his writing was criticized as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way"[16].

Maugham's homosexual leanings also shaped his fiction, in two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for distinguished authors of his time. "Liza of Lambeth," "Cakes and Ale" and "The Razor's Edge" all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result.

Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he traveled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in 1938: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."

Maugham's public account of his abilities remained modest; toward the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters". In 1954, he was made a Companion of Honour.

Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War and continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club[17]. In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and from 1951, some 14 years before his death, it began its exhibition life and in 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden [2] [3].


Significant works

Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical novel which deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who like Maugham, was orphaned and brought up by his pious uncle. Philip's clubfoot causes him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter. Later successful novels were also based on real-life characters: The Moon and Sixpence fictionalizes the life of Paul Gauguin; Cakes and Ale contains thinly veiled characterizations of authors Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole.

Maugham's last major novel, The Razor's Edge, published in 1944, was a departure for him in many ways. While much of the novel takes place in Europe, its main characters are American, not British. The protagonist is a disillusioned veteran of World War I who abandons his wealthy friends and lifestyle, traveling to India seeking enlightenment. The story's themes of Eastern mysticism and war-weariness struck a chord with readers as World War II waned, and a movie adaptation quickly followed.

Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East, and are typically concerned with the emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Some of his more outstanding works in this genre include Rain, Footprints in the Jungle, and The Outstation. Rain, in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the Pacific island prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its fame and been made into a movie several times. Maugham said that many of his short stories presented themselves to him in the stories he heard during his travels in the outposts of the Empire. He left behind a long string of angry former hosts, and a contemporary anti-Maugham writer retraced his footsteps and wrote a record of his journeys called "Gin and Bitters". Maugham's restrained prose allows him to explore the resulting tensions and passions without descending into melodrama. His The Magician (1908) is based on British occultist Aleister Crowley.

Maugham was one of the most significant travel writers of the inter-war years, and can be compared with contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Freya Stark. His best efforts in this line include The Gentleman in the Parlour, dealing with a journey through Burma, Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, and On a Chinese Screen, a series of very brief vignettes which might almost be notes for short stories that were never written.

Influenced by the published journals of the French writer Jules Renard, which Maugham had often enjoyed for their conscientiousness, wisdom and wit, Maugham published in 1949 selections from his own journals under the title "A Writer's Notebook". Although these journal selections are, by nature, episodic and of varying quality, they range over more than 50 years of the writer's life and there is much that Maugham scholars and admirers find of interest in this book.


Influence

In 1947 Maugham instituted the Somerset Maugham Award, awarded to the best British writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a work of fiction published in the past year. Notable past winners include V.S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis and Thom Gunn. On his death, he donated his copyrights to the Royal Literary Fund.

One of very few later writers to praise his influence was Anthony Burgess, who included a complex fictional portrait of Maugham in the novel Earthly Powers. George Orwell also stated that his writing style was influenced by Maugham. The American writer Paul Theroux, in his short story collection The Consul's File, updated Maugham's colonial world in an outstation of expatriates in modern Malaysia.

The 1995 film Se7en has a character played by Morgan Freeman, named Lt. William Somerset. The film makes explicit reference to Of Human Bondage.

Virginia Woolf
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born: January 25, 1882
London, England, UK
Died: 28 March 1941
near Lewes, England, UK

Occupation(s): Novelist, essayist, short story writer
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) (January 25, 1882 - March 28, 1941) was a British novelist and essayist who by reputation is regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".



Biography

Early life

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson) (1846-1895), she was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Virginia's parents had married each other after being widowed and the household contained the children of three marriages: Julia's children with her first husband Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth (1868-1934); Stella Duckworth (1869-1897); and Gerald Duckworth (1870-1937). Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870-1945), Leslie's daughter with Minny Thackeray, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she was institutionalised in 1891 to the end of her life; and Leslie and Julia's children: Vanessa Stephen (1879-1961); Thoby Stephen (1880-1906); Virginia; and Adrian Stephen (1883-1948).

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the widower of Thackeray's eldest daughter) meant that Woolf was raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society.

Henry James, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at 22 Hyde Park Gate, from which Virginia (unlike her brothers, who were formally educated) was taught the classics and English literature.

According to her memoirs her most vivid childhood memories, however, were not of London, but of St Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The family stayed in their home called the Talland House, which looked out over the Porthminster Bay. Memories of the family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction she wrote in later years, notably To the Lighthouse. She also based the summer home in Scotland after the Talland House and the Ramsay family after her own family.

The sudden death of her mother from influenza in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.

Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed, were also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by their half-brothers George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though these recurring mental breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her literary abilities remained intact. Modern diagnostic techniques have led to a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which coloured her work and life, and eventually led to her suicide. Following the death of her father in 1904 and her second serious nervous breakdown, Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate, and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. There they came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury group.


Personal life

Woolf married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless Jew". Many biographers have concluded that the marriage was never fully consummated, and that Woolf's sexuality was primarily directed toward women. However, the couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in her diary "Love-making ?- after 25 years can't bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." They also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published most of Woolf's work.[1] The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met and fell in love with Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began an affair that lasted through most of the 1920s.[2] In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature."[3] Although their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death.

Other intimate friendships included Madge Vaughn (the daughter of J. A. Symonds, and inspiration for the character of Mrs. Dalloway), and Violet Dickinson, composer and suffragette Ethel Smyth, and Woolf's beloved sister Vanessa Bell.


Death

On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. In a note to her husband she wrote:

" I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that ?- everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. "


Work



Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a writer, civil servant and political theorist. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.

This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but due to criticism Virginia Woolf received about the political nature of the book, she changed the novel and its title. This older version of The Voyage Out has been compiled and is now available to the public under the intended title. She went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success.

Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost Modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category.

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology. In the words of E. M. Forster, she pushed the English language "a little further against the dark," and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today.

Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist.

Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia, peopled with delicate, but ultimately trivial, self-centred, and overly introspective individuals. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes who seemed to belong to an era definitely closed and buried. She is also criticized as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to a Jew. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh".[4]

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted?-and sometimes almost dissolved?-in the characters' receptive consciousnesses. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings of most of her novels, even as they are often set in an environment of war. For example, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind.

The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.

Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation - all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.

While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism. [citation needed]


Modern scholarship and interpretations

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Louise A. DeSalvo offers treatment of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf experienced as a young woman in her book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work.

Woolf's fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class, and modern British society. Her best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties female writers and intellectuals faced in an era when men held disproportionate legal and economic power, and the future of women in education and society.

Irene Coates's book Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf takes the position that Leonard Woolf's treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death. The position, which is not accepted by Leonard's family, is extensively researched and fills in some of the gaps in the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's life. In contrast, Victoria Glendinning's book Leonard Woolf: A Biography, argues that Leonard Woolf was very supportive of his wife, remarkably so in view of her "corrosive contempt" for his Jewish origins.[5]

The first biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1972 by her favorite nephew, Quentin Bell.

In 1989 Louise Desalvo published the book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work.

Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination of Woolf's life. It focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz's book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf ISBN 0-7658-0321-6 was published in 2006.


Cultural references

Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours uses some of Woolf's characteristic stylistic tools to intertwine a story of the Virginia who is writing Mrs. Dalloway with stories of two other women decades apart, each of whom is planning a party. The book was adapted into a 2002 film, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie.
Playwright Edward Albee asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use his wife's name in the title of his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which concerns a clash between a university professor and his wife as they host a younger faculty couple for evening cocktails.
Indiana band Murder by Death have a song entitled "I'm Afraid of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" on their first album, Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing.
American folk rock duo Indigo Girls wrote and recorded a song called "Virginia Woolf" for their 1992 album Rites of Passage, and also included it on their live recording 1200 Curfews in 1995.
British indie rock band Assembly Now reference Woolf by name in their song "It's Magnetic".
British singer Steve Harley wrote and recorded a song "Riding the Waves (for Virginia Woolf)" for his album Hobo with a grin.
Indie rock band Modest Mouse got their name from a passage from her story "The Mark on the Wall".
Laura Veirs references Virginia Woolf in her song "Rapture".
In The Reptile Room, the second novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, there is mention of a snake called the Virginian Wolfsnake. The only thing said about it is that it should never, ever be allowed near a typewriter.
Folk group Two Nice Girls named their album Chloe Liked Olivia after a key phrase in Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
Patrick Wolf's song "To the Lighthouse" was inspired by Woolf's novel.

Dean Jones (actor)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Born January 25, 1931 (age 75)
Decatur, Alabama United States


Dean Jones (born January 25, 1931 in Decatur, Alabama) is an American actor. He served in the US Navy during the Korean War, after which he worked at the Bird Cage Theater at Knott's Berry Farm, California.

