WA2K Radio is now on the air

Well, there's our Raggedy, listeners. My goodness, PA, more pin ups for our bullentin board.We love 'em all, right folks?

Well, we're putting Ossie and Betty beside each other, and then Brad and Steven under each other. My, this entire studio is replete with pix. <smile>

Yit, I don't quite remember that Four Seasons song, but I vaguely remember this one:





IT'S MY PARTY
Lesley Gore

Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone
Judy left the same time
Why was he holding her hand
When he's supposed to be mine

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you





Playin' my records, keep dancin' all night
Leave me alone for a while
'Till Johnny's dancin' with me
I've got no reason to smile

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you

------ LEAD BREAK ------

Judy and Johnny just walked through the door
Like a queen with her king
Oh what a birthday surprise
Judy's wearin' his ring

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you

a bit of celeb news:



Time Honors Bill and Melinda Gates, Bono By DESMOND BUTLER, Associated Press Writer
Sun Dec 18, 8:51 AM ET



NEW YORK - Time magazine has named Bill and Melinda Gates and rock star Bono its "Persons of the Year," citing their charitable work and activism aimed at reducing global poverty and improving world health.






The magazine said 2005 was a year of extraordinary charity in which people donated record amounts in response to extreme natural disasters, from the tsunami in South Asia to Hurricane Katrina.

"Natural disasters are terrible things, but there is a different kind of ongoing calamity in poverty and nobody is doing a better job in addressing it in different ways than Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono," said Jim Kelly, Time's managing editor.

The 2005 "Person of the Year" package hits newsstands Monday.

"For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are Time's Persons of the Year," the magazine said.

So, let's here a song by Bill Gates. (just kidding, listeners)

Bono of
U2
Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me

You don't know how you took it
You just know what you got
Oh Lordy, you been stealing from the thieves and you got caught
In the headlights
Of a stretch car
You're a star
Dressing like your sister
Living like a tart
You don't know what you doing
Babe, it must be art
You're a headache
In a suitcase
You're a star
Oh no, don't be shy
You don't have to go blind
Hold Me
Thrill Me
Kiss Me
Kill Me
You don't know how you got here
You just know you want out
Believing in yourself almost as much as you doubt
You're a big smash
You wear it like a rash
Star
Oh no, don't be shy
It takes a clown to cry
Hold Me
Thrill Me
Kiss Me
Kill Me
They want you to be Jesus
They'll go down on one knee
They'll want their money back if you're alive at 33
And your turning tricks
With your crucifix
You're the star
Of course, you're not shy
You don't have to deny love
Hold Me
Thrill Me
Kiss Me
Kill Me

Paul Klee
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Paul Klee (December 18, 1879 - June 29, 1940) was a Swiss painter.

Klee (pronounced klā) was born in Münchenbuchsee (near Bern), Switzerland, into a musical family - his father, Hans Klee, taught music at the Hofwil Teacher Seminar near Berne. In his early years, Paul wanted to be a musician, but decided on the visual arts in his teen years. He studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck. After travelling to Italy and then back to Bern, he settled in Munich, where he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde figures, and became associated with the Blaue Reiter. Here he met Bavarian pianist Lily Stumpf, whom he married; they had one son.

In 1914, he visited Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet and was impressed by the quality of the light there, writing "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever ... Color and I are one. I am a painter."

Klee worked with many different types of media - oil paint, watercolor, ink, and more. He often combined them into one work. He has been variously associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism but his pictures are difficult to classify. They often have a fragile child-like quality to them, and are usually on a small scale. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation. The later works are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols. His better known works include Southern (Tunisian) Gardens (1919), Ad Parnassum (1932), and Embrace (1939).

Following World War I, in which he was a medic in the imperial German army, Klee taught at the Bauhaus, and from 1931 at the Düsseldorf Academy, before being denounced by the Nazi Party for producing "degenerate art".

Composer Gunther Schuller also immortalized seven works of Klee's in his Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. The studies are based on a range of works, including Alter Klang [Antique Harmonies], Abstraktes Terzett [Abstract Trio], Little Blue Devil, Twittering Machine, Arab Village, Ein unheimlicher Moment [An Eerie Moment], and Pastorale.

Another of Klee's paintings, Angelus Novus, was the object of an interpretive text by German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin. In it, Benjamin suggests that the angel depicted in the painting represents progress in history.

