Today is the birthday of artist Alexander Calder. Let's hear what he has to say.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=M1oUa_kC72Q
And here is an interesting piece on Calder's work as a theater/set designer
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yeMT68Rq8cs
Good morning to you as well, firefly, and may I say that your Glen Miller big band song was great. His body was never found, incidentally, and my husband once told me that he heard from a reliable source, that Glen was killed by a jealous lover. Who knows.
Wow! Your Alexander Calder philosophy was a mirror image of mine, and his art design unusual, but impressive. Thanks, dear.
Here's a version of a Glen Miller number that I like, probably because it was done by Gershwin, folks.
So as the light filters through our blinds, let's strike up the band.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTd9QHdk5I8
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8icEGqnAJuM
Something from te Softones this early morning.
I am convinced the storm will hit too far souh of here to disturb Tomball in the slightest. It is expected to be minimal. For that reason, if we are to have one this year, it probably would have been best if it were Dolly.
Hope this will be your weather forecast, edgar.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aglqFRvEdPw
Stephen Vincent Benét
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 - March 13, 1943) was an American author, poet, short story writer and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body (1928), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, The Devil and Daniel Webster and By the Waters of Babylon.
Life and Career
Benet's fantasy short story The Devil and Daniel Webster won an O. Henry Award, and he furnished the material for Scratch, a one-act opera by Douglas Moore. The story was filmed in 1941 and shown originally under the title All That Money Can Buy. Benét also wrote a sequel, Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent, in which real-life historic figure Webster encounters the Leviathan of biblical legend.
Benét was born into an Army family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He spent most of his boyhood in Benicia, California. At the age of about ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy. A graduate of The Albany Academy in Albany, New York and Yale University, where he was a member of Wolf's Head Society and the power behind the Yale Lit, according to Thornton Wilder.
Benét died in New York City at the age of 44. He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for Western Star, an unfinished narrative poem on the settling of America.
It was a line of Benet's poetry that gave the title to Dee Brown's famous history of the destruction of Native American tribes by the United States: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
He also adapted the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine Women into the story The Sobbin' Women, which in turn was adapted into the movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
John Brown's Body was staged on Broadway in 1953, in a three-person dramatic reading featuring Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey, and directed by Charles Laughton.
Benet's brother, William Rose Benét (1886-1950), was a poet, anthologist and critic who is largely remembered for his desk reference, The Reader's Cyclopedia (1948).
Margaret Whiting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 22, 1924 (1924-07-22) (age 84)
Genre(s) Traditional Pop
Years active 1942-1990s
Label(s) Capitol, Dot, Verve, London
Website Musical biography of Margaret Whiting
Margaret Whiting (born July 22, 1924, Detroit, Michigan) is a singer of American popular music who first made her reputation during the 1940s and 1950s.
Margaret's musical talent may have been inherited; her father Richard Whiting, was a famous composer of popular songs. She also had an aunt, Margaret Young, who was also a singer and popular recording artist in the 1920s. In her childhood her singing ability had already been noticed, and at the age of only seven she sang for singer-lyricist Johnny Mercer, with whom her father had collaborated on some popular songs. In 1942, Mercer started Capitol Records and signed Margaret to one of Capitol's first recording contracts.
Her first recordings were as featured singer with various orchestras:
"That Old Black Magic", with Freddie Slack And His Orchestra (1942)
"Moonlight In Vermont", with Billy Butterfield's Orchestra (1943)
"It Might As Well Be Spring", with Paul Weston And His Orchestra (1943)
In 1945 she began to record under her own name, making such recordings as:
"All Through The Day" (1945, becoming a bestseller in the spring of 1946)
"In Love In Vain" (1945)
(these two from the movie "Centennial Summer")
"Guilty" (1946)
"Oh, But I Do" (1946)
"A Tree In The Meadow" (a number 1 hit in the summer of 1948)
"Slipping Around", a duet with country music star Jimmy Wakely (a number 1 hit in 1949)
"Baby, It's Cold Outside" (1949)
"Blind Date", a novelty record with Bob Hope (1950)
"Faraway Places (With Strange Sounding Names)"
Until the mid-1950s, Whiting continued to record for Capitol, but as she ceased to record songs that charted as hits, switched to Dot Records in 1958 and to Verve Records in 1960. She came back to Capitol in the mid-1960s but went with London Records in 1966. On London, Whiting landed one last major hit single in 1966, "The Wheel of Hurt", which hit #1 on the Easy Listening singles chart.