He was notoriously replaced (by Larry Kert) in Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical Company after just two weeks, having already recorded the cast album. He also appeared in many Disney films in the 1960s and 1970s, including, That Darn Cat! (1965), The Ugly Dachshund (1966), Blackbeard's Ghost (1968), and Snowball Express (1972). Jones' signature Disney role would be that of race car driver Jim Douglas in the highly successful The Love Bug (1969) series. Jones appeared in two of the five feature films, a short-lived television series produced in 1982, and a made for TV movie in 1997. He also appeared as the evil vet Herman Varnick in the popular family film Beethoven in 1992.

Jones became a devout born-again Christian in 1973/1974 and has since appeared in several Christian movies. He is semi-retired, and currently resides in California.

He also testified in favor of a constitutional amendment that would limit marriage to only heterosexuals.

Etta James
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Background information

Birth name Jamesetta Hawkins
Born January 25, 1938
Genre(s) Blues, R&B, Pop Music
Occupation(s) Singer
Instrument(s) Vocals
Years active 1954- Present
Label(s) Chess Records (1960-1975)
Bullseye Records
Private Records
RCA Records (2006-Present)
Associated
acts Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday

Etta James (born Jamesetta Hawkins January 25, 1938 in Los Angeles, California) is an American Blues, R&B and Gospel singer. In the 1950s and 60s, she had her biggest success as a Blues and R&B singer. She is best-known for her 1961 ballad "At Last", which has been classified as a "timeless classic" and has been featured in many movies and television commercials since its release.


Childhood & Rise to Success

Few R&B singers have endured tragic travails on the monumental level of Etta James and remain to tell the tale. [1]

Etta James was born to an unmarried 14-year-old African American mother. She claimed that her mother told her that her father was Rudolph "Minnesota Fats" Wanderone, and that they received financial support from him on the condition that they keep his paternity a secret. She received her first professional vocal training at the age of five, from James Earle Hines, musical director of the Echoes of Eden choir at St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles.

James's family moved to San Francisco in 1950 and James soon teamed up with two other girls to form a singing group. When the girls were fourteen, bandleader Johnny Otis had them audition: they sang an answer to Hank Ballard's "Work With Me, Annie" called "Roll With Me Henry." Otis particularly liked the song, and against her mother's wishes, James and the trio went to Los Angeles to record the song in 1954. The song was recorded under the label Modern Records. By this time, the trio renamed the song "The Wallflower (Dance with Me, Henry)". James also named her vocal group The Peaches. "The Wallflower (Dance with Me, Henry)" was released in 1955.

Success

There are at least two versions of how Johnny Otis discovered Etta James: Otis's version is that she came to his hotel room after one of his performances in San Francisco and persuaded him to audition her. Another frequently told story is that Otis spotted her performing in an L.A. nightclub with The Peaches and, having conceived of the answer song to Hank Ballard's "Work With Me, Annie," arranged with the Bihari brothers for Modern Records to record "The Wallfower" with James. "The Wallflower" reached number two on the rhythm and blues charts in February 1955 but was undercut in the wider market by a rushed out cover version by Georgia Gibbs on Mercury Records. The song's royalties were divided between Hank Ballard, Etta James, and Johnny Otis, and its huge success attracted the attention of the R&B world, resulting in James going on tour with Little Richard. On the tour, according to James, she witnessed and experienced situations which minors are not usually privy to and acquired a drug habit.[2]


Career in the 50s

Before too long, "The Wallflower" was a #1 hit on the R&B charts of 1955. The song was later a hit in the white market for Georgia Gibbs, who re-wrote it as "Dance with Me, Henry". Soon after the song's success, The Peaches and Etta parted company, but this did not halt her career. She continued to record and release albums throughout much of the decade, and enjoyed more success. Her follow-up, "Good Rockin' Daddy" was released and became another hit in the fifties. Other songs however, such as "Tough Lover" and "W-O-M-A-N" failed to gain any significant success at all. James toured with Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Otis Redding in the fifties and has cited Watson as the most significant influence on her style.


The Chess Years in the 60s

In 1960, Etta signed a recording contract with Chess Records. Little did she know that she would have the biggest success of her career from this recording label, recording her biggest and most memorable hits. This recording company went into high gear with James, releasing many duets with her then boyfirend Harvey Fuqua, who was then the lead singer of the Moonglows. One of her duets with Fuqua, called "I Can't Have You", became a hit on the R&B charts in 1960. As a solo artist however, she had more enduring success. One of her first singles released by Chess in 1960 was called "All I Could Do Was Cry". This Blues number became a big hit for James on the R&B charts in 1960. James' sassy vibe added a significant touch of personality to the song. Leonard Chess, one of the founders of Chess Records helped James along the way. He saw the potential for James to go into a more Pop-oriented direction. Therefore, James started recording more Pop tunes for the label.

The year 1961 became a year of great change for James. In 1961 came the release of one of her first Pop-oriented tunes called "At Last". The song became a big hit in 1961, reaching #2 on the R&B charts. The song even went as far as #22 on the Pop charts that year, proving that the Pop crossover direction was becoming successful for her. Although it may have turned out to be less of a hit than expected on the Pop charts, it still made the Top 30. The song became her signature song and the song most people remember her by.[3] Her career had not ended yet though. More success came, following the success of "At Last". Other songs such as "Trust In Me" became hits for her, following the success of her signature tune. The 1962 tune "Something's Got a Hold On Me", showed more of James' Gospel side, a genre she had sung since childhood.

Her 1963 album Etta James Rocks the House, which was cut at Nashville's "New Era" club also gave her career a boost. She had other big hits in the 1960s, but mainly on the R&B charts. The song "Pushover" was a hit for her in 1963. Other hits followed, like "Stop the Wedding", "Fool That I Am" and "Don't Cry Baby", which were all hits for her between 1961 and 1963. From this, James became one of the most successful R&B artists of the 1960s, having many more Top Ten and Top Twenty hit singles on the charts. She has been classified as one of the pioneers of the Blues, being acclaimed to the ranks of artists like B.B. King. Performing in Memphis, Tennessee, the city where Blues started didn't hurt James into making her into a blues icon. Between 1965 and 1967, not much other success had followed, in terms of chart success. However, this wasn't to last for very long, in 1967, she would release another single that would become a big hit again, giving her comeback into music once more.


The Chess Years in the 70s, 80s and Onward

In 1967, Etta was ready to release her next hit single. The song was called "Tell Mama" and it became a Top Ten hit on the R&B charts that year. The song showed James' comeback, after a dry period of no hits for almost four years. The song made James a household name once more. The follow-up also proved to be just as successful as "Tell Mama" was for her. The song was called "Security" and proved that James had staying power on the charts agin. After that, less success came, but James was still on the charts regularly. Despite the death of Leonard Chess, Etta James stayed with the Chess label into 1975. Towards the end of the Chess years though, James went into more Rock-based songs. Her career however did not stop once the Chess years came to an end. Etta recorded for numerous other labels and continued to release albums, like 1978's Deep In the Night by Bullseye Records.

Despite a dry period during the early to mid 80s, Etta got back on track and began to record music again. Her 1988 album Seven Year Itch proved this comeback capability. The album showed more James' Soul side. Into the 1990s, she continued to record and perform. Her albums widely varied in styles and genres of music. Her 1992 album The Right Time was another Soul album that was produced by Elektra Records. The album was upbeat as well. She began to record more Jazz music as well, which became the subject for many of her 1990s albums. In 1998 she released a Christmas album called An Etta James Christmas. To a younger generation, Etta is known for the Muddy Waters song "I Just Wanna Make Love To You", used in television commercials for Coca-Cola and for John Smith's bitter. The Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry and Foghat have also recorded the song. Etta's version was a surprise Top 10 UK hit in 1995. Drug-related and romantic problems interfered with her career, but James managed to maintain a career throughout the latter half of the 20th century.[4] Later in life, James struggled with obesity. She reached more than 400 pounds, experienced mobility and knee problems, and often needed a wheelchair. In 2003, James underwent gastric bypass surgery and lost over 200 pounds.[5] James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.[6] She was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001. Her pioneering contribution to the genre has been recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In 2003 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked her #62 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.[7] She is still touring in 2006. A new album was also released in 2006 called All the Way, which was released by RCA Records.

When Insults Had Class.

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
-- Winston Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
-- Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure."
-- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary."
-- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
-- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time
reading it."
-- Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I
know."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
-- Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved
of it."
-- Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
-- Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a
friend.... if you have one."
-- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is
one."
-- Winston Churchill, in response

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here."
-- Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
-- John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
-- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
-- Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
-- Paul Keating

"He had delusions of adequacy."
-- Walter Kerr

"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
-- Jack E. Leonard

"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."
-- Robert Redford

"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human
knowledge."
-- Thomas Brackett Reed

"He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by
diligent hard work, he overcame them."
-- James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
-- Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
-- Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on
it?"
-- Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
-- Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
-- Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts.. .for support
rather than illumination. "
-- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
-- Billy Wilder

Thank goodness, hawkman. We were concerned about you. Great bio's today, Boston, and those scathing quotes are fantastic.