In 1933, Paul Klee returned to Switzerland; in 1935, he began experiencing the symptoms of what was diagnosed as scleroderma after his death. The progression of his disease can be followed through the art he created in his last years.

He died in Muralto, Switzerland, in 1940 without having obtained the Swiss citizenship.

Today, a painting by Paul Klee can sell for as much as US$7.5 million.

A museum dedicated to Paul Klee was built in Bern, Switzerland, by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. It opened in June 2005. It houses a collection of about 4000 art works by Paul Klee. Around 200 pieces of art are on display.

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

George Stevens
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

George Stevens (December 18, 1904 - March 8, 1975) was an American motion picture director, producer, writer and cinematographer. Born in Oakland, California, Stevens broke into the movie business as a cameraman, working on many Laurel and Hardy shorts. His first feature film was The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood in 1933.

In 1934 he got his first directing job, the slapstick Kentucky Kernels. His big break came when he directed Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams in 1935. He went on in the late 1930s to direct several Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies, not only with the two actors together, but on their own.

Following World War II, in which he photographed the graphic scenes at the Dachau concentration camp, his films became more dramatic. I Remember Mama in 1948 was the last movie with comic scenes that he made. He was responsible for such classic films as A Place in the Sun, Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant and The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Stevens died on his ranch in Lancaster, California.

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

Betty Grable
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ruth Elizabeth "Betty" Grable (December 18, 1916 - July 3, 1973) was an American actress, singer, and pin-up girl whose famous bathing-suit poster was an icon of the World War II era.

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri to John C. Grable (the son of German and Dutch immigrants) and Lillian Hoffman (who was of Dutch, Irish and English descent), she was propelled into acting by her mother, who insisted that one of her daughters become a star. For her first role, as a chorus girl in the film Happy Days (1929), Grable was only 12 years old (legally underage for acting), but because the chorus line performed in blackface, it was impossible to tell how old she was. For her next film, her mother tried to get her to sign a contract using false ID, but when this was discovered Grable was fired. Grable finally obtained a role as a 'Goldwyn Girl' in Whoopee!, starring Eddie Cantor, and had played in some 20 films by 1939, including the Academy Award-nominated The Gay Divorcee, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

In 1937 she married another famous former child-actor, Jackie Coogan, but Coogan was under considerable stress from a lawsuit against his parents over his earnings, and the couple divorced in 1940.

The same year that she divorced Coogan, Grable obtained a contract with 20th Century Fox, becoming their top star throughout the decade, with splashy technicolor films such as Down Argentine Way, Springtime in the Rockies, Moon Over Miami, Coney Island, and Pin Up Girl. It was during her reign as box-office champ that Grable posed for her famous pin-up photo, which soon became escapist fare among GIs fighting overseas in World War II. It has become one of the most iconic images of the war. This pin-up poster was featured in the movie Stalag 17. Despite solid competition from Dorothy Lamour, Rita Hayworth, and Lana Turner, Grable was indisputably the number one pinup girl for American World War II soliders.

In 1943 she married jazz trumpeter and big band leader Harry James, by whom she had 2 children; they divorced in 1965.

Grable's later career was marked by feuds with studio heads, who worked her to exhaustion. At one point, in the middle of a fight with Darryl F. Zanuck, she tore up her contract with him and stormed out of his office. Gradually leaving movies entirely, she made the transition to television and starred in Las Vegas.

Betty Grable died of lung cancer at the age of 56 and was buried in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.

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

Ossie Davis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ossie Davis (December 18, 1917 - February 4, 2005) was an African-American actor, film director, and activist.

Davis was born Raiford Chatman Davis in Cogdell, Georgia. Following his parents' wishes, he attended Howard University, graduating in 1938. His acting career, which spanned seven decades, began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem. He made his film debut in 1950 in the Sidney Poitier film No Way Out.

Davis experienced many of the same struggles that most African-American actors of his generation underwent; he wanted to act but he did not want to play stereotypical subservient roles, such as butler, that were the standard for black actors of his generation. Instead, he tried to follow the example of Sidney Poitier and play more distinguished characters. When he found it necessary to play a Pullman porter or a butler, he tried to inject the role with a certain degree of dignity.

In addition to acting, Davis, along with Melvin Van Peebles, was one of the first African-American directors. Along with Bill Cosby and Poitier, Davis was one of a handful of African-American actors able to find commercial success while avoiding stereotypical roles prior to 1970. However, it should be noted that Davis never had the tremendous commercial or critical success that Cosby and Poitier enjoyed.