She continued to sing into the 1990s.
During the 1950s Whiting was married to record executive Lou Busch, who also recorded semi-anonymously as ragtime pianist Joe "Fingers" Carr. They had one daughter. Her late-life marriage to young porn star Jack Wrangler raised many eyebrows. When the couple first began dating, Wrangler protested, "But I'm gay!" to which Whiting replied, "Only around the edges, dear."[1]
Orson Bean
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 22, 1928 (1928-07-22) (age 80)
Burlington, Vermont
Occupation Film, stage, television actor
Orson Bean (born Dallas Frederick Burrows July 22, 1928) is an American film, television, and stage actor. He appeared frequently on televised game shows in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but is perhaps best known as a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth.
Bean was born in Burlington, Vermont, to George Frederick Burrows and his wife Marian A. Pollard; Bean is a second cousin to Calvin Coolidge, who was President of the United States at the time of his birth.[1] He made frequent guest appearances on The Tonight Show (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson). He was a regular on both Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off, Fernwood 2Nite, and also played storekeeper Loren Bray on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman throughout its six-year run on CBS in the 1990s. He played John Goodman's homophobic father on the short-lived sitcom Normal, Ohio. And in a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, "Mr. Bevis", Bean played the title character.
On Broadway, he was the star of the original cast of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), and was featured in Subways Are for Sleeping (1961), for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Featured Actor in a Musical, as well as Never Too Late (1962). He also starred opposite Melina Mercouri in Illya Darling, the 1967 musical adaptation of the film Never on Sunday. In 1964 he produced the Obie Award winning Home Movies.
Two of his significant credits were playing the main characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the 1977 and 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and The Return of the King.
Bean was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s for his outspokenly liberal political views.[2]
Bean has been married three times: to Jacqueline De Sibour (1956 - 1962); to Caroline Maxwell (1965 - 1981); and to actress Alley Mills (who is twenty-three years his junior) since 1993. Bean appeared in the sitcom Two and a Half Men, in a 2005 episode entitled "Does This Smell Funny to You?", playing a former playboy whose conquests included actresses Tuesday Weld and Anne Francis. More recently, he appeared in a 2007 episode of How I Met Your Mother.
He currently is the spokesman for J.G. Wentworth.
Louise Fletcher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 22, 1934 (1934-07-22) (age 74)
Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.
Spouse(s) Jerry Bick (1960-1978)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Actress
1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
BAFTA Awards
Best Actress
1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Golden Globe Awards
Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama
1976 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Louise Fletcher (born July 22, 1934) is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning American actress.
Biography
Early life
Fletcher, the second of four children, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of Estelle Caldwell and Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, who was an Episcopalian minister from Arab, Alabama. Both of her parents were deaf and worked with the deaf and hard-of-hearing.[1] Fletcher's father founded more than 40 churches for the deaf in Alabama.[2] Fletcher and her siblings, Roberta, John and Georgianna,[2] were all born hearing without any hearing loss;[3] she was taught to speak by a hearing aunt, who also introduced her to acting. After attending the University of North Carolina, she traveled to Los Angeles, California, where she found work as a secretary by day and took acting lessons by night.
Career
Fletcher began appearing in several television productions, including the highest-rated episode of Maverick. She married Jerry Bick and took time off to raise her two children; she eventually divorced Bick, who died in 2004. In 1974, she returned to film in Thieves Like Us. Milo Forman saw her, and cast her (possibly because of her height and bearing) as McMurphy's nemesis Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. When Fletcher accepted her Oscar, she used sign language to thank her parents,[4] having spent two hours on the phone with her sister the previous night brushing up on her signing skills.[2]
She also appeared in such films as The Cheap Detective, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Firestarter, The Lady in Red, Brainstorm, Flowers in the Attic, Big Eden, Two Moon Junction, and as Sebastian's aunt in Cruel Intentions. Fletcher also co-starred in made-for-tv movies such as The Karen Carpenter Story as Karen and Richard Carpenter's mother Agnes, and The Stepford Husbands.