Love the George Bernard Shaw quote and Winston's retort.

No particular reason for this song, folks. I just heard it in the background of our little studio.

Gilbert O'Sullivan

Alone Again (Naturally)

In a little while from now
If I'm not feeling any less sour
I promise myself to treat myself
And visit a nearby tower
And climbing to the top will throw myself off
In an effort to make it clear to who
Ever what it's like when you're shattered
Left standing in the lurch at a church
Where people saying: "My God, that's tough
She's stood him up"
No point in us remaining
We may as well go home
As I did on my own
Alone again, naturally

To think that only yesterday
I was cheerful, bright and gay
Looking forward to well wouldn't do
The role I was about to play
But as if to knock me down
Reality came around
And without so much, as a mere touch
Cut me into little pieces
Leaving me to doubt
Talk about God and His mercy
Or if He really does exist
Why did He desert me in my hour of need
I truly am indeed Alone again, naturally

It seems to me that there are more hearts
broken in the world that can't be mended
Left unattended
What do we do? What do we do?

Alone again, naturally
Now looking back over the years
And whatever else that appears
I remember I cried when my father died
Never wishing to hide the tears
And at sixty-five years old
My mother, God rest her soul,
Couldn't understand why the only man
She had ever loved had been taken
Leaving her to start with a heart so badly broken
Despite encouragement from me
No words were ever spoken
And when she passed away
I cried and cried all day
Alone again, naturally
Alone again, naturally

We can't let the day wane without hearing one from Robert Burns, folks.

TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY
ON TURNING ONE DOWN WITH THE PLOUGH, APRIL, 1786
by: Robert Burns (1759-1796)

I

EE, modest, crimson-tippèd flow'r,
Thou's met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow'r,
Thou bonie gem.

II

Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet,
The bonie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet!
Wi' spreckl'd breast!
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet
The purpling east.

III

Cauld blew the bitter-biting north
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce rear'd above the parent-earth
Thy tender form.

IV

The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield,
High shelt'ring woods and wa's maun shield;
But thou, beneath the random bield
O' clod or stane,
Adorns the histie stibble-field,
Unseen, alane.

V

There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head
In humble guise;
But now the share uptears thy bed,
And low thou lies!

VI

Such is the fate of artless maid,
Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade!
By love's simplicity betray'd,
And guileless trust;
Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid
Low i' the dust.

VII

Such is the fate of simple Bard,
On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd!
Unskilful he to note the card
Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o'er!

VIII

Such fate to suffering Worth is giv'n,
Who long with wants and woes has striv'n,
By human pride or cunning driv'n
To mis'ry's brink;
Till, wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n,
He, ruin'd, sink!

IX

Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate,
That fate is thine -- no distant date;
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight,
Shall by thy doom!

One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong
I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me.
But the room just filled up with mosquitos,
they heard that my body was free.
Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night
and I put it in your little shoe.
And then I confess that I tortured the dress
that you wore for the world to look through.
I showed my heart to the doctor: he said I just have to quit.
Then he wrote himself a prescription,
and your name was mentioned in it!
Then he locked himself in a library shelf
with the details of our honeymoon,
and I hear from the nurse that he's gotten much worse
and his practice is all in a ruin.

I heard of a saint who had loved you,
so I studied all night in his school.
He taught that the duty of lovers
is to tarnish the golden rule.
And just when I was sure that his teachings were pure
he drowned himself in the pool.
His body is gone but back here on the lawn
his spirit continues to drool.

An Eskimo showed me a movie
he'd recently taken of you:
the poor man could hardly stop shivering,
his lips and his fingers were blue.
I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes
and I guess he just never got warm.
But you stand there so nice, in your blizzard of ice,
oh please let me come into the storm.


Leonard Cohen

WOW! edgar Leonard Cohen never ceases to amaze me. Although the lyrics are very arcane, they are beautiful, Texas. There's nothing further that I can add to that song. I can just keep rereading them.

New from the world of science:

Earth's moon destined to desintegrate.

During the red giant phase the Sun will swell until its distended atmosphere reaches out to envelop the Earth and Moon, which will both begin to be affected by gas drag-the space through which they orbit will contain more molecules.
The Moon is now moving away from Earth and by then will be in an orbit that's about 40 percent larger than today. It will be the first to warp under the Sun's influence.
'The Moon's actual path is a wiggly line around the Sun, with it moving faster when it is slightly farther out (at full Moon) and more slowly when it is slightly closer (at new Moon),' said Lee Anne Willson of Iowa State University. 'So the gas drag is more effective at the farther part of the orbit and this will put the Moon into an orbit where the new Moon is closer to Earth than the full Moon.'

The rest of the story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20070122/sc_space/earthsmoondestinedtodisintegrate

We can NOT allow that to happen.

In as little as 4 to 5 billion years our sun will burn out, it will turn dark then.

My goodness, dys. That's rather alarming news. Should we be concerned?

Dark Moon by Elvis Presley


(Words & music by Ned Miller)

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love
What is the cause your light withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love
What is the cause your light withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

I Want To Know What Love Is
Foreigner

I gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I'm older

Now this mountain I must climb
Feels like the world upon my shoulders
Through the clouds I see love shine
It keeps me warm as life grows colder

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now
I've travelled so far
To change this lonely life

I want to know what love is
I want you to show me
I want to feel what love is
I know you can show me

I'm gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me
I've got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found me

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now
I've travelled so far
To change this lonely life

I want to know what love is
I want you to show me
I want to feel what love is
I know you can show me
I want to know what love is
I want you to show me
And I wanna feel
I want to feel what love is
And I know
I know you can show me

Let's talk about love (I want to know what love is)
The love that you feel inside (I want you to show me)
And I'm feeling so much love (I want to feel what love is)
No, you just can't hide (I know you can show me)
I want to know what love is [let's talk about love]
(I know you can show me)
I wanna feel it too (I want to feel what love is)
I wanna feel it too
and I know and I know
I know you can show me
Show me love is real (yeah)
I want to know what love is...

if dys and letty's gloomy future comes true

hawksley workman has a solution

You and the Candles

When societies crumbled
And everything's gone
When the cars are all rusted away,
When there ain't no more money
And there's nothing to buy,
And all that we have is the day.

When the world becomes silent
No planes in the air
And the voices just gather to sing.
When the guns are the fence posts
And the cars are the dog house
And the telephones no longer ring.

And what, what of the night?
With no electrical light?
So what then?

You, you and the candles will be all that I need.
Your face bathed in the firelight will be all I want to see.
And I'll still sing you a song
That'll last the whole night long.
You, you and the candles.

When the grocery stores are hollow inside
And the airports are filled with a breeze
After the anarchy finally subsides
When you reckon on how it will be
When empires are humbled before the eyes of the people
And the truth will be like a parade
When industry's fallen we'll make our own clothes now
The gifts of our hands rise again

And what, what of the night?
With no electrical light?
So what then?

You, you and the candles will be all that I need.
Your face bathed in the firelight will be all I want to see.
And I'll still sing you a song
That'll last the whole night long.
You, you and the candles

In the waste paper basket
The timing's fantastic
For lovers to mean what they say
And in a night lit in candles on stained wooden mantles
Keeps us safe ?'til night turns to day

You, you and the storm clouds
And the puddles at our feet
The lightning cuts through the heavens
And lights you so bravely.
And I'll still write you a song
To last the whole night long.
You, you and the candles
You, you and the candles.
You, you and the candles

Anne Jeffreys
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anne Jeffreys (born Anne Carmichael on January 26, 1923 in Goldsboro, North Carolina) is an American actress and singer.




Career

Jeffreys entered the entertainment field at a young age; her initial training was in voice (she was an accomplished soprano), but she decided as a teenager to sign with the John Robert Powers agency as a junior model.

Her plans for an operatic career were sidelined when she was cast in a staged musical review, Fun for the Money. Her appearance in that revue led to her being cast in her first movie role, in I Married an Angel (1942), starring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. She was under contract to both RKO and Republic Studios during the 1940's, including several appearances as Tess in the Dick Tracy series, and the 1942 Frank Sinatra musical Step Lively

When her career faltered, she instead focused on her stage career, starring in productions such as the Broadway musical My Romance. With husband Robert Sterling, she appeared in the 1953 sitcom Topper.

After a semi-retirement in the 1960s, she appeared on television, appearing in episodes of such TV series as L.A. Law and Murder, She Wrote. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her work in The Delphi Bureau (1972). From 1984 to 1985, she starred in the short-lived Aaron Spelling series Finder of Lost Loves. She also appeared in Baywatch as David Hasselhoff's mother.

Her most recent career has been in daytime television; since 1984 she has appeared on the soap opera General Hospital (as well as its short-lived spinoff, Port Charles) as wealthy socialite Amanda Barrington.


Personal life

Jeffreys has been married twice. Her first marriage, to Joseph Serena, ended in divorce in 1949.