Davis found recognition late in his life by working in several of director Spike Lee's films, including Do The Right Thing, Jungle Fever, She Hate Me and Get on the Bus. He also found work as a commercial voice-over artist and served as the narrator of the early-1990s CBS sitcom Evening Shade, starring Burt Reynolds.

Ossie Davis and his wife, actor Ruby Dee (they married in 1948), were well-known civil rights activists, being personal friends of Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Davis and Dee helped organize (and served as MCs for) the 1963 civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Davis delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X; he re-read part of this eulogy at the end of Spike Lee's film Malcolm X. He also delivered the eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr.

Davis and wife Ruby Dee were recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004. They were also named to the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame in 1989.

Davis was found dead on February 4th 2005, in a hotel room in Miami, Florida, of natural causes. He was in the first stages of working on a film called Retirement.
His last role was a several episode guest arc on the groundbreaking Showtime drama series The L Word as a father struggling with the acceptance of his daughter Bette (Jennifer Beals) parenting a child with her lesbian partner.

In his final episodes, his character was taken ill and died. His wife Ruby Dee was present during the filming of his own death scene. That episode, which aired shortly after Davis's own death, aired with a dedication to the actor.

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

Steven Spielberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Steven Allan Spielberg KBE (born December 18, 1946) is an Oscar winning Jewish American film director and producer. He is noted in recent years for his willingness to tackle emotionally powerful issues, such as the horrors of the Holocaust in Schindler's List, slavery in Amistad, and the hardships of war in Saving Private Ryan. One consistent theme in his family friendly work is a childlike, even naïve, sense of wonderment and faith, as attested by works such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hook and A.I., and the challenging role of a father-figure.


The director

Spielberg is the most financially successful motion picture director of all time. He has directed and/or produced an astounding number of major box-office hits, giving him enormous influence in Hollywood. As of 2004, he has been listed in Premiere and other magazines as the most "powerful" and influential figure in the motion picture industry.

In 2005, Empire magazine created a list of the 50 greatest film directors of all time. Spielberg was number one on the list.

Currently, he has won two Academy Awards for Best Director, one for Schindler's List and another for Saving Private Ryan. He is seen as a figure who has the influence, financial resources, and acceptance of Hollywood studio authorities to make any movie he wants to make, be it a mainstream action-adventure movie (Jurassic Park) or a three-hour-long black and white drama about a heavy historical subject (Schindler's List).

His beginnings

Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio but raised in the suburbs of Haddonfield, New Jersey and Scottsdale, Arizona. He is known by film historians as one of the famous "film-school generation" (also known as "the movie brats" or "the New Hollywood") of the 1970s: along with fellow filmmakers (and personal friends) George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, and Brian De Palma, Spielberg grew up making movies. He was making amateur 8mm "adventure" movies with his friends as a teenager (scenes from these amateur films have been included on the DVD edition of Saving Private Ryan), and he made his first short film for theatrical release, Amblin', in 1968 at the age of twenty one. (Spielberg's own production company, Amblin Entertainment, was named after this short film.) His maiden directorial work was a segment of the pilot film to Rod Serling's Night Gallery. While working on this segment its star Joan Crawford collared a production executive and said, "Keep an eye on this kid, he's going places." After directing episodes of various TV shows, including an early Columbo TV movie, Spielberg directed his first well-known feature with a 1971 TV "movie-of-the-week" entitled Duel (later released to theatres overseas and eventually in the U.S.). This film, about a truck mysteriously terrorizing an average citizen, has become a cult classic, having been released on video several times over the years. Much of his early success was due to Sidney Sheinberg who is credited with discovering him; Spielberg also received an honorary degree from Brown University in 1999.

Move to theatrical films

Spielberg's debut theatrical feature film, The Sugarland Express (takes place and filmed on location in Sugar Land, Texas and is about a husband and wife attempting to escape the law), won him critical praise and enough studio backing to be chosen as the director of a summer movie that would secure him a place in the history of motion pictures. Jaws, a horror film based on the Peter Benchley novel about a killer shark that attacks people off the coast of a small island. Jaws won three Academy Awards (for editing, original score and sound), and grossed over USD$100 million at the box office, setting the domestic record for box office gross.

In 1976, Spielberg was asked by Alexander Salkind to direct Superman, but decided instead to expand on a pet project he had had in mind since his youth: a film about UFOs, which became Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The film remains a cult sci-fi classic among its fans.

