Mork & Mindy was the first tv show to display an incredible talent of Robin Williams. The audience instantly fell in love with the “cute and cuddly” alien Mork and his human friend Mindy. I think of this show with great fondness because it’s extremely funny, lovely and kind. It’s the kind of TV product we really need these days. It was a huge hit back in the day and i think the people in 2015 could really use a little happiness it gives. Anyway, here’s a little video, i hope you gonna like it! Song: Walk The Moon – Shut Up and Dance
The Love Story of Mork & Mindy
Mork & Mindy – Never Thought That I Could Love
Mork & Mindy – Getting To Know You
Mork and Mindy – Dance With Me
Bing Crosby – Getting To Know You
JAMES TAYLOR – GETTING TO KNOW YOU
Getting to Know You from The King and I
Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr perform “Shall We Dance” from The King and I
Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere, I’ve looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun they rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all
Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels the dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real, I’ve looked at love that way
But now it’s just another show, you leave ’em laughin’ when you go
And if you care don’t let them know, don’t give yourself away
I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all
Tears and fears and feeling proud, to say, “I love you” right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I’ve looked at life that way
But now old friends are acting strange they shake their heads, they say
I’ve changed
But something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day
I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all
Isn’t it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground,
You in mid-air,
Where are the clowns?
Isn’t it bliss?
Don’t you approve?
One who keeps tearing around,
One who can’t move,
Where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns?
Just when I’d stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours
Making my entrance again with my usual flair
Sure of my lines
No one is there
Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want
Sorry, my dear!
But where are the clowns
Send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here
Isn’t it rich?
Isn’t it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career
But where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns
Well, maybe next year
JUDY COLLINS – Turn Turn Turn (1966 )
Judy Collins Lyrics
“Turn, Turn, Turn (To Everything There Is A Season)”
Words-adapted from the bible, book of ecclesiastes
Music-pete seegerTo everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heavenA time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weepTo everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven
A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear its not too late
Celtic Woman – Amazing Grace
The Most Beautiful “Amazing Grace” I’ve ever heard
AMAZING GRACE
Amazing grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I am found,
Was blind, but now I see.’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come,
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.The Lord has promised good to me
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.
It started with what seemed like a simple question I asked myself. That question, not surprisingly for anyone who knows me, led to a series of additional questions. Somehow, I wasn’t getting clear answers for myself, so I started asking people I came in contact with the same questions. The results were fascinating to me and I wanted to explore the topic more fully. The basic question: “What does intimacy mean to you?”
The range of responses was wide and varied. I included both men and women, different ages, some were in relationships and others were not. Most people had to stop for a moment to really think about and put into words what intimacy meant to them. As I looked more deeply at the topic, I found that there are in fact four key types of intimacy.
What Does Intimacy Mean to You?
The people I asked generally started with the most common of the four types of intimacy: Sexual. This wasn’t too much of a surprise because sexual intimacy is probably the most stereotypical and most familiar definition of the word in modern society. Having sex, however, often has less to do with intimacy than with a physical act between people. As it ended up, the people I talked to wanted more than just the act of sex — they wanted some depth. They wanted to feel safe while being vulnerable, wanting to be seen by his/her partner. That made sense, as this form of intimacy also includes a wide range of sensuous activity and sensual expression, so it’s much more than having intercourse.
It’s interesting that the word intercourse is also defined as an “exchange especially of thoughts or feelings.” It’s curious why intimacy is challenging to people in their relationships. I continued to look further.
Connecting Emotionally
The next of the four faces of intimacy is emotional intimacy.This happens when two people feel comfortable sharing their feelings with each other. The goal is to try to be aware and understand the other person’s emotional side. My guess is that women have an easier time with this in very close female friendships, but I’d like to believe that men too are becoming more comfortable experiencing emotional intimacy. This form of intimacy I’ve become comfortable with and see as a healthy part of the give-and-take in all relationships, whether female or male.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D, refers to the fears people have in relation to emotional intimacy. She says, “Many people have two major fears that may cause them to avoid intimacy: the fear of rejection (of losing the other person), and the fear of engulfment (of being invaded, controlled, and losing oneself).” This made some sense to me.
Love and Intimacy
However, if we believe that there are only two major energies we humans experience, love and fear (or an absence of love), then I find it interesting that in this area of intimacy, it seems people have moved from their hearts and love to an energy that stops them from experiencing their true essence and what they often yearn for the most. Love and intimacy.
In her book A Return to Love, the brilliant Marianne Williamson says it most eloquently:
“Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment or unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts. Love is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.”
Even the Bible says, “There is no fear where love exists.” Of course I believe that love and intimacy are highly spiritual. In her book Love for No Reason, Marci Shimoff states, “Love for no reason is your natural state.” She also tells a wonderful story about a spiritual teacher who once said to her, “I love you and it’s no concern of yours.” To love, from your heart, just to love. As I talked about in my piece on what makes a good relationship, my ideal is definitely a loving spiritual partnership.
True Intimacy
I kept wondering if true intimacy could be as simple as a matter of moving back to loving ourselves first? To rediscovering the unconditional love we all were born with? The idea of self-intimacy and self-love is a fascinating concept. I’ll leave these as open-ended questions for you to ask yourselves for now. I was curious to look more closely at the other two types of intimacy.
The next, intellectual intimacy, is something I personally have the most comfort with. This one is about communication, and as someone who lives and breathes words, it’s extremely familiar to me. The ability to share ideas in an open and comfortable way can lead to a very intimate relationship indeed, as I’m fortunate to discover quite frequently. As someone who engages in this type of interaction all the time, it offers me a wonderful and fulfilling form of intimacy. I wondered if this was my strongest area of intimacy.
Experiential Intimacy
The fourth kind of intimacy is experiential intimacy, an intimacy of activity. I realized I experience this every time I get together with a group to create art in a silent process. It’s about letting the art unfold, by working together in co-operation. The essence of this intimate activity is that very little is said to each other, it’s not a verbal sharing of thoughts or feelings, but it’s more about involving yourself in the activity and feeling an intimacy from this involvement.
During a recent encounter I had at a contact improv jam, I realized was actually this form of intimacy. I interacted with a young man, letting our body energy lead the dance, with no eye contact and no words, just movement in a sensual and open, if not dramatic, dance. So, I understood that this experiential intimacy is also, somewhat surprisingly, in my intimacy vocabulary.
Joining and Separating
Rick Hanson, Ph.D says that having intimacy in our lives requires a natural balance of two great themes — joining and separation — that are in fact central to human life. Almost everyone wants both of them, to varying degrees. He goes on to say, “In other words: individuality and relationship, autonomy and intimacy, separation and joining support each other. They are often seen at odds with each other, but this is so not the case!” This also made perfect sense to me. Yin and yang. Light and dark. All the polarities we live in life, lead to a balance.
My understanding and curiosity were greatly expanded after exploring the four faces of intimacy. Maybe this awareness might make it easier to find your own perfect personal balance between them all. For me, it comes down to our willingness to explore intimacy in all its forms. It’s not necessary that every intimate relationship includes all the different types of intimacy. Ultimately it is each individual’s choice.
What I learned, makes me believe that with some balance in these areas, we might find a deeper connection and understanding of the relationships in our life. I also fully recognize that we all have different definitions of intimacy. Are men and women’s definitions dramatically different? It is a fascinating conversation to continue to explore.
Soul Intimacy
Then, as often happens with perfect synchronicity, I received my daily Gaping Void email by Hugh MacLeod with the subject: Has your soul been seen lately?It went on to say, “I saw your soul today and it made me want to cry with joy and thanks.” The topic was intimacy. What followed was a beautiful way to end my piece.
“Intimacy isn’t strictly about romantic relationships, or even relations with family — sometimes it happens quickly, and often times in ways we hardly notice.
I’m talking about that moment when someone allows the world to see what’s inside… what they are really about. It’s about seeing someone for who and what they are and that the glimpse was offered either voluntarily or without the person’s knowledge. This is an incredible moment where our existence suddenly makes sense and all comes together in a singular place.
For those of you who have experienced this, it’s something that never gets lost in memory or time. It’s like a little mirror we take out every now and then to remember a time when something so complex became so inconceivably simple. It’s pretty incredible.”
This is the essence of what intimacy is really all about. Dare to be vulnerable, dare to be seen.
Intimacy is Key to Being Healthy and Vital
Dr. Christiane Northrup in her newest book “Goddesses Never Age”, tells us that intimacy is an important part of life regardless of age. As she shares, “Age is just a number, and agelessness means not buying into the idea that a number determines everything from your state of health to your attractiveness to your value.” As a member of Team Northrup, a team whose mission is to support people to live their most vital and healthy lives, I invite you to a complimentary health and vitality consultation.
Before we talk to customize a plan for you, find out how healthy you are with the True Health Assessment. The three-part report, identifies your top health risk factors, maps out a recommended lifestyle plan that identifies ways you can improve your health and provides you with individualized nutrition recommendations based on your specific assessment answers.
Now let me ask you my starting question: What does intimacy mean to you?