She married actor Robert Sterling in 1951. Sterling appeared with Jeffreys in the series Topper. They had three sons: Jeffrey, Dana and Tyler. Sterling died on May 30, 2006.


Trivia

Jeffreys' star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is at 1501 Vine Street.

Paul Newman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name Paul Leonard Newman
Born January 26, 1925 (age 81)
Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA

Height 5' 9½" (1.77 m)
Spouse(s) Jackie Witte
(1949-1958)
Joanne Woodward
(1958-present)

Paul Leonard Newman (born January 26, 1925) is an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Cannes Award, and Emmy winning American iconic actor and film director. He is the founder of Newman's Own. He has donated all of the company's profits and royalties, in excess of $200 million, to thousands of charities.[1]




Background

Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, near Cleveland, to Theresa Fetzer and Arthur S. Newman, a retail store owner. Newman's father was Jewish, the son of European immigrants Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn,[2] while his mother was Slovakian (Humenne) and practiced Christian Science.

Newman served in the Navy in World War II, in the Pacific theater. Prior to entering the service, he attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. He completed his degree at Kenyon College after the war and later studied acting at Yale University and the Actors Studio in New York City.


Film career

While he was attending graduate school at Yale, he became a successful stage actor in New York City. He made his Broadway theatre debut in the original production of William Inge's Picnic with Kim Stanley. He later appeared in the original Broadway productions of The Desperate Hours and Sweet Bird of Youth with Geraldine Page. He would later star in the film version of Sweet Bird of Youth, which also starred Page.

His first movie, The Silver Chalice (1954) has been described by Newman himself as the "worst movie of the entire 1950s decade," but he rebounded with acclaimed roles such as Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) as boxer Rocky Graziano and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opposite Elizabeth Taylor.

Newman appeared in a screen test with James Dean for the role of Cal Trask in East of Eden, but Dean won the part.


Major films

With his piercing blue eyes and handsome chiseled features, he could have been just a romantic leading man, but he wanted much more than that. Newman fought for important roles in great movies, rather than trade on his good looks and take standard pretty boy roles Hollywood offered every young handsome actor. Newman was one of the few actors who successfully made the transition from 1950s to the 1960s and 1970s cinema. His rebellious persona translated well to a subsequent generation. He has been frequently mentioned by younger actors as an influence.

Newman has appeared in such classics as The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963),Harper (1964), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Slap Shot (1977) and The Verdict (1982). He appeared most notably with Robert Redford in the films Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973).

He also appeared with his wife, Joanne Woodward, in the feature films The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, (1958), From the Terrace (1960), Paris Blues (1961), A New Kind of Love (1963), Winning (1969), WUSA (1970), The Drowning Pool (1975), Harry & Son (1984) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). They also both starred in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls, but did not have any scenes together.

In addition to Harry & Son, which Newman starred and directed, he also directed three feature films (which he was only the director) that starred Woodward. They were Rachel, Rachel (1968), based on Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, the screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), the television screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Shadow Box (1980) and a screen version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1987).


Recent work

Recently, he appeared in a Broadway theatre revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. He received his first Tony Award nomination for his performance. PBS and the cable network Showtime aired a taping of the production, and Newman was nominated for an Emmy Award, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie.

One of his most recent screen appearance is as a conflicted mob boss in Road To Perdition opposite Tom Hanks. Now in his early eighties, Newman has almost retired but has continued acting occasionally, such as doing voice work for Disney/Pixar's Cars as the character Doc Hudson

‎



Awards

Newman has been nominated for an Academy Award nine times as an actor, in addition to the producer nomination he received for Rachel, Rachel. He was nominated for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Hustler; Hud; Cool Hand Luke; Rachel, Rachel; Absence of Malice; The Verdict; Nobody's Fool; and Road to Perdition. Of his acting nominations, he won once, for his leading role on The Color of Money in 1986. That award came a year after he won an honorary Oscar for his "many and memorable and compelling screen performances." In 1994, the Academy awarded him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charity work. In all, he has three Oscar statuettes.

Newman was nominated for five BAFTA Awards, winning once for The Hustler. He won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for The Long, Hot Summer.

In 2005, he won his first ever Emmy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe Award, for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, for Empire Falls, which he also produced. He got another Emmy nomination as producer for the miniseries. He was previously nominated for Outstanding Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, for Our Town, in 2003; and for Outstanding Director of a Miniseries or TV Movie, for The Shadow Box, in 1980.

In 1969, he won the Golden Globe award for Best Director, for Rachel, Rachel, but failed to get an Academy Award nomination even though the film was nominated for Best Picture. He won the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984.

And finally, in 1968, Newman was awarded the second of a long series of prestigious "Man of the Year" awards by Harvard University's renowned performance group, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.


Life outside the cinema

Personal life

Detached from Hollywood, Newman makes his home in Westport, Connecticut with his wife Joanne Woodward most of the year. He also lives in the small town of Golden Beach, Florida.

He has married twice. His first marriage was to Jackie Witte, and lasted from 1949 to 1958. Together they had a son, Scott, who was born in 1950 and died in 1978 from an accidental drug overdose [3]. Scott had appeared in such films as The Towering Inferno as a firefighter, and in the 1977 film Fraternity Row. Newman started the Scott Newman Center for drug abuse prevention in memory of his son. [4]. They also had two daughters together: Susan Kendall (1953) and Stephanie. Susan is a stage actress and philanthropist. She also produced his telefilm The Shadow Box.

Newman married Joanne Woodward on January 29, 1958. They have three daughters ?- Elinor Teresa (1959), Melissa Steward (1961), and Claire "Clea" Olivia (1965). Newman directed his daughter Elinor (stage name Nell Potts) in the central role alongside her mother in the film The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Newman has been married to Woodward now for almost 50 years and when asked why he never committed adultery by Empire magazine he famously replied "Why fool around with hamburgers when you have steak at home?"

For his strong support of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (and effective use of television commercials in California), Newman was 19th on Richard Nixon's enemies list. He has said that this is one of his life's proudest achievements.

Consistent with his work for liberal causes, Newman publicly supported Ned Lamont's candidacy in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary against Senator Joe Lieberman.


Auto racing

He first became interested in the motorsport ("the first thing that I ever found I had any grace in") while training for, and filming, Winning, a 1968 film, despite being color-blind.

Newman's first professional event was in 1972, in Thompson, Connecticut. He ran the 24 hours of Le Mans once in 1979 and finished second in a Porsche 935 of Dick Barbour, mainly due to the driving skills of German team mate Rolf Stommelen.

From the mid seventies to the early nineties, he drove for the Bob Sharp Racing team, racing mainly Nissans. He became heavily associated with the brand during the eighties, even appearing in commercials for them. Although they named a Skyline model after him, calling it the "Newman", he was most closely associated with the Z series, which he used for most of his race victories and championship titles.

At the age of 70, he became the oldest driver to be part of a winning team in a major sanctioned race, the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1995. Newman told an Associated Press journalist in March 2005 that he'll "probably race for another year".

Newman co-founded Newman/Haas Racing with Carl Haas, a Champ Car auto racing team, in 1983. He is also a partner in the Champ Car Atlantics team Newman-Wachs racing. The 1996 racing season was chronicled in the IMAX film Super Speedway, which Newman narrates.

Later in his career, he voiced the Hudson Hornet "Doc Hudson", a former racecar in silent retirement in the little town of Radiator Springs, in the 2006 Disney/Pixar animated release Cars.


Philanthropy

With writer A.E. Hotchner, Newman founded Newman's Own, a line of food products, in 1982. The brand started with salad dressing, and has expanded to include pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, and salsa, among other things. Newman donates the proceeds, after taxes, to charity. As of early 2006, the franchise has resulted in excess of $200 million in donations. He co-wrote a memoir about the subject with Hotchner, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good (ISBN 0-385-50802-6). Among other awards, Newman co-sponsors the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, a $25,000 reward designed to recognize those who protect the first amendment as it applies to the written word.

One beneficiary of his philanthropy is the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a residential summer camp for seriously ill children, which is located between Ashford and Eastford in Connecticut. Newman cofounded the camp in 1986; it was named after the gang in his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Newman's college fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, adopted "Hole in the Wall" as their "national philanthropy" in 1995. One camp has expanded to become several Hole in the Wall Camps in the U.S., Ireland, France and Israel. The camp serves 13,000 children every year, free of charge.[5]




Trivia

While on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Newman was dared to have a taste of his own brand name label dog food. He tried it and was pleased with its taste.
While on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Newman and Leno raced. Newman beat Leno by a considerable time.
Paul Newman was the only male to have endorsed Lux brand soaps until Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan did the same in 2005.

Scott Glenn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Born January 26, 1941
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania


Theodore Scott Glenn (born January 26, 1941) is an American actor known for supporting roles. His roles include Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy (1980), astronaut Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff (1983), Commander Bart Mancuso in The Hunt for Red October (1990), and as Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).