The success Spielberg was beginning to enjoy, as well as his eventual tendency to make films with wide mainstream and commercial appeal, also subjected him to disdain in critical circles by film reviewers. For example, Spielberg's next film was 1941, a big-budgeted World War II comedy farce set in L.A. days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with the two top stars from Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, along with other all-stars. Although the film did make a small profit, it is considered by some to be Spielberg's first flop, although today it is also considered a cult classic. An expanded version has been shown on network television and later on Laserdisc and DVD.


1980s and 1990s


Indiana Jones

But what some would consider Spielberg's greatest film work was still to come, beginning in the 1980s. In 1981, Spielberg teamed up for the first time with his friend George Lucas to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, his homage to the cliffhanger serials of the Golden Age of Hollywood, with Harrison Ford (whom Lucas directed in Star Wars) as the dashing hero Indiana Jones. Raiders itself spawned two sequels, also directed by Spielberg and executive produced by Lucas.


E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

One year later, Spielberg returned to his alien visitors motif with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a Disney-inspired story of a boy and the alien whom he befriends (and is trying to get back "home" to outer space). E.T. went on to become the top-grossing film of all time for many years.

When E.T. was released, Spielberg, a Porsche 928 aficionado, had his car's moon-roof button re-designed with the movie's logo as both a gag for passengers, and a tribute to the movie's success. Despite their enormous appeal, few film scholars and critics place such Spielberg films as Raiders or E.T. in the same class as The Godfather, Citizen Kane, or many other classics of the cinema.

E.T. originated as a sci-fi suspense thriller called Night Skies. Night Skies also gave birth to Poltergeist, a film that Spielberg co-wrote , co-produced (and some people who worked on the film claim directed) and was released only a week before E.T..

Spielberg also negotiated an unusually lucrative video game licensing deal with Atari for an E.T. video game. This was a famously expensive failure
which contributed to the video game crash of 1983.

The Color Purple


In 1985, Spielberg made The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Many critics were unsure of whether or not Spielberg could handle such serious material, as his output to that point had been viewed as "lighter" entertainment.


Hook & Jurassic Park

Spielberg had tried numerous times to film a live-action version of Peter Pan without success. He eventually decided to create his own take on the Pan legend in 1991. Hook focused on a middle-aged Pan (played by Robin Williams), who returns to Neverland to face the title character (Captain Hook, played by Dustin Hoffman). However, by the time the film began shooting, innumerable rewrites and creative changes made by the numerous major Hollywood players attached to project resulted in a film regarded by most critics as hit-and-miss at best. The film was made for $70 million (at that time a huge amount) and made $119 million domestically, but it was not as successful as some had hoped.

In 1993, Spielberg decided to once again tackle the adventure genre, as he directed the movie version of Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park, about killer dinosaurs rampaging through a tropical island resort. The adaptation muted somewhat the novel's message about the consequences of mankind tampering with nature, instead focusing on the adventure aspects of the story. With the aid of revolutionary special effects provided by friend George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, the film became an instant classic. It would eventually overtake E.T. as the all-time top grossing film-- a position it held for several years (until James Cameron's Titanic).

Schindler's List & Saving Private Ryan

It was in that same year that Jurassic Park was released that Spielberg finally received the critical acclaim he had long sought for making Schindler's List (based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a man who sacrificed himself to save 1,100 people from the wrath of the Holocaust). Schindler's List earned Spielberg his first Academy Award for Best Director (it also won Best Picture).

Another of Spielberg's critically acclaimed films, the World War II drama Saving Private Ryan, was released in 1998. Spielberg considered it one of his finest works, yet in a highly publicized "showdown", it lost the Best Picture Oscar at the 1999 Academy Awards to Shakespeare in Love. However, Spielberg would win his second Academy Award for his direction in the war epic.


Into a new century

2001-2004

In 2001, Spielberg filmed fellow director and friend Stanley Kubrick's final project, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, a project planned by the two directors for many years but which Kubrick was unable to begin during his lifetime. The futuristic story of a humanoid android longing for love, A.I. featured groundbreaking visual effects, but unfortunately was not the blockbuster film Spielberg had hoped for. The film polarized both critics and audiences, many stating that the film was overly long and a pretentious impression of Kubrick, while a small minority of critics believed it to be a masterpiece. The film failed to recoup its budget at the US box-office.