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow with Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari on the Rise of Homo Deus
Homo Deus A Brief History of Tomorrow Full Audiobook Part
Yuval Noah Harari Gives A Brief History Of Tomorrow
How Alicia Vikander Perfected Her Robot Voice for Ex Machina – Late Night with Seth Meyers
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Ex Machina
Ex Machina
Ex Machina Official Teaser Trailer #1 (2015) – Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson Movie HD
Ex Machina 2015 – full movie
Godlike ‘Homo Deus’ Could Replace Humans as Tech Evolves
What happens when the twin worlds of biotechnology and artificial intelligence merge, allowing us to re-design our species to meet our whims and desires?
Updated May.31.2017 / 1:44 PM ET
Evolution is a slow affair, taking some 5 million years to turn a chimpanzee-like creature into us. But what happens when we push down the accelerator and take command of our bodies and brains instead of leaving it to nature? What happens when biotechnology and artificial intelligence merge, allowing us to re-design our species to meet our whims and desires?
Historian Yuval Noah Harari explores these questions in his runaway bestseller, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” a kind of sequel to his 2014 book, “Sapiens.” The title of his new book suggests a startling stage in our evolution: Homo sapiens (“wise man”), far from being the pinnacle of creation, is a temporary creature, one soon to be replaced by Homo deus (“god man”).
“It is very likely, within a century or two, Homo sapiens, as we have known it for thousands of years, will disappear,” Hararitold an audience at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs recently. “Not because, like in some Hollywood science fiction movie, the robots will come and kill us, but rather because we will use technology to upgrade ourselves — or at least some of us — into something different; something which is far more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals.”
Harari makes no pretense of being able to peer into the future — but the advances humans have made suggest where we may be heading. Breakthroughs in biotechnology, including gene-editing methods likeCRISPR, hint at the power we’ll soon have to change our genes, our bodies, and perhaps our brains.
At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence, includingmachine learning, may soon let us build brain-computer interfaces that will blur the line between man and machine. So far, we’ve muddled along as biological creatures, but we may one day become something new — a novel mix of the biological and the technological; of flesh and silicon.
Harari said we’re already moving in that direction: We depend on our smartphones for a staggering number of decisions every day — and that dependence is growing.
“In 2050, it is likely that your smartphone will not be separate from you at all,” Harari said by e-mail from his home in Israel. “It will be embedded in your body via biometric sensors, and it will monitor your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your brain activity 24 hours a day.” Your smartphone will constantly analyze that data, and “will, therefore, know your desires, likes, and dislikes even better than you.” We see versions of this today, with our Amazon accounts, which seem to know our taste in books and music better than we do.
BLURRING THE HUMAN-MACHINE BOUNDARY
Humanity has been through revolutions before, but this one will be different, Harari said. When our ancestors first picked up stone tools to hack away at an animal carcass, some 2 million years ago, it was a game-changer — but it primarily changed our culture, not our bodies. Now we’re entering a new era, in which rather than using tools, the tools might be using us.
“People are delegating more responsibility to AI and they are already merging with their smartphones and their Facebook accounts,” Harari said. “These are no longer dumb tools like a hammer or a knife — they are intelligent entities that constantly study us, adapt to our unique personality, and actively shape our worldview and our innermost desires.”
We will use technology to upgrade ourselves … into something different.
In the future Harari envisions, we’ll gradually merge with machines thanks to biometric sensors and brain-computer interfaces. This may sound like science fiction, but it’s already a reality. At Miguel Nicolelis’s lab at Duke University’s Center for Neuroengineering, patients with spinal cord injuries can use a brain-machine interface to control a motorized “exoskeleton” to regain some sensation and muscle control in damaged limbs.
“Humans will merge with computers and machines to form cyborgs — part-organic, part-bionic life forms,” Harari said. “You could surf the Internet with your mind; you could use bionic arms, legs, and eyes; you will augment your organic immune system with a bionic immune system, and you will delegate more and more decisions to algorithms that know you better than you know yourself.”
At first, you may feel a sentimental attachment to the traditional human form. Looking recognizably like Homo sapiens, we might soon be able to select “designer bodies,” as though shopping from a catalog, Harari speculates.
“However, in the longer term — perhaps in the 22nd century — the human body is likely to lose its relevance and appeal,” he said. As our mastery over materials progresses, we may go “beyond material structures altogether. We might reach a point when minds could surf cyberspace directly, and adopt there any kind of form we fancy, irrespective of the laws of biology or even physics.”
TRANSCENDING SPACE AND TIME
The way we understand space and time may also change, Harari said. “Today we have organic bodies, hence at any one time, we can be only in one place. But a future cyborg may have an organic brain connected via a brain-computer interface to numerous arms, legs, and other tools that could be scattered all over the world. Your brain could be in New York, while your hands will be fighting insurgents in Afghanistan or performing heart surgery in Egypt. So where are you?”
Whether the homo deus species is “human” is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. But Harari believes these changes will come gradually as our relationship with the machines becomes slowly but inexorably more intimate. Our species “is likely to upgrade itself step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process,” he wrote in his latest book, “until our descendants will look back and realise they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible, built the Great Wall of China, and laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s antics.”
Humankind’s relationship with technology has always been complex. “We’ve always sort of been merged with technology,” said journalist Mark O’Connell, author of the new book “To Be a Machine.” “We’re already cyborgs, in a sense, because we’re in this relationship with technology which is very intimate.” The coming of the smartphone — which many of us put down only when we’re asleep or in the shower — has taken this relationship to the next level. “Your phone is a cyborg technology, in a way. It’s not physically internalized — but the phone is like an extra limb or an extrasensory device.”
Traditionally, technology has been located outside the body, but more and more often it’s inside — where it takes on more personal significance. Think of the difference between eyeglasses, which touch the body, and a pacemaker, which lies next to the heart.
“I feel like there’s a very strong, profound distinction between just using technology and integrating technology” into our bodies, O’Connell said.
MIND 2.0?
When body and machine merge, what happens to the mind? As Harari admitted in “Homo Deus,” the nature of consciousness remains a deep mystery. That’s why, despite AI advancements, our efforts to create a “thinking machine” haven’t lived up to expectations.
“We’ve seen an amazing development in computer intelligence, but exactly zero development in computer consciousness,” Harari said. Part of the problem is that we often confuse intelligence, which he defines as the ability to solve problems, with consciousness — the ability to feel. Yet, he said, we may one day find a way around this divide, eventually reaching a state of “super-intelligence.”
Not surprisingly, the schemes for enhancing human intelligence seem to be coming from Silicon Valley. Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who made his fortune by selling eBay, now heads a startup called Kernel, which is developing computerized brain implants that can help people with neurological damage caused by strokes or Alzheimer’s disease. With help from neuroscientists, Johnson hopes to go further. He’d like to use the technology to boost memory and even intelligence. As Johnson told the Washington Postlast year: “Whatever endeavor we imagine — flying cars, go to Mars — it all fits downstream from our intelligence. It is the most powerful resource in existence. It is the master tool.”
HEAVEN CAN WAIT
Harari won’t say whether we will conquer death, but he’s confident we’ll “make a bid” for immortality this century. In fact, our attitude toward death has changed since the Scientific Revolution, he said. Science “has redefined death as a technical problem. A very complicated problem, no doubt, but still only a technical problem.”
And technical problems have technical solutions. “If traditionally death was the specialty of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over,” Harari said. That doesn’t mean we’ll be able to pull it off — but he doesn’t dismiss the idea. “My position is that humankind has the potential to overcome old age and death, but it will probably take a few centuries rather than a few decades.”
But if people stop dying, won’t the world get crowded?
“Only the rich will stop dying,” Harari said, “and there aren’t many of them.” This raises a dire vision of the world in which the ultra-wealthy have access to life-extending modifications — perhaps even immortality — while the majority live in a constant state of resentment. If only the rich can be immortal, the poor won’t stand for it, Harari said.
We’re already cyborgs, in a sense, because we’re in this relationship with technology which is very intimate.
“Those unable to afford the new miracle treatments — the vast majority of people — will be beside themselves with rage,” he said. “Throughout history, the poor and oppressed comforted themselves with the thought that at least death is even-handed — that the rich and powerful will also die. The poor will not be comfortable with the thought that they have to die, while the rich will remain young and beautiful forever.”
Even if immortality is never achieved, the unequal availability of life-extending procedures will take a toll on society, Harari said. “We might see the emergence of the most unequal societies that ever existed… economic inequality will be translated into biological inequality.”
People will still have to work for a living, but what sort of work is impossible to predict. “Nobody knows what the job market will look like in 2050, except that it will be completely different from today,” Harari said. Many familiar jobs will have disappeared, and new ones will arise. But the direction we’re moving in suggests that a “post-work world” is on the horizon. “The idea of going to the office to earn a living would sound as strange as the idea of going to the forest to hunt your dinner.”
DIVINE DATA
The office isn’t the only place that may soon be redundant. Churches, Harari suggested, may fade into history along with the very idea of religion. As he points out, the things that God does in Genesis — creating plants, animals, and people — may soon be things that humans can do. We’ll see these new gods every time we look in the mirror. If making things no longer seems miraculous, what would?