Biography

Early life

Glenn was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Elizabeth Glenn. He grew up in Appalachia and has Irish and Native American ancestry.[1] During his childhood he was regularly ill, and for a year was bed-ridden. Through intense training programs he got over his illnesses, including a limp. After graduating from a Pittsburgh high school, Glenn entered College of William and Mary where he majored in English. He then joined the Marines for three years and worked roughly five months as a reporter for the Kenosha Evening News. He then tried to become an author, but found he could not write good dialogues. To learn the art of dialogue, he began taking acting classes.

In 1965, Glenn made his Broadway debut in The Impossible Years. He joined George Morrison's acting class, helping direct student plays to pay for his studies and appearing onstage in La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club productions. In 1967, he married Carol Schwartz, his current wife; Glenn converted to his wife's Jewish religion upon marrying her.[1] In 1968, he joined The Actors Studio and began working in professional theatre and TV. In 1970, director James Bridges offered him his first movie role in The Baby Maker, released the same year.


Career

Glenn that year left for LA and spent about 8 years there acting small roles in films and doing brief TV stints. He appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), in a small role, while there and also worked with directors like Jonathan Demme and Robert Altman. Fed up with Hollywood, in 1978 Glenn left LA with his family for Ketchum, Idaho and worked for the two years he lived there as a barman, huntsman and mountain ranger, occasionally acting in Seattle stage productions.

In 1980, Glenn got back into acting in films, by appearing as ex-convict Wes Hightower in Bridges's Urban Cowboy. After, he appeared in action films like Silverado (1985), and The Challenge (1982) and drama films like The Right Stuff (1983), TV film Countdown to Looking Glass (1984), The River (1984) and Off Limits (1988) as he alternately played good guys and bad guys during the 1980s. He tried his hand at gangster movies in 1987 when he starred as the real-life sheriff turned gunman Verne Miller in the movie of the same name. "Verne Miller" was only given a theatrical release in Finland and went straight to video in the U.S. In the beginning of the 1990s his career was at its peak as he appeared in several well-known films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the blockbuster smash hit Backdraft (1991), The Hunt for Red October (1990), and The Player (1992). Later he gravitated toward more different movie role, such as in the Freudian farce Reckless (1995/I), tragicomedy Edie and Pen (1997) and Ken Loach's socio-political declaration Carla's Song (1996). Today Glenn alternates between mainstream films (Courage Under Fire (1996), Absolute Power (1997)), with independent projects (Lesser Prophets (1997) and Larga distancia (1998), written by his daughter Dakota Glenn) and TV (Naked City: A Killer Christmas (1998)).

Glenn's most recent theatrical role was in the drama Freedom Writers (2007), in which he played the father of Hilary Swank's character.

Eddie Van Halen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Born January 26, 1957
Nijmegen, Netherlands

Genre(s) Hard rock
Affiliation(s) Van Halen
Label(s) Warner Bros.
Notable guitars Super Strat "Frankenstrat"
Ernie Ball Music Man
Peavey Wolfgang
Years active 1974 - Present
Official site www.van-halen.com

Edward (Eddie) Lodewijk Van Halen, born Eduard Lodewijk van Halen on January 26, 1957 in Nijmegen, Netherlands, is a professional guitarist, most famous for being a co-founder of the hard rock band, Van Halen.



Biography

Childhood

Edward Van Halen was born to Jan and Eugenia Van Halen in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The Dutch Van Halen family moved to Pasadena, California, from Holland in 1962. Edward immediately started classical piano training, and won several talent competitions as a child (although during a radio interview he stated he cannot read music notation). Upon their arrival in America, his parents immediately sought a piano tutor for him and his older brother, Alex Van Halen.[1]

However, playing the piano did not prove sufficiently engaging - he once said in an interview, "Who wants to sit in front of the piano? That's boring." Consequently, whilst Alex began playing the guitar, Eddie bought a drum kit and began practicing drumming. According to Eddie, while he was delivering newspapers (to pay for his drum kit) Alex would practice on it.[citation needed] After Eddie heard Alex's performance of the The Surfaris' drum solo in the song "Wipe Out", he grew annoyed that his brother had overtaken his ability and decided to switch and begin learning how to play the electric guitar[1]

Eddie was approximately twelve years old when he started playing guitar, and practiced constantly.[citation needed] He once claimed that he had learned almost all of Eric Clapton's solos in the band Cream "note for note" by age 14[1]; however in later interviews he contradicted this by stating he could never play the solos precisely, instead he would modify them slightly to suit his style.

In an April 1996, in an interview with Guitar World, when asked about how he went from playing his first open A chord to playing "Eruption", Eddie replied:

" Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt talls. My brother would go out at 7pm to party and get laid, and when he'd come back at 3am, I would still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years ?- I still do that.[2] "

Eddie has many influences; most notably Eric Clapton, however he has also acknowledged the influence of Queen guitarist Brian May and fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth.[citation needed]


Van Halen formation


Van Halen, originally called 'Mammoth, was formed in 1974. The band consisted of Eddie Van Halen on guitars and vocals, his brother, Alex, on drums, and bassist Mark Stone. They had no P.A. system of their own, so they rented one from David Lee Roth[1] (who had auditioned for the band, but failed) - a service for which he charged $50 a night. Eddie quickly became frustrated singing lead vocals[2], and decided they could save money by letting Roth into the band[3]. Soon, Michael Anthony replaced Mark Stone on bass. They opted to change the name of the band, reportedly due to another band operating with the same name - Roth is normally attributed with suggesting the name 'Van Halen'.

In 1977 Gene Simmons, saw one of Van Halen's shows and subsequently financed their first demo tape, flying the band to Electric Ladyland studios in New York to record "House of Pain" and "Runnin' With the Devil". Eddie disliked his playing on the demo, because he wasn't using his own equipment, and had to overdub guitar parts (which he had never done before)[4].

In 1977, Van Halen were offered a recording contract with Warner Bros. records. Later that year, they recorded their first album, "Van Halen", which was released on February 10, 1978.


Roth years

Van Halen went on to achieve great success, releasing a total of 6 albums: Van Halen (1978), Van Halen II (1979), Women and Children First (1980), Fair Warning (1981), Diver Down (1982), and 1984 (1984). However, the band had trouble working together as a cohesive unit; according to Gene Simmons' book Kiss And Make Up, Eddie Van Halen approached Simmons in 1982 about possibly joining KISS as a replacement for Ace Frehley, who was suffering from severe substance abuse problems. According to Simmons, Eddie did so chiefly due to his personality conflicts with Roth.

Simmons persuaded Eddie to return to Van Halen, and shortly afterwards the band released the album '1984'; which yielded the band's first and only #1 pop hit ('Jump'). Other singles released from the album also sold well; particularly "Hot For Teacher", the video for which featured a skimpily dressed model playing the part of elementary-school teacher and school-age boys portraying younger versions of the band members.[citation needed] The album was praised by critics[citation needed], peaking at #2 on the Billboard charts behind Thriller by Michael Jackson (Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo on the song "Beat It" from that album - see below).

David Lee Roth left Van Halen on April 1, 1985, citing personal differences with Eddie. He stated in Kerrang! magazine, "Eddie Van Halen isn't happy unless he's unhappy."


Hagar years

With the arrival of former Montrose singer, Sammy Hagar, the band's sound changed somewhat, with Eddie's keyboard playing becoming a permanent fixture (heard on on songs such as 'Dreams' and 'Love Walks In'). This was a very successful time for Van Halen - eclipsing the success of the Roth years commercially.[citation needed] All four studio albums produced during this period reached #1 on the Billboard pop music charts. However tensions within the band again rose, and Hagar departed in 1996. Van Halen later stated that his sobriety made him realize how poor Hagar's work ethic was, and that both he and Roth had "LSD" ("Lead Singer Disease")[citation needed].

Following Hagar's departure, the release of a Greatest Hits package in 1996 coincided with an abortive Roth reunion. Two songs from these sessions were released, with the single "Me Wise Magic" reaching #1 on the mainstream rock chart. However, previous disagreements resurfaced and the reunion did not last.

The band auditioned many prospective replacements for Hagar, finally settling on former Extreme frontman Gary Cherone. Cherone predicted that the new line-up would last 'ten years'; unfortunately this would not prove to be the case, since the resultant album (Van Halen III) was received poorly. Cherone soon left the band, however, his departure was amicable. Once again without a lead singer, Van Halen went into hiatus.


Hagar reunion

In 2004, after several years on hiatus, Van Halen returned with Hagar as their lead singer. A greatest hits package, The Best Of Both Worlds, was released to coincide with the band's reunion tour. All bass parts on the new material on the album were played by Eddie Van Halen rather than Michael Anthony; this would prove a serious point of contention between the two[citation needed].