In recent years, Spielberg has consolidated his popularity with more mainstream fare such as Minority Report (2002), starring Tom Cruise as a futuristic cop on the run from his own fate; and Catch Me If You Can (also in 2002), a biopic based on the life of Frank Abagnale (with Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Hanks), which completed the director's unofficial "Running Man" trilogy following both A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report. Spielberg used Hanks again in 2004 for The Terminal, the story of an East European traveller who has to live in a terminal at JFK International Airport.

War of the Worlds

Spielberg's latest released film, a modernized adaptation of War of the Worlds, featuring Tom Cruise, was released in the U.S. on June 29, 2005. As with past Spielberg films, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) provided the special effects.

In his films E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg portrayed alien visitors as potentially friendly for human beings willing to connect with them. War of the Worlds marked a departure from those optimistic themes; more violent alien invaders visiting havoc on the earth.


Munich


On the same day as the release of War of the Worlds, Spielberg began shooting Munich, a film allegedly about the events following the 1972 Munich Massacre. The film is based on Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, a book by Canadian journalist George Jonas, the first husband of Barbara Amiel, (now married to Conrad Black). The Jonas book, although promoted as non-fiction, has been largely discredited by journalists. It was previously adapted into the 1986 made-for-TV movie Sword of Gideon.

The screenplay for Munich was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. The movie is said to be an examination of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Black September organization, followed by the event's aftermath in which Israel's intelligence agency hunted down and killed the perpetrators. The protagonist, Avner, is believed to be the invention of Jonas' source, Yuval Aviv.

According to Jonas and Aviv, the Israeli team suffered misgivings about their assignment, two were killed, and the others were abandoned or treated badly by Mossad. None of these claims have been verified by other sources.


Upcoming projects

Also in the works are an Abraham Lincoln bio-pic starring Liam Neeson as the 16th President of the United States, and a 4th Indiana Jones film. Both are scheduled for release in 2007.

He is also serving as the executive producer of Memoirs of a Geisha, an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Arthur Golden, a film he was previously attached to as director. Spielberg is also an executive producer on the critically acclaimed 2005 TV miniseries Into the West. He is also co-executive producing the new Transformers live action film with Brian Goldmer, an employee of Hasbro.

In October, 2005, Spielberg announced that he had been signed by Electronic Arts to direct three video game projects.

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

Well, listeners, here's our Boston Bob of the hawk variety. We all appreciate your background on famous folks, and since Raggedy has done our photo's for us, I think it's only proper that we recognize Paul Klee.



He did do stuff for fun, I understand, and some were allusions to poetry. Sure would like to know how one could tell. <smile>

Interesting tabloid stuff about Brad, Bob.

Back later with a Christina Aguilera song.

This seems appropriate for today, listeners:

Christina Aguilera


A Sunday Kind Of Love


I want a Sunday kind of love
A love to last past Saturday night
And I'd like to know it's more than love at first sight
Well I want a Sunday kind of love
Oh yea yea

And my arms need someone to hold
To keep me warm when Mondays and Tuesdays grow cold
I need love for all my life to have and to hold
Well I want a Sunday kind of love
Oh yea yea yea

I don't want nothing baby
Well I want a Sunday kind of love
Oh yea

I saw the War of the Worlds, and Dakata Fanning was fabulous. Tom Cruise wasn't too bad, either. The plot held pretty true to the original.

Well, folks, time for me to say goodnight.

Certainly do miss our European friends, but maybe after all the Christmas doings are over, we'll see them back in our studio.

Kisses to you all.

From Letty with love.

Yes, where are the Europeans? Here's one of them at least, still strangely suffering from jet-lag and disturbed sleep pattern even after three days back home.
I think I'll just lie down until the feeling goes away.

Oh, by the way, loved that Paul Klee. Very vivid, just right to counteract the effects of winter.

Good morning, WA2K listeners and contributors.

Well, McTag, your comment on Paul Klee and Bob's bio, inspired me to do further research. I was amazed that his connection with music extended to Offenbach, especially Tales of Hoffman, and inspired poets such as Sylvia Plath. What a tragic figure she was, folks.



The Colossus
"I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails
of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman
Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are
littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-
color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing."

Well, Taggers, when you recover, you must give us a few highlights of your visit to India.

Ralph Richardson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Sir Ralph David Richardson (19 December 1902 - 10 October 1983) was an English actor, one of a group of theatrical knights of the mid-20th century who, though more closely associated with the stage, did their best to make the transition to film.