As artificial intelligence progresses, and the power of algorithms and data-crunching dominates more aspects of our lives, Harari wonders whether data may come to have divine properties. In the future, “techno-religions” may conquer the world, he said, not by promising salvation in the next world, but by radically changing our lives in this world.
Harari argued that “the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley.” The technology gurus “promise all the old prizes — happiness, peace, prosperity, and even eternal life — but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.”
There is much in Harari’s vision to inspire awe; there is also much to fear. But Harari himself seemed more sanguine — though he acknowledged that, as humanity takes on unprecedented new powers, we will also have to embrace equally great responsibility.
We may not be ready. But, Harari added, “that has never stopped us before.”
Dan Falk (@danfalk) is a science journalist based in Toronto. His books include The Science of Shakespeare and In Search of Time.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Hebrew: ההיסטוריה של המחר) is a book written by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The book was first published in Hebrew in 2015 by Dvir publishing; the English-language version was published in September 2016 in the UK and in February 2017 in the US. As with its predecessor, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari recounts the course of history while describing events and the individual human experience, along with ethical issues in relation to his historical survey. Homo Deus, as opposed to the previous book, deals more with the abilities acquired by humans (Homo sapiens) throughout its existence, and its evolution as the dominant species in the world; the book attempts to paint an image of the future. Many philosophical issues are discussed, such as the human experience,individualism, human emotion and consciousness. The book describes the current abilities and achievements of mankind.
Central thesis
Organisms are algorithms, and as such homo sapiens may not be dominant in a universe where dataism becomes the paradigm.
Since the verbal/language revolution some 70,000 years ago, humans live within an “intersubjective reality”, such as countries, borders, religion, and money, all created to enable large-scale, flexible cooperation between different individual human beings.
Humankind’s immense ability to give meaning to its actions and thoughts is what has enabled its many achievements.
Humanism is a form of religion that worships humankind instead of god. It puts humankind and its desires as a top priority in the world in which humans themselves are framed as the dominant beings. During the 21st century, Harari believes that humanism may push humans to search for immortality, happiness, and power.
Technological developments have threatened the continued ability of humans to give meaning to their lives; Harari prophesies the replacement of humankind with a super-man, or “homo deus” (human god) endowed with supernatural abilities such as eternal life.[1]
Reception
This section needs expansion.You can help by adding to it. (April 2017)
Programmer Caleb Smith, who works for the dominant search engine company Blue Book, wins an office contest for a one-week visit to the luxurious, isolated home of the CEO, Nathan Bateman. The only other person there is Nathan’s servant Kyoko, who, according to Nathan, does not speak English. Nathan has built a humanoid robot named Ava withartificial intelligence. Ava has already passed a simple Turing test; Nathan wants Caleb to judge whether Ava is genuinely capable of thought and consciousness, and whether he can relate to Ava despite knowing she is artificial.
Ava has a robotic body but a human-looking face, and is confined to her apartment. During their talks, Caleb grows close to her, and she expresses a romantic interest in him and a desire to experience the world outside. She can trigger power outages that temporarily shut down the surveillance system which Nathan uses to monitor their interactions, allowing them to speak privately. The power outages also trigger the building’s security system, locking all the doors. During one outage, Ava tells Caleb that Nathan is a liar who cannot be trusted.
Caleb grows uncomfortable with Nathan’s narcissism, excessive drinking, and crude behaviour towards Kyoko and Ava. He learns that Nathan intends to upgrade Ava, “killing” her current personality in the process. After Nathan drinks until he passes out, Caleb steals his security card to access his room and computer. After he alters some of Nathan’s code, he discovers footage of Nathan interacting with previous android models in disturbing ways, and learns that Kyoko is also an android. Suspicious that he may also be an android, Caleb cuts his arm open to examine his flesh.
At their next meeting, Ava cuts the power. Caleb explains what Nathan is going to do and Ava begs him to help her. They form a plan: Caleb will get Nathan drunk again and reprogram the security system to open the doors in a power failure instead of locking them. When Ava cuts the power, she and Caleb will leave together.
Nathan reveals to Caleb that he has been observing Caleb and Ava’s secret conversations with a battery-powered camera. He says Ava has only pretended to like Caleb so he would help her escape; this, he says, was the real test all along, and by manipulating Caleb so successfully, Ava has demonstrated true intelligence. Ava cuts the power. Caleb reveals that he knew Nathan was watching them, and modified the security system when Nathan was passed out the previous day. After seeing Ava leave her confinement, Nathan knocks Caleb unconscious and rushes to stop her.
With help from Kyoko, Ava kills Nathan, but in the process Nathan destroys Kyoko and damages Ava. Ava repairs herself with parts from earlier androids, using their artificial skin to take on the full appearance of a human woman. She leaves Caleb trapped inside the facility, ignoring his screams, and escapes to the outside world in the helicopter meant to take Caleb home.
The foundation for Ex Machina was laid when Garland was 11 or 12 years old, after he had done some basic coding and experimentation on a computer his parents had bought him and which he sometimes felt had a mind of its own.[6] His later ideas came from years of discussions he had been having with a friend with an expertise in neuroscience, who claimed machines could never become sentient. Trying to find an answer on his own he started reading books on the topic. During the pre-production of Dredd, while going through a book by Murray Shanahan about consciousness and embodiment, Garland had an “epiphany.” The idea was written down and put aside till later.[7] Shanahan, along with Adam Rutherford, became a consultant for the film, and the ISBN of his book is referred to as an easter egg in the film.[8][9] Other inspirations came from films like Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Altered States, and books written by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ray Kurzweil and others.[10] Wanting total creative freedom, without having to add conventional action sequences, he made the film on as small a budget as possible.[11]
The film was shot as ordinary live action. During filming, there were no special effects, greenscreen, or tracking markers used. All effects were done in post-production. To create Ava’s robotic features, scenes were filmed both with and without actress Alicia Vikander’s presence, which allowed capturing the background behind her. The parts necessary to keep, especially her hands and face, were then rotoscoped while the rest was digitally painted out, and the background behind her restored. Camera and body tracking systems transferred Vikander’s performance to the CGI robot’s movements. In total, there were about 800 VFX shots, of which 350 or so were “robot” shots.[12][13] Other visual effects included Ava’s clothes when shown through the transparent areas of her body, Nathan’s blood after being stabbed, and the interior of the artificial brains.[14][15][16]
Filming
Principal photography began on 15 July 2013[17] and was shot over four weeks at Pinewood Studios and two weeks at Juvet Landscape Hotel in Valldalen, Norway.[18] It was filmed in digital at 4K resolution.[19] 15,000 mini-tungsten pea bulb lights were installed into the sets to avoid the fluorescent light often used in science fiction films.[20]
The opening office scene is filmed at the Bloomberg Head Office in Finsbury Square, London.
Music
The musical score for Ex Machina was composed by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, who previously worked with Garland on Dredd (2012).[21] A soundtrack album was released digitally on 20 January 2015, with an LP andCompact Disc UK release in February 2015 by Invada Records.[22] Additional songs featured in the film include:[23]
“Unaccompanied Cello Suite No 1 in G Major BWV 1007 – Prelude”, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Yo-Yo Ma
The theme song from the film Ghostbusters is listed in the end titles with the credit, “words and music by Ray Erskine Publishing Limited,” although only its refrain is spoken by the character Nathan in conversation.