The band toured the US, covering 80 cities.[3] Despite taking $55 million dollars, it was revealed in Rolling Stone that the promoters had actually lost money on the tour. The final date on the tour appeared to bring tensions between Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar to the surface, culminating in Eddie violently smashing his guitar before leaving the stage on the last date.

Reviews of the tour differed - some reviews were enthusiastic, whereas many stated the band had poor musicianship and the concerts conatined apparently drunken behaviour.[4] Michael Anthony stated that Eddie regularly performed in an alcoholic stupor:

" I hate to talk smack about anyone in the band or whatever, but, y'know, Eddie, you know, he's still doing a bit of drinking and everything. There were nights where it was kind of like a rollercoaster, up or down, and myself, I would have liked to have seen him totally clean up if we were gonna take this further.[5] "


Possible Roth reunion

Persistent rumours have indicated that the Van Halen brothers are in talks with David Lee Roth to rejoin the band for a tour and/or new material. In the February 2006 edition of Guitar World magazine, Van Halen again talked about working with Roth during the summer of 2007:

" I'm telling Dave 'Dude get your ass up here and sing, bitch! Come on!' As it stands right now, the ball is in Dave's court. Whether he wants to rise to the occasion is entirely up to him, but we're ready to go. "

Regarding the news that Van Halen's 15-year old son Wolfgang may be playing bass in Van Halen this coming summer (indicating that Michael Anthony's status in the band is in question), Van Halen claimed his son's presence will have a positive effect on the band:

" Wolfgang breathes life into what we're doing. He brings youthfullness to something that's inherently youthful. He's only been playing bass for 3 months, but it's spooky. He's locked tight and puts an incredible spin on our ****. The kid is kicking my ass! He's spanking me now, even though I never spanked him. To have my son follow in my footsteps on his own, without me pushing him into it, is the greatest feeling in the world. "

Van Halen also stated in a Howard Stern interview that although Roth is a "loose cannon," he is willing to deal with that.

David Lee Roth has stated that reuniting with the band is "inevitable":

" I see (the reunion) absolutely as an inevitability. There's contact between the two camps, and they have legitimate management. To me, it's not rocket surgery. It's very simple to put together. And, as far as hurt feelings and water under the dam... so what? It's showbiz! So I definitely see it happening.[6] "


Recent events

Eddie Van Halen underwent hip replacement surgery in 1999, after an existing degenerative condition became unbearable.[7].

Since the 2004 tour, Eddie Van Halen has largely disappeared from the public eye, with the exception of occasional appearances such as the 14th annual Elton John Academy Awards, and a performance at a Kenny Chesney concert. In the time between the departure of Gary Cherone and the 2004 tour, Eddie publicly stated that he has "ten albums worth of material"; however this material has yet to see the light of day.[citation needed]

In December 2004 at Dimebag Darrell's funeral, Eddie donated his famous black and yellow guitar from the Van Halen II album inlay, stating that Dimebag had always said that was his all time favorite guitar. The guitar was put in Darrell's coffin, and he is buried with it.[citation needed]

On December 5, 2005, Eddie's wife, Valerie Bertinelli filed for divorce in Los Angeles Superior Court. The Complaint for Divorce revealed that the couple separated on October 15, 2001.[8] In an interview on Howard Stern's radio show on September 8, 2006, Eddie stated that he and Valerie share custody of their son, and that he sees him every day.


Cancer

During the late 1990s Van Halen was treated twice for tongue and mouth cancer. During an interview with Howard Stern on Sirius satellite radio channel 100 on September 8, 2006, Eddie claimed that holding a metal pick in his mouth 12-14 hours per day while immersed in the electromagnetic radiation of his music studio caused his tongue cancer (despite this seeming scientifically unlikely). He said he continues to smoke because "cigarettes didn't cause the cancer"[9].

Eddie also revealed that he stopped the cancer via an illegal method (the nature of which he declined to specify) in conjunction with a pharmaceutical lab with which he's affiliated in New York state. He said a portion of his tongue was removed and experimented on, and then the technique was performed on him. He said he has lost one third of his tongue, though his speech sounds virtually unaffected. Despite his battles with oral cancer, Eddie has been photographed in public as recently as July 2006 smoking cigarettes.[10]


Technique

Edward Van Halen's approach to the guitar involves several distinctive components. His innovative use of two-handed tapping, natural and artificial harmonics, vibrato systems, and speed picking - combined with rhythmic sensibility and a melodic approach - have influenced an entire generation of guitarists.

Whilst relatively commonplace today, Van Halen's ground breaking techniques were originally a closely guarded secret; before the release of the bands eponymous first album, the guitarist would often play solos and more complex riffs with his back to the live audience. This was done at the advice of his bandmates to prevent any guitar players from stealing his style and technique before the album came out in 1978[citation needed].


Tapping


Eddie utilizing the tapping techniqueVan Halen has claimed he developed his signature tapping approach after studying the guitar solo from the Led Zeppelin song "Heartbreaker" (played by Jimmy Page):

" I think I got the idea of tapping watching Jimmy Page do his "Heartbreaker" solo back in 1971. He was doing a pull-off to an open string, and I thought wait a minute, open string ... pull off. I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around ?" ... I just kind of took it and ran with it. "

Although Van Halen popularized the approach, he did not, despite popular belief, invent this technique. Van Halen is known for holding the pick between his thumb and middle finger (as seen in the picture to the right); this leaves the index finger free for easy transition between picking and two handed tapping.

In support of his large variety of two-handed tapping techniques, Van Halen also holds a patent for a flip-out support device which attaches to the rear of the electric guitar[5]. This device enables the user to play the guitar in a manner similar to the piano by orienting the face of the guitar upward instead of forward.


String boiling

Van Halen is well known for boiling new string sets before installation. This contributes to both the playability and tone of the strings.

" I boil the strings so they stretch, because if you just put them on and clamp it down, the strings stretch out on the guitar. I just take a pack and let it boil for 20 minutes in the hot water. And then I dry them in the sun, because otherwise they rust. But I only use them one night anyway, so who cares if they rust?[6] "


Tone

Another critical aspect of Eddie's playing has been his guitar tone, the Brown sound. Van Halen achieved his distinctive tone by using an stock 100-watt Marshall amp, a Variac to lower the voltage of the amp to change the tone, and a "Frankenstrat" guitar Van Halen constructed using a Charvel Stratocaster-type body, a vintage Gibson humbucker pickup sealed in paraffin wax (to reduce microphonic feedback), a pre-CBS Fender tremolo bridge (later to be a Floyd Rose bridge) and a single volume control, with a tone knob in its place.

The, now famous, single pickup, single volume knob guitar configuration was arrived at due to Van Halen's lack of knowledge in electronic circuitry. Upon installing the humbucking pickup, he did not know how to wire it into the circuit, so he wired the simplest working circuit to get it to function. His later guitars include various Kramer models from his period of endorsing that company (most notably the Kramer "5150", from which Kramer in its Gibson-owned days based their Kramer 1984 design, an unofficial artist signature model) and three signature models: the Ernie Ball/ Music Man Edward Van Halen Model (Which continues as the Ernie Ball Axisl), the Peavey EVH Wolfgang (which continues as the HP Special), and the Charvel EVH Art Series, on which Eddie does the striping before they are painted by Charvel.


Tuning

Though rarely discussed, one of the most distinctive aspects of Van Halen's sound was Eddie Van Halen's tuning of the guitar. Before Van Halen, most distorted, metal-oriented rock consciously avoided the use of the major third interval in guitar chords, creating instead the signature power chord of the genre. When run through a distorted amplifier, the rapid beating of the major third on a conventionally tuned guitar is distracting and somewhat dissonant.

Van Halen developed a technique of flattening his B string slightly so that the interval between the open G and B reaches a justly intonated, beatless third. This consonant third was almost unheard of in distorted-guitar rock and allowed Van Halen to use major chords in a way that mixed classic hard rock power with "happy" pop. The effect is pronounced on songs such as "Runnin' With the Devil", "Unchained", and "Where Have All the Good Times Gone?".

With the B string flattened the correct amount, chords in some positions on the guitar have more justly intonated thirds, but in other positions the flat B string creates out-of-tune intervals. As Eddie once remarked to Guitar Player:

" A guitar is just theoretically built wrong. Each string is an interval of fourths, and then the B string is off. Theoretically, that's not right. If you tune an open E chord in the first position and it's perfectly in tune, and then you hit a barre chord an octave higher, it's out of tune. The B string is always a ************ to keep in tune all the time! So I have to retune for certain songs. And when I use the Floyd onstage, I have to unclamp it and do it real quick. But with a standard-vibrato guitar, I can tune it while I'm playing.''[11] "


Equipment

Guitars

Van Halen built his trademark red and white striped "Frankenstrat" guitar (originally black and white) by hand, using an imperfect body and a used neck picked up at Wayne Charvel's guitar shop. The body and neck were constructed by Lynn Ellsworth of Boogie Bodies guitars, who was working for Wayne at the time.