Richardson was born in Cheltenham and made his West End début in 1926. Thereafter he became one of the Old Vic's major stars. After World War II, he became co-director of the Vic, and also appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon.

In 1954-1955 he played the character of Dr. John Watson (mistakenly called 'James' in several episodes) in an American/BBC radio co-production of canonical Sherlock Holmes stories, which starred John Gielgud as the famous consulting detective.

His film appearances included The Heiress, Richard III (playing Buckingham to Laurence Olivier's Richard), O Lucky Man!, Oh! What a Lovely War, Dragonslayer, and Time Bandits. His career has often been compared with that of Olivier, Alec Guinness and John Gielgud.

Richardson was knighted by King George VI in 1947. His final film appearence was as the sixth Earl of Greystoke in the 1983 movie Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, for which he was again nominated for an Academy Award. He also won the BAFTA Award for Best British Actor for The Sound Barrier (1952), and was nominated on another three occasions. In 1963, he won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Long Day's Journey Into Night. He was also nominated for three Tony Awards for his work on the New York stage.

Sir Ralph died of a stroke at the age of eighty, and was interred at Highgate Cemetery.

He was the nephew of the mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson.

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

Jean Genet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.



Jean Genet (1910-1986) was a prominent, sometimes infamous, French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal; later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including The Thief's Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Maids.

Life

Abandoned at birth, Genet was raised by a carpenter and his family, who, according to Edmund White's biography, were loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood was a series of attempts at running away and petty theft (although White also suggests that Genet's later claims of a dismal, impoverished childhood were exaggerated to fit his outlaw image.)

In any event, he was eventually detained at the youth prison Mettray. In The Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives fictionalised account of this period of detention which ended when, at 18, he joined the army in order to get away from Mettray. Genet deserted in 1936 and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe, which he later recounted in The Thief's Journal (1949). After returning to Paris in 1937, Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage and army desertion. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem, "Le condamné à mort," which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944). Jean Cocteau met Genet and was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published and when, in 1949, Genet was threatened with a life sentence, Cocteau, joined by such other key figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, got him acquitted. Genet never went back to prison.

Having written prolifically in prison, by 1949 Genet completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems. Genet's explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality was such that by 1951 his work was banned in the United States. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer) entitled Saint Genet comédien et martyr (1952), which, somewhat paradoxically, was published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the following five years. Between 1955 and 1961, however, Genet wrote three more plays as well as essays on Rembrandt. During this time he became emotionally attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker. However, following a number of accidents and Abdallah's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression and even attempted suicide himself.

From the late 1960s, and starting with a homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became more politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970 the Black Panthers invited him to the USA where he stayed for three months, giving lectures, attending the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and publishing articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in Jordan and the USA, Genet wrote a final lengthy novel about his experiences, A Prisoner of Love, which would be published after his death. Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a pervasive problem persistent since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine. In September 1982 Genet was in Beyrouth when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published "Quatre heures à Chatila" (Four Hours in Chatila), an eye-witness account of his visit to Shatila after the massacres.

Genet developed throat cancer and died on April 15, 1986 in Paris. He was buried in the Spanish Cemetery of Tangier, Morocco.


Genet's works

Novels

Throughout his five early novels, Genet works to subvert the traditional set of moral values of his implied readership. He celebrates a beauty in evil, emphasizing his own singularity as he raises violent criminals to icons, enjoys the specificity of gay gesture and coding, and depicts scenes of betrayal.

The first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1944), is a journey through the prison underworld, written in honour of famous assassins who had recently been killed. The two auto-fictional novels, The Miracle of the Rose (1946) and The Thief's Journal (1949), describe Genet's time at Mettray youth prison and as a vagabond and prostitute across Europe. Querelle de Brest (1947) is set in the mist of the port-town Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder; and Funeral Rites (1949), is a story of love and betrayal across political divides, written this time for the narrator's lover, Jean Decarnin, killed by the Germans in WWII.

A Prisoner of Love published in (1986), after Genet's death, is written in an entirely different tone to his early, provocative writing.

Plays

Associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, Genet's plays present highly stylised depictions of ritual struggles between outcasts of various kinds and their oppressors. Social identities are parodied and shown to involve complex layering as men play maids playing each other or their mistress in The Maids (1949), or leading figures in society play out the role of victims in a brothel, surrounded by mirrors which both reflect and conceal in The Balcony (1956). Most strikingly, Genet takes further what Aimée Césaire called negritude, in The Blacks (1958), presenting a violent assertion of Black identity and anti-white virulence. His most ambitious play is The Screens (1963), an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence.