Release
Universal Pictures released Ex Machina in the United Kingdom on 21 January 2015,[24] following a preview screening at the BFI Southbank on 16 December 2014 as part of the BFI‘s Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder season.[25]
However, Universal and Focus Features refused to release the film in the United States, so A24 jumped on board for the United States release.[26] The film screened on 14 March 2015 at the South by Southwest festival prior to a theatrical release in the United States on 10 April 2015 by A24.[27][28]
Marketing
Using the dating app Tinder, a profile was created for Ava with the image of Alicia Vikander.[29] At the South by Southwest Festival where the film was screened, “Ava” was matched with other Tinder users, wherein a text conversation occurred that led users to the Instagram handle promoting the film. According to Brent Lang, when compared with similar films released in the same year, Ex Machina catered to young audiences.[30]
Critical reception
Ex Machina received critical acclaim for its acting, atmosphere, visual effects, score and Garland’s writing and direction. On website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 93%, based on 227 reviews, with a rating average of 8/10. The site’s critical consensus reads: “Ex Machina leans heavier on ideas than effects, but it’s still a visually polished piece of work—and an uncommonly engaging sci-fi feature.”[31] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 78 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating “generally favorable reviews”.[32]
The magazine New Scientist in a multi-page review said, “It is a rare thing to see a movie about science that takes no prisoners intellectually … [it] is a stylish, spare and cerebral psycho-techno thriller, which gives a much needed shot in the arm for smart science fiction.”[33] The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis gave the film a ‘Critic’s Pick’, calling it “a smart, sleek movie about men and the machines they make”.[34]Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times recommended the film, stating: “Shrewdly imagined and persuasively made, ‘Ex Machina’ is a spooky piece of speculative fiction that’s completely plausible, capable of both thinking big thoughts and providing pulp thrills.”[35]Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer film critic, gave the film 4 out of 4 stars, writing: “Like stage actors who live and breathe their roles over the course of months, Isaac, Gleeson, and Vikander excel, and cast a spell.”[36]
Matt Zoller Seitz from RogerEbert.com praised the use of ideas, ideals, and exploring society’s male and female roles, through the use of an artificial intelligence. He also stated that the tight scripting and scenes allowed the film to move towards a fully justified and predictable end. He gave a rating of 4 out of 4 stars, stating that this film would be a classic.[37]IGN reviewer Chris Tilly gave the film a 9.0 out of 10 ‘Amazing’ score, saying “Anchored by three dazzling central performances, it’s a stunning directorial debut from Alex Garland that’s essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in where technology is taking us.”[38]
Mike Scott, writing for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, said, “It’s a theme Mary Shelley brought us in Frankenstein, which was first published in 1818. That was almost 200 years ago. And while Ex Machina replaces the stitches and neck bolts with gears and fiber-optics, it all feels an awful lot like the same story.”[39]Jaime Perales Contreras, writing for Letras Libres, compared Ex Machina as a gothic experience similar to a modern version ofFrankenstein, saying “both the novel Frankenstein and the movie Ex Machina share the history of a fallible god in a continuous battle against his creation.”[40]Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club criticized the way the sci-fi, near the end, veered off course from being a “film of ideas” by “taking an arbitrary left turn into the territory of corny slasher thrillers”: “While Ex Machina’s ending isn’t unmotivated […], it does fracture much of what’s special about the movie. Up until the final scenes, Garland creates and sustains a credible atmosphere of unease and scientific speculation, defined by color-coded production design […] and a tiny, capable cast.”[41] Steve Dalton fromThe Hollywood Reporter stated, “The story ends in a muddled rush, leaving many unanswered questions. Like a newly launched high-end smartphone, Ex Machina looks cool and sleek, but ultimately proves flimsy and underpowered. Still, for dystopian future-shock fans who can look beyond its basic design flaws, Garland’s feature debut functions just fine as superior pulp sci-fi.”[42]
Three convicts, Ulysses Everett McGill, Pete Hogwallop, and Delmar O’Donnell escape from a chain gang and set out to retrieve a supposed treasure Everett buried before the area is flooded to make a lake. The three get a lift from a blind man driving a handcar on a railway. He tells them, among other prophecies, that they will find a fortune but not the one they seek. The trio make their way to the house of Wash, Pete’s cousin. They sleep in the barn, but Wash reports them to Sheriff Cooley, who, along with his men, torches the barn. Wash’s son helps them escape.
They pick up Tommy Johnson, a young black man, who claims he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play guitar. In need of money, the four stop at a radio broadcast tower where they record a song as The Soggy Bottom Boys. That night, the trio part ways with Tommy after their car is discovered by the police. Unbeknownst to them, the recording becomes a major hit.
Near a river, the group hears singing. They see three women washing clothes and singing. The women drug them with corn whiskey and they lose consciousness. Upon waking, Delmar finds Pete’s clothes lying next to him, empty except for a toad. Delmar is convinced the women were Sirens and transformed Pete into the toad. Later, one-eyed Bible salesman Big Dan Teague invites them for a picnic lunch, then mugs them and kills the toad.
Everett and Delmar arrive in Everett’s home town. Everett confronts his wife Penny, who changed her last name and told his daughters he was dead. He gets into a fight with Vernon T. Waldrip, her new “suitor.” They later see Pete working on a chain gang. Later that night, they sneak into Pete’s holding cell and free him. As it turns out, the women had dragged Pete away and turned him in to the authorities. Under torture, Pete gave away the treasure’s location to the police. Everett then confesses that there is no treasure. He made it up to convince the guys he was chained with to escape with him. Pete is enraged at Everett, because he had two weeks left on his original sentence, and must serve fifty more years for the escape.
The trio stumble upon a Ku Klux Klan rally, who are planning to hang Tommy. The trio disguise themselves as Klansmen and attempt to rescue Tommy. However, Big Dan, a Klan member, reveals their identities. Chaos ensues, and the Grand Wizard reveals himself as Homer Stokes, a candidate in the upcoming gubernatorial election. The trio rush Tommy away and cut the supports of a large burning cross, leaving it to fall on Big Dan.
Everett convinces Pete, Delmar and Tommy to help him win his wife back. They sneak into a Stokes campaign gala dinner she is attending, disguised as musicians. The group begins a performance of their radio hit. The crowd recognizes the song and goes wild. Homer recognizes them as the group who humiliated his mob. When he demands the group be arrested and reveals his white supremacist views, the crowd runs him out of town on a rail. Pappy O’Daniel, the incumbent candidate, seizes the opportunity, endorses the Soggy Bottom Boys and grants them full pardons. Penny agrees to marry Everett with the condition that he find her original ring.
The next morning, the group sets out to retrieve the ring, which is at a cabin in the valley, which Everett earlier claimed was the location of his treasure. The police, having learned of the place from Pete, arrest the group. Dismissing their claims of receiving pardons, Sheriff Cooley orders them hanged. Just as Everett prays to God, the valley is flooded and they are saved. Tommy finds the ring in a desk that floats by, and they return to town. However, when Everett presents the ring to Penny, it turns out it wasn’t her ring, and she doesn’t even remember where she put it.
Cast
George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, a man who is imprisoned for practicing law without a license. He claims to have escaped from prison so he can find a stash of money he had hidden, though in reality it is so he can get back to his family before his wife remarries. He corresponds to Odysseus (Ulysses) in the Odyssey.[10]
John Turturro, as Pete Hogwallop, a fellow criminal who reveals little about his past. He believes in being true to one’s kin, even when his cousin Washington B. Hogwallop betrays him. He dreams of moving out west and opening a fine restaurant, where he will be the maître d’. He agreed to go along with the breakout, though he only had two weeks left on his sentence.
Tim Blake Nelson as Delmar O’Donnell, a small-time crook imprisoned for robbing a Piggly Wiggly in Yazoo City; he initially claims innocence but later admits he is guilty. Delmar says he will spend his share of Everett’s nonexistent money buying back his family farm, believing, “You ain’t no kind of man if you ain’t got land.”
Chris Thomas King as Tommy Johnson, a skilled blues musician. He is the accompanying guitarist in the Soggy Bottom Boys. He claims he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his skill on the guitar. He shares his name and story with Tommy Johnson, a blues musician with a mysterious past, who is said to have sold his soul to the devil at the Crossroads (a story more often attributed to Robert Johnson).[11][12]
Frank Collison as Washington B. “Wash” Hogwallop, Pete’s paternal cousin. He removes the escapees’ chains but later betrays the men to the police.
John Goodman as Daniel “Big Dan” Teague, a one-eyed man who masquerades as a bible salesman and mugs Everett and Delmar. He later reveals the identity of the trio when they are disguised at a Ku Klux Klan rally, but they kill him by cutting loose a burning cross, which falls on him and the Klansmen. He corresponds to the cyclops Polyphemus in the Odyssey.[10]
Holly Hunter as Penny, Everett’s ex-wife, who is fed up with Everett’s wheeling and dealing. She divorces him while he is in prison, telling their children he was hit by a Louisville & Nashville train. She is engaged to Vernon T. Waldrip until Everett wins her back. She corresponds to Penelope in the Odyssey.[10] (Penelope is an icon of the faithful wife, as she rejected her many suitors, stalling for time while awaiting Odysseus’ return.)
Charles Durning as Menelaus “Pappy” O’Daniel, the incumbent Governor of Mississippi. He is frequently seen berating his son and his campaign managers, who are depicted as simpletons. The character is based on Texas governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel.[13](Flensted-Jensen elaborates on the connection between the fictional and the real Pappy O’Daniel.)[10] He corresponds to Menelaus in the Odyssey.
Daniel von Bargen as Sheriff Cooley, a ruthless rural sheriff who, with his bloodhound, pursues the trio for the duration of the film. It is implied several times that he is the devil incarnate, and Cooley fits Tommy Johnson’s description of Satan: Cooley’s sunglasses evoke Satan’s “big empty eyes.” He eventually ambushes the escapees after they have been pardoned by the governor. He intends to hang them nonetheless, but when the valley is flooded, he, his men, and his dog all drown. He corresponds to Poseidon in the Odyssey.[10] He has been compared to Boss Godfrey in Cool Hand Luke.[14]
Wayne Duvall as Homer Stokes, the reform candidate in the upcoming election for Governor. He travels the countryside with a dwarf, who depicts the “little man”, and a broom, with which he promises to “sweep this state clean”. He is secretly an Imperial Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan. He falsely identifies Everett, Pete, and Delmar as people of color because they are dirty.