Eddie named his line of signature Peavey Guitars after his son Wolfie. In 2004 the Peavey company parted ways with Van Halen, reportedly because Eddie launched an on-line sale of homebuilt and assembled Charvel guitars, sold by the name of the "EVH Art Series Guitars", while he was still contractually obliged to Peavey. The guitars sold for large sums on eBay, and were essentially replicas of his famous Kramer "Frankenstrat" guitars, played by Van Halen mainly during the David Lee Roth era of the band.


Amplifiers

It's been widely claimed that Eddie Van Halen's #1 Marshall amplifier has either been completely stock or heavily modified. Techs who claim to have seen inside his amp such as Chris Merren and Doug Roccaforte allege [12] that at the time of recording Van Halen's first album, the Marshall amplifier was completely stock. However, amp tech Mark Cameron claimed he found a schematic of EVH's amp in amp tech Jose Arredondo's shop after he died that showed numerous modifications that had been performed by Jose. As well as the "Jose" 16 Ohm load box, it had a transformer-coupled line out that was used to create a line out signal, which was then run into another Marshall amp's input. Basically it uses the first amp like a tube stompbox, and getting increased distortion, feedback, and gain that way. Regardless of whether the amp was modded, its serial number was 12301, which dates it to the transitional period at Marshall of 1967-1968 when the circuit of the 100 watt Marshall 1959 changed gradually from the 'Bass' circuit to the 'SuperLead' circuit. The fact that most '12000 series' (serial number in the twelve thousand range) transitional amps made during this period were a mixture of the two circuits makes it more plausible that Ed's amp was in fact stock, since the mixture of the two circuits provides a tone not dissimilar to Eddie's.


The infamous use of a variac with this amp has caused great confusion among guitarists and fans alike. Sending the reduced mains voltage of 90v into the amp does not increase distortion but actually reduces the amount the amp can produce. It is also unlikely that it was used to lower volume, since the actual reduction in volume from running a fully cranked Marshall 100w amplifier at 90v is slight. The most likely use of the variac was to produce the high end roll off and increased compression in the preamp distortion that is a result of a lower B+ voltage in the preamp and phase inverter sections of the amp, but also presumably to reduce the harmful effects of the "resistor mod" that was performed on the amp in the early days of Van Halen.

The "resistor mod" [13]performed on the amp was the inclusion of a very high wattage (and thus physically large) resistor that was placed in between the output transformer primaries (pins 3) of the inner two output tubes of Eddie Van Halen's amp. This not only greatly reduced the volume, it also dramatically changed the tone and was responsible for the unprecedented amount of distortion from the power tubes that can be heard from the amp. This modification was also the reason for the large amount of power tube and output transformer failures that Eddie Van Halen's amp has become famous for. Several pictures exist today of Eddie's amp in the club days with a large resistor hanging out the back. By using a variac to lower the plate voltage being sent to the output tubes, less stress was placed on the tubes and therefore reduced the incidence of tube failure.

Between 1993 and 2004 Eddie was sponsored by Peavey Electronics to use their 5150 Amplifiers, which he had a part in designing. Following the ending of this relationship, Peavey renamed the amplifier as the 'Peavey 6505', with slightly updated styling but original circuitry.


Floyd Rose system

A crucial component of Van Halen's personal style is his use of the fulcrum vibrato for electric guitars. Developed in the mid-20th century, early versions of this device allowed the guitarist to impart a vibrato (slight, wavering pitch change) to a chord or single string via movement of the bar with the picking hand. Pressure on the bar, attached to the guitar's bridge, slackened the strings and momentarily lowered the pitch. This vibrato device is often mistakenly referred to as a tremolo, due to an early Fender nomenclature error (tremolo correctly refers to a fluctuation in volume, rather than pitch).

Typical versions of this device are prone to tuning problems, and are generally finicky, unstable, and limited in their pitch-changing capability. Leo Fender's development of the fulcrum vibrato for his Stratocaster line of guitars in the 1950s imparted greater tuning stability and range. This technology was exploited by guitarists in the Surf music genre, as well as other artists such as Jimi Hendrix, who pioneered the use of the Stratocaster's vibrato bar for dive-bomb effects and feedback manipulation.

The Fender vibrato unit still suffered from a lack of tuning stability that would not be addressed until the late 1970s by Floyd Rose. The key to Rose's innovation was the introduction of a string clamp located near the nut of a guitar's neck; these new systems are referred to as double-locking vibrato units, and the clamp unit referred to as a 'locking nut'. This device allowed Van Halen far greater latitude in vibrato use than was possible with previous designs, and without the dramatic loss in tuning stability. With a proper setup and periodic maintenance, the double-locking vibrato is an extremely stable and reliable device.

Consequently, Van Halen was able to forge a whole new level of musical expression with the vibrato unit, expanding greatly on techniques developed by earlier players such as Jimi Hendrix. His music incorporated a vast array of never-before-heard guitar sounds, such as shrieks, growls, dive-bombs, chirps, squeals and grunts.

Van Halen went on to collaborate with Floyd Rose on improvements to Rose's device. Among Van Halen's suggestions were the supplemental (fine) tuner knobs on the vibrato unit itself which allow the player to fine-tune the pitch of the guitar after the locking nut was engaged: these fine-tuners are now a feature on virtually all such vibrato systems.


Floyd Rose Pro: disassembled, parts numberedThough Rose incorporated many of Van Halen's suggestions, he was slow to give credit for the guitarist's technical contributions, ultimately resulting in a degree of animosity between the two former collaborators. More recently, Van Halen designed and patented the D-Tuna device, which enables a player to quickly detune the lowest string on a Floyd Rose vibrato-equipped guitar down a full step, extending the effective tonal range of the guitar.

Eddie plays with a non-floating vibrato configuration that allows lowering of pitch only; he shuns the full floating configuration due to its inherent lack of tuning stability. The floating vibrato configuration is particularly susceptible to tuning degradation when a broken string sets the unit into imbalance on its pivot point; typically, the tuning will go sharp from the loss of tension previously supplied by the broken string. To counter this, Van Halen's vibrato unit is configured (by slightly over-tensioning the return springs) to rest on the surface of the guitar when not in use. This serves as a stopping point for the fulcrum rotation, thereby compensating for any loss of tension due to a broken string. Moreover, this setting makes the bridge transmit much more vibration to the guitar body, thus obtaining a better sound.

Van Halen also pioneered the mainstream use of the Trans-Trem system on the Steinberger line of guitars on "5150", most notably on the song "Summer Nights" where the song goes through several key changes while retaining the same chord voicings. The Trans-Trem system allows for the effect of an instant "capo", increasing the pitch of all strings up to a full step and a half (G) or lowering the pitch up to 2 1/2 steps (B), simultaneously and instantaneously.


Solo work

Eddie Van Halen has appeared on several projects outside of his eponymous band.

Most famously he was called in by Quincy Jones to play guitar on the song Beat It, from Michael Jackson's 1982 album, "Thriller". Steve Lukather of Toto played the main guitar riff and rhythm, with Eddie playing a solo that was allegedly blended, or "comped", from three different takes. The subsequent success of the track played a key role in getting R&B videos played on MTV. The combination of Jackson's pop sensibilities, Quincy Jones' production and Van Halen's guitar work melded several genres of music, and helped each to find new fans. Concurrently, Van Halen's song Jump was played in discos, inner-city R&B clubs, and on rock radio.
in 1984 Eddie collaborated with Queen guitarist Brian May on the Star Fleet Project - a 3 track EP consisting of a rock styled rendition of the theme to the popular anime children's show, a May penned track (Let Me Out), and an improvised blues track (Blues Breaker).
He played bass on Sammy Hagar's 1987 solo album I Never Said Goodbye.
He has also done soundtrack work for movies such as Back To The Future, Over The Top (Winner Takes It All, a collaboration with Sammy Hagar), Twister (The track Humans Being featuring Sammy Hagar, along with the instrumental Respect The Wind), Wild Life (an instrumental entitled Donut City), and Lethal Weapon 4 (The track Fire In The Hole from Van Halen III)
He has recorded with Dweezil Zappa, Jeff Porcaro, Roger Waters, Steve Lukather, and Thomas Dolby, amongst others. [7]
In July 2006, Eddie Van Halen recorded two new instrumental tracks ("Rise" and "Catherine") which debuted in a unusual format; in an pornographic feature entitled "Sacred Sin" directed by a friend of the guitarist, well known adult director Michael Ninn.[14][15] These tracks have since surfaced on the internet. Edward also composed some minor uncredited piano interludes in the feature.

Anita Baker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia





Background information

Born January 26, 1958
Toledo, Ohio, United States

Origin Detroit, Michigan, United States
Genre(s) Pop, Adult contemporary, Quiet storm, Smooth jazz
Years active 1978-present
Label(s) Beverly Glen, Elektra, Atlantic, Blue Note
Website http://www.bluenote.com/artistpage.asp?ArtistID=3739
Anita Baker (born January 26, 1958, in Toledo, Ohio) is a multi-platinum selling rhythm and blues singer-songwriter and 8 time Grammy Award winner. Baker is renowned for her soaring alto vocal range.