Film

Genet directed Un Chant d'Amour in 1950, a 26 minute black and white film depicting the fantasies of a gay male prisoner and his prison warden.

Genet's work has also been adapted for film and produced by other filmmakers. Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Querelle, a 1982 film based on Querelle de Brest. (Genet himself never saw this film because he would not have been allowed to smoke in a movie theatre.) Todd Haynes' 1991 movie Poison was also based on the writings of Genet.

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

Édith Piaf
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Édith Piaf (December 19, 1915-October 11, 1963) was one of France's most loved singers and a national icon. Her music reflected her tragic life, with her speciality being the poignant ballad presented with a heartbreaking voice. The most famous songs performed by Piaf were "La vie en rose" (1946), "Milord" (1959), and "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960).

She was born Édith Giovanna Gassion in Paris to Louis-Alphonse Gassion and Annetta Giovanna Maillard, who was Italian; her mother worked as a café singer and her father was a well-known travelling acrobat. Abandoned by her mother, she was raised by her paternal grandmother, who ran a brothel in Normandy. From the age of three to seven she was blind. As part of Piaf's legend, she allegedly recovered her sight after her grandmother's prostitutes went on a pilgrimage to Saint Thérèse de Lisieux. Later she lived for a while with her alcoholic father, whom she left by the age of sixteen in order to become a street singer in Paris.

In 1935, Piaf was discovered by the nightclub owner Louis Leplée, whose club was frequented by the upper and lower classes alike. He convinced her to sing despite her extreme nervousness, which, combined with her height of only 4'8" (142cm) made him give her the nickname that would stay with her for the rest of her life: La Môme Piaf (The Little Sparrow). From this she took her stage name. Her first record was produced in the same year. Shortly afterwards Leplée was murdered, and Piaf was accused of being an accessory; she was acquitted.

In 1940, Jean Cocteau wrote the successful play Le Bel Indifférent for her to star in. She began to make friends with famous people, such as the actor Maurice Chevalier and the poet Jacques Borgeat. She wrote the lyrics of many of her songs, and collaborated with composers on the tunes.

Her signature song, "La vie en rose", (which was voted a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1998) was written in the middle of the German occupation of Paris in World War II. During this time, she was in great demand and very successful. Singing for high-ranking Germans at the One Two Two Club earned Piaf the right to pose for photos with French prisoners of war, ostensibly as a morale-boosting exercise. Once in possession of their celebrity photos, prisoners were able to cut out their own images and use them in forged papers as part of escape plans. Today, Piaf's association with the French Resistance is well known, and many owe their lives to her. After the war, she toured Europe, the United States, and South America, becoming an internationally known figure. Her popularity in the U.S. was such that she appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show eight times. She helped to launch the career of Charles Aznavour, taking him on tour with her in France and the United States.

The great love of Piaf's life, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, died in 1949. Piaf was married twice. Her first husband was Jacques Pills, a singer; they married in 1952 and divorced in 1956. Her second husband, Theophanis Lamboukas (also known as Théo Sarapo), was a hairdresser-turned-singer and actor, and was twenty years younger than Piaf; they married in 1962. She had one child, a daughter, Marcelle, who died at the age of two in 1935; the child's father was Louis Dupont.

In 1951 she was in a car accident, and thereafter had difficulty breaking a serious morphine habit.


The Paris Olympia is the place where Piaf achieved fame and where, just a few months before her death, she gave one of her most memorable concerts while barely able to stand. In early 1963, Piaf recorded her last song, "L'homme de Berlin".

At the early age of forty-seven, Piaf died of cancer in Cannes on October 11, 1963, the same day as her friend Jean Cocteau. She was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. Although forbidden a Mass by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris (because of her lifestyle), her funeral procession drew hundreds of thousands of mourners onto the streets of Paris and the ceremony at the cemetery was jammed with more than forty thousand fans. Charles Aznavour recalled that Piaf's funeral procession was the only time, since the end of World War II, that Parisian traffic came to a complete stop.

There is a museum dedicated to Piaf, the Musée Édith Piaf at 5, rue Crespin du Gast, 75011, Paris.