Ray McKinnon as Vernon T. Waldrip, Penny’s bona fide suitor and the manager of Homer Stokes’s election campaign. It has been suggested that his name is a nod to novelist Howard Waldrop, whose novella A Dozen Tough Jobs is one of the inspirations for the film.[15] He corresponds to the Suitors of Penelope in the Odyssey.[10]
Michael Badalucco as George Nelson, a bipolar bank robber who dislikes being called “Baby Face”. The real George Nelson died in 1934, three years before the story is set. Nelson died in a shootout known as the Battle of Barrington rather than by electric chair, as suggested in the film.
Stephen Root as Mr. Lund, the blind radio station manager who records Everett’s story in the song “Man of Constant Sorrow” and makes him known throughout the state. He corresponds to Homer.[10]
Lee Weaver as the Blind Seer, a mysterious railroad man who accurately predicts the outcome of the trio’s adventure as well as several other incidents. He corresponds to Tiresias in the Odyssey.[10]
Production
The idea of O Brother, Where Art Thou? arose spontaneously. Work on the script began long before the start of production in December 1997 and was at least half-written by May 1998. Despite the fact that Ethan described the Odyssey as “one of my favorite storyline schemes”, neither of the brothers had read the epic and were only familiar with its content through adaptations and numerous references to the Odyssey in popular culture.[16] According to the brothers, Nelson (who has a degree in classics from Brown University)[17][18] was the only person on the set who had read the Odyssey.[19]
The title of the film is a reference to the 1941 Preston Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels, in which the protagonist (a director) wants to direct a film about the Great Depression called O Brother, Where Art Thou?[5] that will be a “commentary on modern conditions, stark realism, and the problems that confront the average man”. Lacking any experience in this area, the director sets out on a journey to experience the human suffering of the average man but is sabotaged by his anxious studio. The film has some similarity in tone to Sturges’s film, including scenes with prison gangs and a black church choir. The prisoners at the picture show scene is also a direct homage to a nearly identical scene in Sturges’s film.[20]
Joel Coen revealed in a 2000 interview that he came to Phoenix, Arizona, to offer the lead role to Clooney. Clooney agreed to do the role immediately, without reading the script. He stated that he liked even the Coens’ least successful films.[21] Clooney did not immediately understand his character and sent the script to his uncle Jack who lived in Kentucky and asked him to read the entire script into a tape recorder.[22] Unknown to Clooney, in his recording, Jack, a devout Baptist, omitted all instances of the words “damn” and “hell” from the Coens’ script, which only became known to Clooney after the directors pointed this out to him in the middle of shooting.[22]
The Coens used digital color correction to give the film a sepia-tinted look.[8] Joel stated this was because the actual set was “greener than Ireland.” [22]CinematographerRoger Deakins stated, “Ethan and Joel favored a dry, dusty Delta look with golden sunsets. They wanted it to look like an old hand-tinted picture, with the intensity of colors dictated by the scene and natural skin tones that were all shades of the rainbow.”[23] Initially the crew tried to perform the color correction using a physical process, however after several tries with various chemical processes proved unsatisfactory, it became necessary to perform the process digitally.[22]
This was the fifth film collaboration between the Coen Brothers and Deakins, and it was slated to be shot in Mississippi at a time of year when the foliage, grass, trees, and bushes would be a lush green.[23] It was filmed near locations in Canton, Mississippi and Florence, South Carolina in the summer of 1999.[24] After shooting tests, including film bipack and bleach bypass techniques, Deakins suggested digital mastering be used.[23] Deakins subsequently spent 11 weeks fine-tuning the look, mainly targeting the greens, making them a burnt yellow and desaturating the overall image in the digital files.[8] This made it the first feature film to be entirely color corrected by digital means, narrowly beating Nick Park‘s Chicken Run.[8]
O Brother, Where Art Thou? was the first time a digital intermediate was used on the entirety of a first-run Hollywood film that otherwise had very few visual effects. The work was done in Los Angeles by Cinesite using a Spirit DataCine for scanning at 2K resolution, a Pandora MegaDef to adjust the color, and a Kodak Lightning II recorder to put out to film.[25]
A major theme of the film is the connection between old-time music and political campaigning in the Southern U.S. It makes reference to the traditions, institutions, and campaign practices of bossism and political reform that defined Southern politics in the first half of the 20th century.
The Ku Klux Klan, at the time a political force of white populism, is depicted burning crosses and engaging in ceremonial dance. The character Menelaus “Pappy” O’Daniel, the governor of Mississippi and host of the radio show The Flour Hour, is similar in name and demeanor to W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel,[26] one-time Governor of Texas and later U.S. Senator from that state.[27] W. Lee O’Daniel was in the flour business, and used a backing band called the Light Crust Doughboys on his radio show.[28] In one campaign, W. Lee O’Daniel carried a broom,[29] an oft-used campaign device in the reform era, promising to sweep away patronage and corruption.[29] His theme song had the hook, “Please pass the biscuits, Pappy”, emphasizing his connection with flour.[28]
While the film borrows from real-life politics, differences are obvious between the characters in the film and historical political figures. The O’Daniel of the movie used “You Are My Sunshine” as his theme song (which was originally recorded by real-life Governor of Louisiana James Houston “Jimmie” Davis[30]) and Homer Stokes, as the challenger to the incumbent O’Daniel, portrays himself as the “reform candidate”, using a broom as a prop.
Music in the film was originally conceived as a major component of the film, not merely as a background or a support. Producer and musician T-Bone Burnett worked with the Coens while the script was still in its working phases, and the soundtrack was recorded before filming commenced.[31]
Much of the music used in the film is period-specific folk music,[6] including that of Virginia bluegrass singer Ralph Stanley.[7] The musical selection also includes religious music, including Primitive Baptist and traditional African Americangospel, most notably the Fairfield Four, an a cappella quartet with a career extending back to 1921 who appear in the soundtrack and as gravediggers towards the film’s end. Selected songs in the film reflect the possible spectrum of musical styles typical of the old culture of the American South: gospel, delta blues, country, swing and bluegrass.[32][33]
The use of dirges and other macabre songs is a theme that often recurs in Appalachian music[34] (“O Death”, “Lonesome Valley”, “Angel Band“, “I Am Weary”) in contrast to bright, cheerful songs (“Keep On the Sunny Side”, “In the Highways”) in other parts of the film.
“Man of Constant Sorrow” has five variations: two are used in the film, one in the music video, and two in the soundtrack album. Two of the variations feature the verses being sung back-to-back, and the other three variations feature additional music between each verse.[36] Though the song received little significant radio airplay,[37] it reached #35 on the U.S. BillboardHot Country Singles & Tracks chart in 2002.[38] The version of “I’ll Fly Away” heard in the film is performed not by Krauss and Welch (as it is on the CD and concert tour), but by the Kossoy Sisters with Erik Darling accompanying on long-neck five-string banjo, recorded in 1956 for the album Bowling Green on Tradition Records.[39]
Release
The film premiered at the AFI Film Festival on October 19, 2000.[1] It grossed $71,868,327 worldwide[3] off its $26 million budget.[2]
Reception
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives it a score of 77% based on 147 reviews and an average score of 7.1/10. The consensus reads: “Though not as good as Coen brothers’ classics such as Blood Simple, the delightfully loopy O Brother, Where Art Thou? is still a lot of fun.”[40] The film holds an average score of 69/100 on Metacritic based on 30 reviews.[41]
Roger Ebert gave two and a half out of four stars to the film, saying all the scenes in the film were “wonderful in their different ways, and yet I left the movie uncertain and unsatisfied”.[42]
Ender’s Game — Molecular Detachment Device and Ending
Ender’s Game Final / Last Battle Scene!
Ender’s Game | The way we win matters.
Ender’s Game (2013) – Final Few Scenes
Ender’s Game: Creating a Zero-G Battle Room Effects Exclusive-Design FX-WIRED
Orson Scott Card discusses the ‘Ender’s Game’ movie
Interview with Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card Interview HD
Published on Apr 19, 2015
World renowned, Orson Scott Card, author of the New York Times Bestseller and Hugo Award winner Ender’s Game and many more, joined Kimberly Quigley in her big red booth for a chat. Not only is he funny and kind but also very humble. His mind has created entire worlds for millions to enjoy. They sit and talk about how he got into writing, about his many novels, about the Ender phenomena, the movie and his future movie plans. Hear Orson’s wonderful advice for aspiring writers. He talks about this and more in this fun half hour interview. Get to know the amazing Orson Scott Card, on The Red Booth!
What is Orson Scott Card’s favorite book? (extended answer)
A Brief Interview with Orson Scott Card (extended answers)
Orson Scott Card on Libraries
Orson Scott Card on literature, logic and scientific method
Orson Scott Card – On the State of Israel
Creative education–how to keep the spark alive in children and adults | Orson Scott Card | TEDxUSU
Published on Dec 6, 2014
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Orson Scott Card discusses the importance of creativity and how it can be fostered.
Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools. His most recent series, the young adult Pathfinder series (Pathfinder, Ruins, Visitors) and the fantasy Mithermages series (Lost Gate, Gate Thief), are taking readers in new directions. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Orson writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with Seventh Son), poetry (An Open Book), and many plays and scripts, including his “freshened” Shakespeare scripts for Romeo & Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice. Orson was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he teaches occasional classes and workshops and directs plays. He frequently teaches writing and literature courses at Southern Virginia University. Orson currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, where his primary activities are writing a review column for the local Rhino Times and feeding birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums and raccoons on the patio.
Orson Scott Card On Science Fiction and Religion
‘Enders Game’ Writer’s Ridiculous Racist Rant Against Obama
Ender’s Game – Book vs Movie Part 1/2
Ender’s Game – Book vs Movie Part 2/2
5 REASONS WHY I LIKED THE ENDER’S GAME SERIES
Ender’s Game Cast chat Orson Scott Card controversy
EDA #4 – Orson Scott Card is a Dick
Ender’s Game Xenocide Book 3 Audiobook Part 1
Top 10 Best Books In the Ender Series
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Book Summary and Review) – Minute Book Report
On Lusitania, Ender finds a world where humans and pequeninos and the Hive Queen could all live together; where three very different intelligent species could find common ground at last. Or so he thought.
Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus that kills all humans it infects, but which the pequininos require in order to become adults. The Starways Congress so fears the effects of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet, and all who live there. With The Fleet on its way, a second xenocide seems inevitable.[2]
Lusitania
Following the events of Speaker for the Dead, a group of characters are depicted living as members of a Brazilian Catholic human colony on Lusitania, a unique planet inhabited by the only other two known species of sentient alien life: the Pequeninos “little ones” and the Hive Queen. The pequeninos are native to the planet, while the Hive Queen was transplanted to this world by Ender, partly in penance for his near-total destruction of her Formic species in Ender’s Game.
The Lusitanian ecosystem is pervaded by a complex virus, dubbed ‘Descolada’ (Portuguese for “no longer glued”) by humans. The Descolada breaks apart and rearranges the basic genetic structure of living cells. It is extremely adaptable to any species or form of known life, and easily transmissible. The native pequeninos and other life that survived on Lusitania after the Descolada’s introduction to the planet thousands (or millions) of years ago are adapted to it. As a result of the deadly virus, the Lusitanian ecosystem is severely limited. Staying alive on Lusitania takes immense effort and research on the part of the Hive Queen and the humans, as they are not adapted to the descolada. Near the end of the story, it is revealed the Descolada is possibly an artificially engineered virus designed to terraform planets, but the original creators of the virus are unknown, and there remains a slim chance it evolved naturally.
After the rebellion of the small human colony on Lusitania in Speaker for the Dead to protect the future of the intelligent alien species, Starways Congress sends a fleet to Lusitania to regain control, which will take several decades to reach its destination. Valentine Wiggin, under her pseudonym Demosthenes, publishes a series of articles revealing the presence of the “Little Doctor” planet-annihilating weapon on the Fleet. Demosthenes calls it the “Second Xenocide,” as using the weapon will result in the obliteration of the only known intelligent alien life. She also claims it to be a brutal crackdown of any colony world striving for autonomy from Starways Congress. Public anger spreads through humanity, and rebellions nearly ensue on several colonies.
After quelling much public discontent, Starways Congress finishes their analysis of the situation while the fleet is en route. Fearing the Descolada virus, further rebellions by colony worlds, and other possible unknown political motives, Starways Congress attempts to relay an order to the fleet to annihilate Lusitania upon arrival. After conferring with friends on whether a cause is worth dying for, Jane (a compassionate AI living in the interstellar ansible communication network) shuts off transmissions to the fleet to block the order. As a consequence of this action, she risks her eventual discovery and death, should the government shut down and wipe the interplanetary network. No known smaller computer system can house her consciousness.
On Lusitania itself, Ender attempts to find solutions to the looming catastrophes of the Congressional fleet, Descolada virus, and conflicts among the humans and intelligent alien species. Much on Lusitania centers around the Ribeira family, including Ender’s wife Novinha and her children. Novinha and Elanora, the mother-daughter team responsible for most of the biological advances countering the complex Descolada virus, are unsure if they can manufacture a harmless replacement virus. Conflicts arise on whether they should even do so, since the Descolada is intrinsically tied in with the life cycles of all Lusitanian organisms and may even be sentient itself. In addition, to try to devise methods to escape the planet, Lusitania’s leading, troublemaking physicist Grego is persuaded by Ender to research faster-than-light travel, despite Grego scoffing at the idea. The third biologista of the family, Quara, is convinced that the Descolada is an intelligent, self-aware species, and deserves attempts from the humans for communication and preservation. An additional sibling and Catholic priest, Quim (Father Estevão), is determined to use faith and theology to head off another form of xenocide: a group of warmongering Pequenino wish to wipe out all Earthborn life via starship, carrying the deadly Descolada within them.
World of Path
Starways Congress wants its fleet back. After all else fails, it sends the dilemma of the fleet’s impossible disappearance to several citizens of the world of Path, a cultural planetary enclave modeled on early China. Path’s culture centers on the godspoken – those who hear the voices of the gods in the form of irresistible compulsions, and are capable of significantly superior intelligence. It later becomes clear that the godspoken of Path are victims of a cruel government project: granted great intelligence by genetic modification, they were also shackled with a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder to control their loyalty. The experiment is set in a culture bound by five dictates – obey the gods, honor the ancestors, love the people, serve the rulers, then serve your self. This is a further safeguard against rebellion. The superintelligent godspoken are considered the most devout and holy of all citizens, and any disloyal thoughts in a godspoken’s mind are immediately suppressed by overwhelming obsessive-compulsive behavior, believed to be a sign from the gods the thoughts are wrong. The most respected godspoken on Path is Han Fei-Tzu, for devising a treaty to prevent the rebellion of several colony worlds after the articles published by Demosthenes. Great things are expected of his daughter and potential successor Han Qing-jao, “Gloriously Bright”. While doubting the existence of the gods himself, Han Fei-Tzu promised his dying wife he would raise Qing-jao with an unwavering belief in the godspoken. The two of them are tasked by Starways Congress with deciphering the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet. Han Qing-jao’s secret maid, Si Wang-mu, aids her in this task, her intelligence (partially) unfettered by the rigid caste system.
The young and naive Qing-jao eventually traces the identity of Demosthenes. Discovering that Demosthenes is Valentine Wiggin, Ender’s sister – but that Valentine has been on a starship en route to Lusitania for the last thirty years – Qing-Jao concludes that the only possible explanation is advanced computer software closely tied to the communication network. This software must be hiding Demosthenes and publishing her work, while also causing the disappearance of the Fleet. All but discovered, Jane reveals herself to Han Fei-tzu, Han Qing-jao and Si Wang-mu, telling them about their genetic slavery and begging forbearance on their report to Starways Congress.
Already harboring suspicions about the godspoken’s condition, Han Fei-tzu accepts the news of Congress’s atrocity, as does Si Wang-mu, but his daughter Han Qing-jao clings to her belief that Demosthenes and Jane are enemies of the gods. Feeling betrayed by her father, who is violently incapacitated by OCD from the disloyal thoughts, Qing-jao argues with Jane. Jane threatens shutting off all communications from Path, but Si Wang-mu realizes this would eventually lead to the planet’s destruction by Starways Congress. Understanding Jane to be truly alive and compassionate, through tears Si Wang-mu states Jane will not block the report. However, Qing-jao compares Jane to the servants in Path’s caste system, merely a computer program designed to serve humans, containing neither autonomy nor awareness.
Knowing she has exhausted her last possibilities of stopping Qing-jao, Jane sacrifices her future and life, unwilling to bring harm to Qing-jao or the people of Path. A triumphant Qing-jao reports the knowledge of Demosthenes, Jane, and the fate of the Fleet to Starways Congress. Qing-jao recommends a coordinated date set several months from the present, to prepare the massive undertaking of setting up clean computers across the interplanetary network, after which the transition to a new system will kill Jane and allow Congress full control again. Allowing the message to be sent, Jane restores communication with the Fleet, and Congress re-issues the order for the Fleet to obliterate Lusitania.
Han Fei-tzu recovers from the incapacitation of his OCD, despairing over his daughter’s actions, and his unwitting aid in deeply brainwashing her to serve Congress. He and Si Wang-mu assist Jane and those on Lusitania in finding solutions to their impending catastrophes. Planter, a Pequenino on Lusitania, offers his life for an experiment to determine whether the Descolada gives Pequeninos sentience, or if they have the ability innately. Eventually, Elanora Ribeira is able to come up with a possible model for a “recolada:” a refit of the Descolada that allows the native life to survive and retain self-awareness, but doesn’t seek to kill all other life forms. With the available equipment, however, the recolada is impossible to make, and they are running out of time against the soon-to-arrive Fleet.