Biography

Early career

Anita Baker was raised in Detroit, Michigan. She began singing in a Baptist church choir at the age of 12. At age 16 she was in a band called Humanity which included fellow high school friends and was playing with other local bands when she was approached by bass player David Washington of Chapter 8 to audition.

In 1975, Baker joined Chapter 8, the most popular group of Detroit at the time. They spent a couple of years playing in and around Detroit, and eventually got a record deal with Ariola. The self-titled album came out in fall 1979. Two singles hit the R&B charts: "Ready for Your Love" and "I Just Wanna Be Your Girl". Ariola Records suddenly ran into financial trouble and the company was bought by Arista. The executives at Arista did not care for Baker's vocals and refused to renew Chapter 8's record deal while Baker was a part of the group. After being rejected Baker went back home to Detroit and got a job as a receptionist for a local law firm.


Solo career

In 1981, Otis Smith, the man behind Chapter 8's contract, formed his own label Beverly Glen. Remembering Baker's vocals, he got her telephone number from a Chapter 8 member and called her in late 1982. Baker refused the job at first due to her duties as a receptionist. However, she agreed to sign with the label and try again with a music career. It would prove to be a smart move.

In 1983, Baker released her debut album The Songtress. This album was a moderate success, which paved the way for a host of bigger things to come; two of the album's singles, "Angel" and "No More Tears", became smash hits on the R&B charts. By the spring of 1984, Baker had 5 chart hits and was close to a gold record. However, there was no answer when she asked Beverly Glen about a new album.


1986 - 1989: The critical and commercial success

In 1985, Baker got a major label contract with Elektra Records, a division of Warner Music Group. She released her second album, Rapture in 1986. Choosing her friend from Chapter 8, Michael J. Powell, as her producer, they created a masterpiece. It was this album which established Anita Baker as a world-wide musical tour de force and a household name. It was also this album that afforded her the opportunity to stretch her skills; she wrote "Been So Long", "Watch Your Step" and "Sweet Love". "Sweet Love", "Caught Up In the Rapture", "No One In The World", and "Same Ole Love" became major R&B hits during 1986 and 1987. By the time "Rapture" had completed its chart run, it had sold 6 million copies worldwide and also earned Baker two Grammys.

In November 1986 when she was returning to Detroit to receive the key of the city, she got engaged to Walter Bridgforth Jr. whom she'd met on an earlier trip home in January. They were married on Christmas Eve 1987.

In 1987, Baker collaborated with The Winans on the single "Ain't No Need To Worry" and this single lead Baker to her third Grammy award. At the same time, she also worked on her follow-up album Giving You The Best That I Got in between a busy performance schedule. This album was released in October 1988. She worked with Michael J. Powell again, and the album became a critical and commercial success, which sold another 4.5 million copies wordwide. It features the such hits as "Just Because" and the title track. Critics noted that, single-handedly, through her first two albums, "Anita Baker has set a new standard and helped redefine the sound of contemporary music recorded by female vocalists in the '80s and the '90s."


Compositions

Baker returned back to the studio in 1990 for her third Elektra album Compositions. On her third project for Elektra, Anita wanted to be more involved in song writing and wished to experiment with jazz. Baker wrote seven of the songs on this album, including the hits "Talk to Me", "Fairy Tales", "No One To Blame", and "Whatever It Takes Soul Inspiration" (co-written with Gerald Levert). The album was mostly cut live, meaning that the rhythm section was playing as Baker sung. On the album produced by Michael J. Powell, there were musicians like Greg Philinganes, Nathan East, Paulinho da Costa, Vernon Fails, Ricky Lawson and Stephen Ferrone. Baker's involvement in the whole recording process gave the album a personal touch and for the effort she received her 7th Grammy award.

Though the three singles from Compositions all failed to peak Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart, they still became Top 20 hits on the R&B Singles Chart, however. Compositions peaked at #5 on the Billboard 200 Albums Chart, #3 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, #4 on the Billboard Top Contemporary Jazz Albums, and still was certified Platinum by RIAA.

After almost five years of touring, performing, and recording non-stop, Anita took a break, only taking time off to record the jazz standard "Witchcraft" with Frank Sinatra for his 1993 Duets album.


Rhythm of Love
In January 1993, Baker gave birth to her first child, a boy named Walter Baker Bridgforth. Five months later Baker started working on her 5th album, and during the recording sessions she became pregnant again. In May 1994, with most of the album completed, Baker gave birth to a second son, Edward Carlton.

Her 5th album, Rhythm of Love, was issued on September 1994. After she ended the partnership with Michael J. Powell, Anita produced most of the album. However, this time many famous producers like George Duke, Arif Mardin, Barry Eastmond and Tommy Lipuma also contributed to the album. Rhythm Of Love was mainly recorded in Baker's home due to her pregnancy, and she wrote 5 out of 12 songs and beautifully selected "My Funny Valentine" to be the last song, a song that proves that Anita should do an all jazz album in many fans' opinion.

This album still sold well, peaked at #3 on the Billboard 200 Albums Chart and #1 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. It was certified double platinum by RIAA and received her 8th Grammy for the second single "I Apologize" in 1995.


Turn back home with family

After Rhythm Of Love album, Baker spent most of her time with her family. She only appeared in a jazz-influenced soundtrack to the Billy Crystal directed 1995 film Forget Paris. For this movie, Baker paired with popular Pop/R&B crooner James Ingram to record "When You Love Someone", which is produced by David Foster, and was also written with Foster, Carole Bayer Sager and Ingram.

The tragedy occurred that she lost her birth mother in 1996 and her father in 1998. At the same time she had a disagreement with Elektra Records about the delay of her new album. After all, she won the case against Elektra and signed with Atlantic Records, another division of Warner Music Group.


The allegedly ruined new album

In August 2000, Baker began to record her long-awaited new album. However, In May 2001, she had filed a lawsuit in federal court against an audio equipment rental company she said ruined some tracks recorded for her new album. She alleged that a 24-track tape machine she rented produced random popping noises. The company sent a technician to Baker's studio to repair the equipment, but Baker said the technician determined that the recorded material could not be salvaged because no system could remove the popping noises. According to the lawsuit, she said it cost her more than $500,000 to rent the equipment, hire producers, songwriters, musicians and vocalists, and pay their travel and housing expenses. She was seeking more than $200,000.

Due to the delay of new album, Atlantic Records parted ways with her in December 2001. Rhino Records released her compilation The Best Of Anita Baker on June 18, 2002, and the international version had different tracks and title, Sweet Love: The Very Best Of Anita Baker. On May 3, 2004 this compilation was certified gold by RIAA.


Back to music industry

After two years, in March 2004, Blue Note Records announced they signed Baker to an exclusive recording contract that would result in at least two albums. Bruce Lundvall, president/CEO of EMI Jazz & Classics, signed her after she approached him to record for Blue Note. In the same time Rhino Records released A Night Of Rapture: Live, a compilation that contains nine live tracks and three extra multimedia video in the late 80's.

In September, after a decade, Anita Baker finally released her long-awaited original album My Everything. Produced by Barry J. Eastmond and Baker herself, she still wrote or cowrote nine of this album's 10 tracks, including a duet with Babyface, "Like You Used To Do." Though she had left the limelight so long, this album still got the critical and commercial success. It debut at #4 on the Billboard 200 Albums Chart and #1 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. The album was certified gold by RIAA for shipments of 500,000 copies.

October 2005, she released her first Christmas album, Christmas Fantasy. Still produced by Baker and Barry J. Eastmond, the album mixes traditional Christmas carols ("God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"), standards ("I'll Be Home For Christmas"), re-imagined classics ("Frosty's Rag"), Broadway show tunes ("My Favorite Things"), and three new songs by Baker and Eastmond ("Moonlight Sleighride", "Family of Man", and "Christmas Fantasy"), all tied together with Baker's warm, rapturous voice.


The Babyface lawsuit

On April 15, 2006, the Grammy-winning singer-producer Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds had filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Baker, claiming she owed him more than $250,000.

According to the lawsuit, filed in Superior Court, Baker broke two oral agreements with Edmonds, who co-wrote, produced and performed on the song "Like You Used To Do" on her 2004 reunited album My Everything. The lawsuit claimed Baker refused to pay Edmonds producer's royalties equaling at least $100,000 from an estimated more than 500,000 albums sold. He also alleged that he and Baker had an agreement to play four concerts together, but that Baker canceled two shows and refused to pay $150,000 for those dates.

Spokesman Cem Kurosman from Baker's label, Blue Note Records, declined to comment Friday, saying the label had no knowledge of the lawsuit.