Fletcher was nominated for an Emmy Award for her recurring role on the television series Picket Fences. She also had a continuing role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the scheming Bajoran religious leader Kai Winn Adami. Fletcher played the character of Ruth Shorter, a supporting role, in the 2005 film, Aurora Borealis, alongside Joshua Jackson and Donald Sutherland, and appeared in the Fox Faith film The Last Sin Eater.
Personal life
Fletcher married literary agent and producer Jerry Bick in 1960, divorcing in 1977.[4] The couple had two sons, John Dashiell Bick and Andrew Wilson Bick,[5] for whom Fletcher took an 11 year hiatus from acting to raise.[4]
Terence Stamp
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 22, 1939 (1939-07-22) (age 69)
Stepney, London, England
Terence Henry Stamp (born July 22, 1939[1]) is an Academy Award-nominated English actor.
Biography
Early life
Stamp, the eldest of five children, was born in Stepney, London, the son of Ethel Ester (née Perrott) and Thomas Stamp, who was a tugboat captain.[1][2] His early years were spent in the East End of London,[3] but later in his childhood the family moved to Plaistow, Essex (now Greater London). His brother, Chris, is a rock 'n roll impresario credited with helping to bring The Who to prominence during the 1960s. As his father was away for long periods with his job in the Merchant Navy, the young Stamp was mostly raised by his mother, grandmother, and aunts. He grew up idolizing the film actor Gary Cooper after his mother had taken him to see Beau Geste at the age of three. He was also inspired by James Dean.
On leaving school Stamp worked in a variety of advertising agencies in London, working his way up to a very respectable wage. Deep down he wanted to be an actor, a realisation that came when Stamp found he no longer had to serve two years National Service after being rejected for once having treatment on his feet.
Career
Stamp made his film debut in Peter Ustinov's 1962 film adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Stamp's portrayal of the title character brought him not only an Academy Award nomination, but also international attention.
Stamp collaborated with some of the cinema's most revered filmmakers. Stamp starred in William Wyler's adaptation of John Fowles' The Collector (1965), opposite Samantha Eggar, and in Modesty Blaise (1966), for director Joseph Losey and producer Joe Janni. Stamp reteamed with producer Janni for two more projects: John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) starring Julie Christie, and Ken Loach's first feature film Poor Cow (1967).
Stamp then journeyed to Italy to star in Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit, a 50-minute portion of the Edgar Allan Poe film adaptation(s) Histoires extraordinaires (1968, aka Spirits of the Dead). Stamp lived in Italy for several years, during which time his film work included Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema (1968) opposite Silvana Mangano, and Stagione all'inferno, Una (1970). Stamp was considered for the title role of Alfie (1966), but turned it down.
His subsequent film credits included Alan Cooke's The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), Richard Donner's Superman (1978) and Richard Lester's Superman II (1980) (as Kryptonian super-villain General Zod), Peter Brook's Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), Stephen Frears' The Hit (1984). Also in 1984, he had the opportunity to play the Devil in a cameo in The Company of Wolves. He also starred in Richard Franklin's Link (1986), Ivan Reitman's Legal Eagles (1986), Michael Cimino's The Sicilian (1987), and Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987). The film Beltenebros (1992, aka Prince of Shadows), in which Stamp starred for director Pilar Miro, was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
Stamp began his fourth decade as an actor wearing some of the choicest of Lizzy Gardiner's Academy Award-winning costumes for the comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) for director Stefan Elliot and starring with Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving.
In 1999, Stamp played a lead role in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, to widespread critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. For his performance, Stamp received nominations for Best Male Lead at the 2000 Independent Spirit Awards, and for Best British Actor at the London Film Critic Circle (ALFS) Awards. Stamp can also be seen in George Lucas' global blockbuster Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) as Chancellor Finis Valorum; Frank Oz's Bowfinger (1999) opposite Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; and Red Planet (2000) opposite Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore.
In recent years, Stamp has completed the features Ma femme est une actrice (2001, aka My Wife Is An Actress) for Timothy Burrill Productions; My Boss's Daughter (2003) opposite Ashton Kutcher; Disney's The Haunted Mansion (2003), opposite Eddie Murphy, and Elektra (2005), opposite Jennifer Garner. Stamp returned to the Superman mythos in two roles. Not only did he provide the voice of Clark Kent's father, Jor-El, in the WB\CW television series Smallville (2001-present), but, In a season six premiere, Stamp reprises his role of General Zod, his original Superman role.