Outside
While this research takes place, tragedies occur on Lusitania. Father Estevão Ribeira, the priest attempting to sway a distant warmongering sect of the Pequeninos from their goal of attacking humanity, is killed by the Fathertree Warmaker, who took Quim hostage and denied him the food with the anti-descolada chemicals, so the descolada infected and killed him on the 7th day of being hostage. Grego Ribeira spurs a riot of humans to burn down the warmaker’s forest, but the violent mob gets out of his control, and rampages through the neighboring Pequenino forest instead, massacring many of its inhabitants – the original friends and allies of humanity. Under the terms of the treaty with Pequeninos, the Hive Queen is brought in to hold the peace, setting a perimeter guard of hive drones around the human colony and preventing further escalation of violence between the two groups. Grego is locked in jail, despite eventually stepping between the surviving Pequeninos and his own riot. The town realizes their horrific rage, and constructs a chapel surrounding the fallen priest’s grave, trying to find penance for their actions.
Finally, a breakthrough is made. Knowing the Ansible communication network allows instantaneous transfer of information, and through knowledge of how the Hive Queen gives sentience to child queens, Jane, Grego, and Olhado discover the “Outside”. The Outside is a spacetime plane where aiúas initially exist. (Aiúa is the term given to the pattern defining any specific structure of the universe, whether a particular atom, a star, or a sentient consciousness.) Formic hive queens are called from Outside after birth, giving awareness to the new body. Jane is able to contain within her vast computing power the pattern defining the billions of atoms and overall structure comprising a simple “starship” (little more than a room), with passengers included, and take them Outside. By bringing them Outside, where relative location is nonexistent, then back “Inside” at a different spot in the physical universe, instantaneous travel has been achieved, finally matching the instantaneous communication of the Ansibles and Formics. They quickly arrange to take Ender, Ela, and Miro to Outside. While Ela is Outside, she is able to create the recolada virus, which is a safe replacement of the descolada, and a cure to the godspoken genetic defect. Miro envisions his body as it was before he was crippled by paralysis, and upon arrival in the Outside, his consciousness is contained within a new, restored body. Ender discovers, however, the surreal unwitting creation of a new “Valentine” and new “Peter Wiggin” from his subconscious, who embody idealized forms of his altruistic and power-hungry sides.
The recolada begins its spread across Lusitania, converting the formerly lethal virus into a harmless aid to native life. The cure to the people of Path’s genetic-controlling defect is distributed, yet Han Fei-tzu is tragically unable to convince his daughter Qing-jao this was the true course of action. Confronted with the possibility of being lied to all her life and dooming many sentient species to destruction, or an alternative of believing all she ever loved and trusted has betrayed her – Demosthenes, her father, her friend, her world. Qing-jao instead continues her godspoken rite of woodgrain tracing until her death and is honored by those on Path who still believe in the gods as the last true godspoken. She is elevated to god status after her death. Si Wang-mu sets off with Peter to take control over Starways Congress to stop the Fleet closing in on Lusitania. The new Valentine-persona journeys to find a planet to which the population of Lusitania can evacuate. The stage is set for the final book of the four-part series, Children of the Mind.
Card is a professor of English at Southern Virginia University,[11] has written two books on creative writing, hosts writing bootcamps and workshops, and serves as a judge in the Writers of the Future contest.[12] A great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, Card is a practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). In addition to producing a large body of fiction works, he has also offered political, religious, and social commentary in his columns and other writing.
Card began his writing career primarily as a poet, studying with Clinton F. Larson at BYU. During his studies as a theater major, he began “doctoring” scripts, adapting fiction for readers theater production, and finally writing his own one-act and full-length plays, several of which were produced by faculty directors at BYU. He also explored fiction writing, beginning with stories that eventually evolved into The Worthing Saga.
After returning to Provo, Utah from his LDS mission in Brazil, Card started the Utah Valley Repertory Theatre Company, which for two summers produced plays at “the Castle”, a Depression-era outdoor amphitheater behind the state psychiatric hospital in Provo; his company’s were the first plays ever produced at the Castle. Meanwhile, he took part-time employment as a proofreader at BYU Press, then made the jump to full-time employment as a copy editor. In 1976, in the midst of a paid role performing in the church’s musical celebrating America’s Bicentennial, he secured employment as an assistant editor at the Ensign, and moved to Salt Lake City. It was while working at Ensign that Card published his first piece of fiction. His short story “Gert Fram” appeared in the July 1977 fine arts issue of that magazine under the pseudonym Byron Walley.
Science fiction
He wrote the short story “Ender’s Game” while working at the BYU press, and submitted it to several publications. The idea for the later novel of the same title came from the short story about a school where boys can fight in space. It was eventually purchased by Ben Bova at Analog Science Fiction and Fact and published in the August 1977 issue. Meanwhile, he started writing half-hour audioplays on LDS Church history, the New Testament, and other subjects for Living Scriptures in Ogden, Utah; on the basis of that continuing contract, some freelance editing work, and a novel contract for Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason, he left Ensign and began supporting his family as a freelancer.
He completed his master’s degree in English at the University of Utah in 1981 and began a doctoral program at the University of Notre Dame, but the recession of the early 1980s caused the flow of new book contracts to temporarily dry up. He returned to full-time employment as the book editor for Compute! magazine in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1983. In October of that year, a new contract for the Alvin Maker “trilogy” (now up to six books) allowed him to return to freelancing.
Ender’s Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead were both awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, making Card the only author (as of 2015) to win both of science fiction’s top prizes in consecutive years. Card continued the series with Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, “First Meetings in the Enderverse“, Shadow of the Giant, Shadows in Flight, the 2007 release of A War of Gifts, and the 2008 release of Ender in Exile, a book that takes place after Ender’s Game and before Speaker for the Dead. Card has also announced his plan to write Shadows Alive, a book that connects the “Shadow” series and “Speaker” series together. He later also wrote the first formic war saga: Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, and Earth Awakens as a prequel to the Ender novels. This trilogy relays, among other things, the history of Mazer Rackham. In 2008 Card announced that Ender’s Game would be made into a movie, but that he did not have a director lined up (Wolfgang Petersen had previously been scheduled to direct the movie but subsequently moved on to other projects.) It was to be produced by Chartoff Productions, and Card was writing the screenplay himself.[17] The film was made several years later, and released in 2013, with Asa Butterfield in the title role and Gavin Hood directing.
In 1983 Card published the novel Saints, a historical fiction based loosely on one of his ancestors and her experiences coming into the LDS Church during the early portion of its movement. It continues through her eyes into subsequent events up until the granting of Statehood to Utah.
In 2000, Card published the first novel in The Women of Genesis series. This series explores the lives of the principal women mentioned in the first book of the Bible and includes Sarah (2000), Rebekah (2002), and Rachel and Leah (2004).
In the fall of 2005, Card launched Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show.[19] He edited the first two issues, but found that the demands of teaching, writing, and directing plays for his local church theater group made it impossible to respond to writers’ submissions in a timely manner; former Card student and experienced freelance writer and editor Edmund R. Schubert took over as editor on June 1, 2006.
The dialog and screenplay (but not the story) for the Xbox video game Advent Rising was written by Card and Cameron Dayton.[20]
In 2008, Card’s novella Hamlet’s Father, a retelling of Shakespeare‘s Hamlet, was published in the anthology The Ghost Quartet (Tor Books). The work re-interpreted all of the characters’ personalities and motivations.
Pseudonyms
Over the years Orson Scott Card has used at least seven pseudonyms.
The names Frederick Bliss and P.Q. Gump were used by Card when he was asked to write an overview of Mormon playwrights “Mormon Shakespeares: A Study of Contemporary Mormon Theatre” for Spring 1976 issue of Sunstone magazine. According to Card he used these pseudonyms because the article included a brief reference to himself and his play “Stone Tables”.[21]
The name Byron Walley was used by Card on his first published piece of fiction “Gert Fram” which appeared in the July 1977 fine arts issue of Ensign magazine. According to Card he used this name because he had a non-fiction article, “Family Art”, a poem, “Looking West”, and a short play, “The Rag Mission”, appearing in the same issue.[21] Card also used the name Byron Walley in stories he published in Friend magazine, New Era magazine and in the anthology Dragons of Darkness. Stories by Byron Walley include: “Gert Fram“, Ensign magazine, July 1977; “Bicicleta“, Friend magazine, October 1977; “The Best Family Home Evening Ever“, Friend magazine, January 1978; “Billy’s Box“, Friend magazine, February 1978; “I Think Mom and Dad Are Going Crazy, Jerry“, New Era magazine, May 1979; and “Middle Woman“, Dragons of Darkness, Ace Books, 1982.
The name Brian Green was also used by Card in the July 1977 fine arts issue of Ensign magazine. He used this name for his short play “The Rag Mission” because he had three other pieces appearing in the same issue.[21]
The name Dinah Kirkham was used to write the short story “The Best Day“, in 1983.[22]
The name Noam D. Pellume was used by Card for his short story “Damn Fine Novel” which appeared in the October 1989 issue of The Green Pages.[23]
Card wrote the novel Zanna’s Gift (2004) under the pen name Scott Richards, saying, “I was trying to establish a separate identity in the marketplace, but for various reasons the marketing strategy didn’t work as we’d hoped.”[24]
On writing
Teaching
In 2005, Card accepted a permanent appointment as “distinguished professor” at Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia, a small liberal arts college run according to the principles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Card has cited his frustration with the dismal teaching methodology for creative writing in most universities as a reason for accepting this position, along with his desire to teach the techniques of effective fiction writing to writers whose values are more congruent with his own.[11] Card has worked closely with colleagues to develop ways to educate aspiring writers and has published two books on the subject. He was eager for the opportunity to apply these techniques in a university environment—his assorted workshops did not allow the follow-through he desired. After being deeply moved by stories of his students’ parents in some of their essays, he decided to stop teaching regularly at the university to spend time with his youngest child who still lives at home.[25][non-primary source needed] Card returned to teaching for the spring semester of 2009.
