WA2K Radio is now on the air

Comedy & Tragedy
Each Scene in Classical Literature for DIMTWITS! is divided into bite-sized
chunks so you don't get a reading headache. No knowledge of the original is required!

When reading look out for the symbols! Click on the symbols to read an interesting tidbit or see a picture, or look over to the right column to see some FINE translation in work! You can also hear REAL down on their luck Thespian actors demeaning themselves by reading lines from for DIMTWITS! plays!

Sophocles' Oedipus the King
or...Oedipus the King's Really Bad day

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Scene 1: Creon Exposes a Murder! Oedipus Exposes Himself!
            Part A
            Part B
            Part C

  Scene 2: Oedipus Greco-Roman Wrestles the Disabled!
            Part A
            Part B
            Part C
            Part D

Stay tuned for Scene 3!!
Read about Oedipus' hot wife! Learn about the baklava incident! More chills!
More thrills! Less good writing!

*NOTE* If the Scene text doesn't line up, try reducing your text size through the browser toolbar. P.S. If you don't understand, don't do it you might mess up your comp.

On first scene go down to move to the next page, then after that, see top of page for next page.
http://odin.prohosting.com/reotord/Dimtwits/OR_Sc1A.htm

That's wonderful, Angel. There is a positive side to tradition, and the handing down of ballads via our family is one of those positives.

Mini headline for today:

An intoxicated 20-year-old man stole a small plane in Connecticut and took two friends on a three-hour joyride early Wednesday that somehow ended with a safe landing at a darkened Westchester County Airport, authorities said.

He must have been Irish, folks.

'Til The End Of TimePerry Como

[Words and Music by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman]

Adapted from Chopin's "Polonaise in A-flat Major"

'Til' the end of time, long as stars are in the blue
Long as there's a Spring of birds to sing I'll go on loving you
Till the end of time, long as roses bloom in May
My love for you will grow deeper with every passing day

'Til the wells run dry and each mountain disappears
I'll be there for you to care for you
Through laughter and through tears
So take my heart in sweet surrender and tenderly say that I'm
The one you love and live for 'til the end of time

---- Instrumental Interlude ----

'Til the wells run dry and each mountain disappears
I'll be there for you to care for you
through laughter and through tears
So take my heart in sweet surrender
And tenderly say that I'm the one you love
And live for 'til the end of time

#1 for 10 weeks in 1945 and sold over 2 million copies

Good morning, edgar. Many pop songs were adapted from the classics, and Chopin was just one. Let's see if our listeners can identify from which classical musician comes the following:

None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness
Alone and parted
Far from joy and gladness
Heaven's boundless arch I see
Spread about above me
O what a distance dear to one
Who loves me
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness
Alone and parted
Far from joy and gladness
Alone and parted far
From joy and gladness
My senses fail
A burning fire
Devours me
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness

Good Morning WA2K:

Thanks for the informative bio, Bob.

Once upon a time:



Here are some more June 23 Birthdays

1668 Giovanni Vico, historian/philosopher (Italy; died 1744)
1876 Irvin S Cobb Ky, writer/humorist (Old Judge Priest) died 1944
1894 King Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, English king who abdicated to wed Wallis Warfield Simpson (Richmond, Surrey, England; died 1972)
1916 Irene Worth, actress (NE)(Deathtrap, Nicolas & Alexandra)
1927 Bob Fosse, director/choreographer (Chicago, IL; died 1987) All That Jazz, Cabaret, et al
1929 June Carter Cash, country singer (Maces Spring, VA)
1940 Wilma Rudolph, Olympic champion sprinter (St. Bethlehem, TN; died 1994)
1943 James Levine, conductor/pianist (Cincinnati, OH)
1946 Ted Shackelford Okla City Okla, actor (Dallas, Knots Landing)
1947 Bryan Brown, actor (Sydney, Australia) TV The Thorn Birds
1948 Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court justice (Savannah, GA)
1953 Cornel West, scholar/critic (Tulsa, OK)
1957 Frances McDormand, actress (Chicago, IL) Married to Joel Coen, Frances McDormand once jokingly remarked on how she got her Oscar-winning role in the Coen Brothers' Fargo: "The fact that I'm sleeping with the director may have something to do with it."
1963 Eriq LaSalle, actor (Hartford, CT)





The brilliant American pianist and conductor, James Levine, came from a musical family. His maternal grandfather was a cantor in a synagogue; his father was a violinist, who led a dance band; his mother was an actress. He began to play the piano as a small child. At the age of 10, he was soloist in Mendelssohn's 2nd Piano Concerto at a youth concert of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He then studied music with Walter Levin, 1st violinist in the La Salle Quartet. In 1956 he took piano lessons with Rudolf Serkin at the Marlboro (Vermont) School of Music. In 1957 he began piano studies with Lhévinne at the Aspen (Colorado) Music School. In 1961 he entered the Juilliard School of Music in New York, and took courses in conducting with Jean Morel. He also had conducting lessons with Wolfgang Vacano in Aspen. In 1964 he graduated from the Juilliard School and jointed the American Conductors project connected with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where he had occasion to practice conducting with Wallenstein, Rudolf, and Cleva.