In addition to his acting career, Stamp is an accomplished writer and author. He has published three volumes of his memoirs, including Stamp Album (written in tribute to his late mother), a novel entitled The Night, and a cookbook co-written with Elizabeth Buxton to provide alternative recipes for those who are wheat and dairy-intolerant.
Stamp's current projects include the video game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in which he plays the villainous Mankar Camoran, head preacher of the Mythic Dawn, an evil cult that worships the Daedra Lord Mehrunes Dagon; and the films Zombie Island and These Foolish Things. Stamp appeared in the music video for "At the Bottom of Everything" by Bright Eyes. Stamp has recently voiced the Prophet of Truth in Halo 3, replacing Michael Wincott. He next appeared as the villain in the film adaptation of Get Smart starring Steve Carell.
On July 7, 2007, Stamp gave a speech on Climate Change at the UK leg of Live Earth in Wembley Stadium, before introducing Madonna.
Personal life
In the 1960s, Stamp shared a flat with Michael Caine before and during their rise to fame.[4] In his autobiography, Double Feature, Stamp describes his life with Caine, including an incident in which Caine tried to force Stamp to reverse his decision to turn down the starring role in Alfie, which Caine later accepted. In his autobiography, What's it All About, Caine states that he "still wakes up sweating in the night as he sees Terence agreeing to accept my advice".
Stamp received extensive media coverage of his romances in the 1960s with film stars Julie Christie, Brigitte Bardot, and supermodel Jean Shrimpton. His and Julie Christie's romance, and their high profiles during London's 'swinging 60s', was at one point thought to be referenced in The Kinks' 1967 song, Waterloo Sunset, with the lines about "Terry and Julie". He and Jean Shrimpton were one of the most photographed couples of Mod London. It was after Shrimpton ended her relationship with Stamp that he moved to India. There, he lived in an ashram, dropping out from the society for several years.
On New Year's Eve 2002, Stamp married for the first time. His 29-year-old bride was Elizabeth, whom Stamp first met during the mid-1990s at a pharmacy in Bondi, New South Wales. A Eurasian of Australian and Singapore Chinese parentage, Elizabeth was raised in Singapore before moving to Australia in her early 20s to study pharmacology. The couple divorced on the grounds of his unreasonable behaviour in April 2008.[5]
A minister was preoccupied with thoughts of how he was going to ask the congregation to come up with more money than they were expecting for repairs to the church building. Therefore, he talked with the organist to see what kind of inspirational music she could play after the announcement about the finances to get the congregation in a giving mood. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll think of something." During the service, the minister paused and said, "Brothers and Sisters, we are in great difficulty; the roof repairs cost twice as much as we expected, and we need $4,000 more. Any of you who can pledge $100 or more, please stand up." Just at that moment, the organist started playing, "The Star Spangled Banner."
edgar, thanks for the soft tones. That's exactly what we need this morning, and firefly, Blue Skies is perfect for the day.
Hey, hawkman. Once again we learn something from your celeb info. "Gay around the edges..."? Margaret was quite clever with that one.
Also love your little anecdote about how music got the congregation to pledge support. Thanks for the smile.
Let's listen to one by Margaret Whiting, then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypFC8Q5f1C0
Thanks, Raggedy, for the great quartet. Whenever I see Louise Fletcher, I recall Brainstorm and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Here is a tribute to the latter, folks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALUSl5Lr93o&feature=related
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=01mB4Ep9vSs
Here is an instrumental by Chet Atkins and Hank Snow.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy1d34IOySI
And, Softly by Bobby Darin
It almost put a tear in my eye.
edgar, what a lovely duo by Chet and Hank. Learned that Brahms as a child, Texas, and thanks.
I didn't know that Bobby Darin did that beautiful song and it is a sad reminder.
Well, all, here's a more forceful Brahms.
http://pop.youtube.com/watch?v=yfs1X2-lEhU&feature=related
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ZM6nihIiY
Here is another Bobby Darin in an unexpected performance. One you could not guess in a thousand years.
Wow! That was fabulous, edgar. You're right. I don't think many of us realize that Bobby did Ritchie.
Been having a wee bit of trouble today, y'all, and I would like to educate our listeners to the beauty of Romania. I happened to meet a man from Romania and we had a delightful exchange. He seemed pleased that I recognized Romanian as one of the Romance languages.
Hope this works, folks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itidLk5Dd3k