Today she is still remembered and revered as one of the greatest singers France has ever produced. Her life was one of sharp contrasts: the range of her fame as opposed to her tragic personal life, and her fragile small figure on stage with the resounding power of her voice.

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


La Vie En Rose :: Édith Piaf

Des yeux qui font baisser les miens,
Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche,
Voilà le portrait sans retouche
De l'homme auquel j'appartiens

Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas,
Je vois la vie en rose.

Il me dit des mots d'amour,
Des mots de tous les jours,
Et ça me fait quelque chose.

Il est entré dans mon coeur
Une part de bonheur
Dont je connais la cause.

C'est lui pour moi. Moi pour lui
Dans la vie,
Il me l'a dit, l'a juré pour la vie.

Et dès que je l'aperçois
Alors je sens en moi
Mon coeur qui bat

Des nuits d'amour à plus finir
Un grand bonheur qui prend sa place
Les ennuis les chagrins s'effacent
Heureux, heureux à en mourir.

Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas,
Je vois la vie en rose.

Il me dit des mots d'amour,
Des mots de tous les jours,
Et ça me fait quelque chose.

Il est entré dans mon coeur
Une part de bonheur
Dont je connais la cause.

C'est toi pour moi. Moi pour toi
Dans la vie,
Il me l'a dit, l'a juré pour la vie.

Et dès que je l'aperçois
Alors je sens en moi
Mon coeur qui bat

Cicely Tyson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Cicely Tyson (born December 19, 1933) is an award-winning African-American actress, who tried to shave 9 years off her age, claiming 1942 as her year of birth in the pre-Internet age. Her devoutly Christian parents came from the island of Nevis in the West Indies, but Cicely was born and raised in Harlem, New York. She was discovered by a photographer for Ebony magazine, and became a popular fashion model. Her first film was an uncredited role in Carib Gold in 1957, but she went on to do television - the celebrated series East Side/West Side and the long-running soap opera The Guiding Light.

In 1967, she appeared in The Comedians, and the following year, had a featured role in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. In 1972, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the critically acclaimed Sounder.

In 1974 she won two Emmy Awards for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Other acclaimed television roles included Roots, King, in which she played Coretta Scott King, The Marva Collins Story, When No One Would Listen and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (for which she won another Emmy). Currently, Tyson is is co-starring in the movies Because of Winn-Dixie and Diary of a Mad Black Woman.

Tyson co-founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Tyson was married to legendary trumpeter Miles Davis from 1981 to 1988. She has mentioned a daughter but there is no evidence of her ever having had any children.

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

This one's for my two sisters, who were nine and ten years older than me.

When I was about seven or so, the front doorbell was always being rung, and there was always some form of spotty youth, with slicked back hair and a bunch of flowers, asking if one of my sisters would go out dancing with him.

They invarioubly did.

The first time I ever heard this song (it came out in the late 80's ?), It immediately transported me back to those days.

I would imagine that they went out every friday and saturday night from the age of seventeen.

They always went dancing........as everyone did, in that era.



COME DANCING (Possibly the best song that the Kinks ever did)

They put a parking lot on a piece of land
When the supermarket used to stand.
Before that they put up a bowling alley
On the site that used to be the local palais.
That's where the big bands used to come and play.
My sister went there on a saturday.

Come dancing,
All her boyfriends used to come and call.
Why not come dancing, it's only natural?

Another saturday, another date.
She would be ready but she's always make them wait.
In the hallway, in anticipation,
He didn't know the night would end up in frustration.
He'd end up blowing all his wages for the week
All for a cuddle and a peck on the cheek.

Come dancing,
That's how they did it when I was just a kid,
And when they said come dancing,
My sister always did.

My sister should have come in a midnight,
And my mum would always sit up and wait.
It always ended up in a big row
When my sister used to get home late.

Out of my window I can see them in the moonlight,
Two silhouettes saying goodnight by the garden gate.

The day they knocked down the palais
My sister stood and cried.
The day they knocked down the palais
Part of my childhood died, just died.

Now I'm grown up and playing in a band,
And there's a car park where the palais used to stand.
My sister's married and she lives on an estate.
Her daughters go out, now it's her turn to wait.
She knows they get away with things she never could,
But if I asked her I wonder if she would,

Come dancing,
Come on sister, have yourself a ball.
Don't be afraid to come dancing,
It's only natural.

Come dancing,
Just like the palais on a saturday.
And all her friends will come dancing
Where the big bands used to play.