In 1964-1965 James Levine served as an apprentice to Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra; then he became a regular assistant conductor with it (1965-1970). In 1966 he organized the University Circle Orchestra of the Cleveland Institute of Music; also led the Student orchestra of the summer music institute of Oakland University in Meadow Brook, Michigan (1967-1969). In 1970 he made a successful appearance as guest conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra at its summer home at Robin Hood Dell; subsequently appeared with other American orchestras. In 1970 he also conducted the Welsh National Opera and the San Francisco Opera. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in New York in June 1971, in a festival performance of Tosca; his success led to further appearances and to his appointment as its principal conductor in 1973; he then was its music director from 1975 until becoming its Artistic Director (the first in the Company's history) in 1986.

Under the leadership of James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera is now in a golden age. During his tenure at the Met, he has developed the orchestra and chorus to an unparalleled level of achievement, excellence and public recognition. Levine spends more than seven months each year with the Company (unique in today's music world) and has led numerous house premieres -- including works by Mozart, Verdi, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Weill, Berg, Gershwin, Rossini and Corigliano -- as well as an enormous number of works from the standard and not-so-standard repertoires. The Met has recently announced two new commissions -- by Tan Dun and Tobias Picker - to be conducted by Maestro Levine in the first years of the new millennium. This season at the Metropolitan, he will lead a new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde -- the first at the Met in 25 years -- as well as several major revivals (including Verdi's Otello with Plácido Domingo, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann), three cycles of Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen and the world premiere performances of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby (commissioned in honour of the 25th anniversary of his Met debut).

Maestro Levine has led the Metropolitan Opera on many domestic and international tours, including a visit to Expo '92 in Seville, tours to Frankfurt - in 1994 for its 1200th anniversary celebration in 1994 and again in 1996 - and three visits to Japan since 1988. The company telecasts several productions around the world each season, broadcasts each week from December to April on radio across North America (and regularly across Europe) and appears on an extensive library of studio recordings. Following the tremendous success of their first concert tour in 1991, the Met Orchestra and James Levine have initiated an annual series of orchestral programs with international soloists, including three performances each season in New York's Carnegie Hall and more across America and Europe. (This season's concert soloists include Evgeny Kissin, Olga Borodina, Sylvia McNair, Anne Sofie von Otter and Samuel Ramey.)

James Levine performs regularly with the Vienna Philharmonic in Vienna and also in European capitals, the USA and the Far East. He also works each season with the Berlin Philharmonic, has had a long association with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (including 20 years (1973-1993) as Music Director of the Ravinia Festival, where the orchestra is in summer residence), and is a regular guest with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also served as Music Director with the Cincinnati May Festival (1974-1978). In 1975 he began to conduct at the Salzburg Festivals.

In 1999 James Levine became Chief Conductor of the Munich Philharmonic, having made his debut there in 1997. At the Bayreuth Festival he conducted Wagner's Parsifal annually between his 1982 debut there (conducting the Centennial Production of the work) and 1993, and from 1994 until 1998 he directed Der Ring des Nibelungen in a staging by Alfred Kirchner and Rosalie. Beginning in 1996 he has conducted an extended World Tour with "The Three Tenors". More recently, in the summer of 1999, he conducted the orchestra of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland and returned to the Aspen Festival in Colorado (where he spent fifteen summers between 1957-1974) for two concerts to celebrate the Festival's 50th anniversary.

James Levine is also a distinguished pianist and an active recital collaborator, especially in Lieder and song repertoire. He continued to make appearances as a pianist, playing chamber music with impeccable technical precision. But it is as a conductor and an indefatigable planner of the seasons at the Metropolitan Opera that he inspired respect. Unconcerned with egotistical. projections of his own personality, he presided over the singers and the orchestras with concentrated efficiency.

James Levine has the distinction of being the first recipient of the annual cultural award of the City of New York.

Raggedy, thanks so much for the celebs update. Funny about the leading lady of Fargo. I like O Brother better, but we must admire the Coen Bros. for their different approach to movie making. All of us probably will have to go back and reread your biographical bit about James Levine.

Angel, I missed your Oedipus the first time around. Thanks for that because it coincides with my research on Tchaikovsky. I was stunned at what I read. Should any of you in our audience like a brief background, just call in, otherwise, I'll leave it to your imagination!

I saw a movie a few years ago, I think it was about Tchaikovsky. Movies are not like the real story of the person. They leave some things in, take out others, exaggerate, and so on.

Letty in your research, did the young wife of the composer end up in an insane asylum?

Many artist suffer from the same maladies. Mental, sexual, obsession with death etc...In the past, and today.

Angel, and all. In the research, I found that Tchaikovsky was a paedophile and in the attempt to cleanse himself of this devil, he married a woman that kept sending him letters. The marriage lasted only six weeks but he died a married man. It seems there are those who think that he committed suicide by taking arsenic in small doses, and yes, his wife ended up in an insane asylum.

Often, listeners, I feel that the genius that is inherent in certain people, also produces a flawed gene that may or may not be responsible for troubled development.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky

Nurture or nature is the eternal unresolved question, listeners.

Thats the movie I saw. In his biography it says that he was a homosexual, and that his wife was a student of his. She was supposed to be a ninpho maniac, and he married her for appearances only.

Another good movie was the one on Mozart.

DiCaprio played the poet Rimbaud in "Total Eclipse"

But, you don't get all the facts from the movies, not even from one biography. You have to read several biographies by different authors of the same person.

Well, folks, we learn so much that is necessary in understanding ourselves, do we not?

Thank you, Angel. I realize that Hollywood over dramatizes things, and it's up to the discerning mind to separate the real from the unreal because somewhere in between lies a gentle truth.

Let's consider "gentle", listeners, by welcoming englishdavis to the audience:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=54167

Tchaikovsky brother was also a homosexual according to another biography.

Well, folks. In keeping with our discussion, here is a supportive news item:

Brain Cells 'Recognize' Famous People

By MALCOLM RITTER

NEW YORK (AP) - Halle Berry? Jennifer Aniston? Everybody knows them. And now a surprising study finds that even individual cells in your brain act as if they recognize them.

The work could help shed light on how the brain stores information, an expert said.

When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some individual cells that reacted to a particular celebrity, landmark, animal or object.

In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her ``Catwoman'' costume, a drawing of her and even the words, ``Halle Berry.''


The findings appear in a part of the brain that transforms what people perceive into what they'll eventually remember, said Dr. Itzhak Fried of the University of California, Los Angeles, a senior investigator on the project.


The findings do not mean that a particular person or object is recognized and remembered by only one brain cell, Fried said. ``There is not only one cell that codes for Jennifer Aniston. That would be impossible,'' Fried said.


Nor do they mean that a given brain cell will react to only one person or object, he said, because the study participants were tested with only a relatively limited number of pictures. In fact, some cells were found to respond to more than one person, or to a person and an object.


What the study does suggest, Fried and colleagues say in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, is that the brain appears to use relatively few cells to record something it sees. That's in contrast to the idea that it uses a huge network of brain cells instead.


It's surprising that an individual neuron would react so specifically to a given person, said the study's other senior investigator, Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology. ``It's much more specific than people used to think.''


Charles Connor, who studies how the brain processes visual information but who didn't participate in the new study, called the results striking.


Nobody would have predicted that conceptual information relating to Aniston, for example, would be signaled so clearly by single cells, said Connor, who works at Johns Hopkins University.


The ``really dramatic finding,'' he said, is that a single brain cell can respond so consistently to completely different pictures of a given person. ``That will surprise everybody,'' Connor said.


The part of the brain the researchers studied draws heavily on memory as well as signals from what the eye sees, so the result may illustrate how memory is represented in the brain and how it relates to visual signals, he said.


He noted that in one participant, one brain cell responded both to Aniston and to Lisa Kudrow, her co-star on the TV hit ``Friends.''


``That's a tantalizing glimpse at how neurons represent concepts like membership in the cast of `Friends,' and could lead to much more extensive studies of how conceptual information is organized in human memory,'' he said.


The researchers tested eight people with epilepsy who'd had electrodes placed in their brains so that doctors could track down the origins of their seizures. The electrodes monitored the activity of a small fraction of cells in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe.


The researchers kept track of which cells became activated as the participants looked at images of people, landmarks and objects on a laptop computer. One participant had a brain cell that reacted to different pictures of Aniston, for example, but was not strongly stimulated by other famous or non-famous faces.


Oddly, when that participant was shown photos of Aniston paired with actor Brad Pitt, from whom Aniston later separated, the brain cell didn't respond.


``I don't know if it was a prophetic thing,'' Fried said.






06/23/05 07:42

The really weird thing Letty is that I don't know who Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston or Brad Pitt are.

Nor do you care, right dys?

Well, time for a little tune or two:

Carpenters Superstar lyrics







Long ago and oh so far away
I fell in love with you before the second show
Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear
But you're not really here
It's just the radio

(*) Don't you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you'd be coming back this way again baby
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, I love you I really do

Loneliness is a such a sad affair
And I can hardly wait to be with you again

What to say to make you come again
Come back to me again
And play your sad guitar

Repeat (*) twice

That's a groupie song, folks.

Maureen O'Hara was on the radio here this morning, on Woman's Hour, (I'll listen to anything on Radio4 while I'm driving) speaking from Limerick, Eire

I bet Dys could recognise her, from old publicity pics. She has just published an autobiography.
They spoke about "The Quiet Man" with John Wayne. Do you remember that? Wayne was very fond of her.

I remember Maureen, McTag. She also played Mrs. Walton in Spencer's Mountain. I was just a kid, and I remember meeting the REAL Mrs. Hamner and thinking, "She doesn't look one bit like that red-headed movie star." <smile>

As we all know, listeners, Hollywood does take a few liberties.

We have a thing called "Compulsory Purchase" here, where private property may be purchased in certain circumstances to make way for public works (Dams, roads, flood defences, etc)

You don't have that in the States?

Bob, I read that news item and it made me livid. One more lose of freedom, both on the state level and the right of the individual.

GRRRRRRR on Washington, D.C.