Books on writing
Card has written two books on the subject of creative writing – Characters and Viewpoint, published in 1988, and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 1990. He was also a co-writer for How to Write a Million (though his contribution is actually a reprint of an earlier work).
Card also offered advice about writing in an interview in Leading Edge #23 in 1991.
Card won the ALA Margaret Edwards Award in 2008 for his contribution in writing for teens, selected by a panel of YA librarians.[26] “What have I done that made some wonderfully deluded people think that I should get the [award] for lifetime achievement in writing young adult fiction?” he asked in his address, and asserted that “There is no such thing as children’s literature.” Furthermore:[27]
I have not worked with YA editors; my work has never been marketed that way until Tor put a YA cover and a new ISBN on Ender’s Game — fifteen years after the book first came out, and long after it had become popular with young readers. Ender’s Game was written with no concessions to young readers. My protagonists were children, but the book was definitely not aimed at kids. I was perfectly aware that the rule of thumb for children’s literature is that the protagonist must be a couple of years older than the target audience. You want ten-year-old readers, you have a twelve-year-old hero.
At the beginning of the book, Ender is six. Who, exactly, is the target audience?
Poetry
Card created a website, Strong Verse that publishes poetry from authors living and dead with the aim of showcasing works that present a clear message in clear language. The following motto appears on the website’s header: “Good poetry is meant to be understood, not decoded.”[28]
Opinion
Since 2001, Card’s commentary[29] includes the political columns “War Watch”, “World Watch”, or “Civilization Watch” (depending on Card’s topic) and the column “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything,” all published at the Greensboro Rhinoceros Times. The last-named column features personal reviews of movies, books, and restaurants in the greater Greensboro area, in addition to a variety of other topics.[30] The column also later appears on his website, Hatrack River. Since 2008 Card has written a column for the Mormon Times.
Politics
Card’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage and other views on homosexuality led to a boycott of the film version of Ender’s Game[31] – a development which itself received criticism.[32] Owing to political developments, by the early 2010s Card believed the question of U.S. legalization of same-sex marriage moot.[33]
Describing himself as a political liberal[34] and moral conservative,[35] Card’s ideals concerning society—as well as foundational themes within his fiction—are described as communitarian.[34][36][37] In 2000, Card said, “Most of the program of both the left and the right is so unbelievably stupid it’s hard to wish to identify myself with either. But on economic matters, I’m a committed communitarian. I regard the Soviet Union as simply state monopoly capitalism. It was run the way the United States would be if Microsoft owned everything. Real communism has never been tried! I would like to see government controls expanded, laws that allow capitalism to not reward the most rapacious, exploitative behavior. I believe government has a strong role to protect us from capitalism.”[38]
In an August 2013 essay, he presented as an experiment in fictional writing of “The game of Unlikely Events”,[45] Card described an alternative future in which President Barack Obama ruled as a “Hitler– or Stalin-style dictator” with his own national police force of young unemployed men; Obama and his wife Michelle would have amended the U.S. Constitution to allow presidents to remain in power for life, as in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Hitler’s Germany.[46][47] Card’s essay drew criticism, especially for alleged insensitivity in its reference to urban gangs.[48][49][50]
Views about homosexuality
Card has publicly declared his opposition to homosexuality and same-sex marriage.[41][51] In a 1990 essay he wrote that the laws prohibiting homosexual behavior should remain on the books and be enforced in order to “send a message” that those who break those laws “cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens”.[41][52] In May 2013, however, Card wrote that since the US Supreme Court had ruled those laws unconstitutional in 2003, he has “no interest in criminalizing homosexual acts”.[53]
In a 2008 opinion piece in the Mormon church’s newspaper he wrote that “no matter how close the bonds of affection and friendship might be” for a same-sex couple, their relationship will never be “the same as the coupling between a man and a woman”. He additionally stated that any government attempting to change the definition of marriage is his “mortal enemy” and that he would “act to destroy that government and bring it down”.[54] In 2009 he joined the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that campaigns against same-sex marriage,[41] but later resigned from the board in mid-2013.[31] Card has stated that there is “no need to legalize gay marriage”.[55]
Card has also expressed his opinion that paraphilia and homosexuality are linked. In 2004, he claimed that it’s a “myth that homosexuals are ‘born that way‘” and the “dark secret” of homosexuality was that it often resulted from “disturbing seduction”, “rape”, or child abuse.[31][41][55] Additionally, in Card’s 2008 novella Hamlet’s Father, which re-imagines the backstory of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Card was accused of directly trying to link the king’s pedophilia with homosexuality. The novella prompted public outcry and its publishers were inundated with complaints.[56][57] Trade journal Publishers Weekly criticized Card’s work, stating that the main purpose of it was to attempt to link homosexuality to pedophilia.[58] Card responded to the claim: “…[T]here is no link whatsoever between homosexuality and pedophilia in this book. Hamlet’s father, in the book, is a pedophile, period. I don’t show him being even slightly attracted to adults of either sex. It is the reviewer, not me, who has asserted this link, which I would not and did not make.”[57]
In 2013, Card was selected as a guest author for DC Comics‘s new Adventures of Superman comic book series,[59] but controversy over Card’s views on homosexuality led illustrator Chris Sprouse to leave the project[60] and DC Comics to put Card’s story on hold indefinitely.[61] A few months later an LGBT group, Geeks OUT!, proposed a boycott of the movie adaptation of Ender’s Game calling Card’s view anti-gay,[62][63] causing the movie studio Lionsgate to publicly distance itself from Card’s opinions.[64]
In July 2013, one week after the U.S. Supreme Court issued rulings in two cases that were widely interpreted as favoring recognition of same-sex marriages, Card wrote in Entertainment Weekly that the gay marriage issue is moot due to the Supreme Court’s decision on DOMA.[33] He further stated, “now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”[33]
Religion
Card’s membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been an important facet of his life from early on. He is a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, the second Latter-day Saint prophet, and all of Card’s ancestors for at least three generations have been members of the LDS Church. His ancestors include several other figures notable in the LDS Church, including the Cardston colony founder Charles Ora Card. As such, his faith has been a source of inspiration and influence for both his writing and his personal views.[14] Since 2008 Card has written a column of Latter-day Saint devotional and cultural commentary for the Sunday national edition of the Deseret News (formerly “the Mormon Times“).[65]
The life of their son, Charles, influenced some of Card’s fiction, most notably the Homecoming series, Lost Boys and Folk of the Fringe. Their daughter, Emily, along with two other writers, adapted Card’s short stories “Clap Hands and Sing“, “Lifeloop” and “A Sepulchre of Songs” for the stage in Posing as People.[66]
In 2008, he appeared in the short film The Delivery, which starred his daughter, Emily. He plays an author reading an audiobook in this film, which won First Place in Fantasy at Dragon*Con Film Festival. He wrote an original story, “The Emperor of the Air,” specifically for the short film by Gabrielle de Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki.
Card suffered a mild stroke on January 1, 2011, and was briefly hospitalized. He reported expecting to make a full recovery despite impairment of his left hand.[67][68]
Awards
The ALA Margaret A. Edwards Award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work for “significant and lasting contributions to young adult literature”. Card won the annual award in 2008, citing Ender’s Game (1985), which inaugurated the science fiction Ender Saga, and Ender’s Shadow (1999), the so-called parallel novel featuring another boy in the Battle School. According to the citation, the two boys’ “experiences echo those of teens, beginning as children navigating in an adult world and growing into a state of greater awareness of themselves, their communities and the larger universe.”[26] In the same year, Card won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Mormon writers (Whitney Awards).[69]
In 1978, the Harold B. Lee Library acquired the Orson Scott Card papers, which included Card’s works, writing notes and letters, and in 2007 the collection was formally opened.[74][75][76]
Kyle Mills (born 1966) is an American writer of thriller novels including Rising Phoenix, Fade, and The Second Horseman. Several of his books (Rising Phoenix, Storming Heaven, Sphere of Influence, Free Fall and Darkness Falls) include a character Mark Beamon, an FBI special agent. He also wrote The Ares Decision (2011), The Utopia Experiment (2013), and The Patriot Attack (2015), the eighth, tenth, and twelfth installments of the Covert-One series, originally created by Robert Ludlum.
Mills lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with his wife and they are both avid rock climbers. Mills grew up in Oregon, and his father was an agent with the FBI.
Douglas Jerome Preston (born May 20, 1956) is an American author of techno-thriller and horror novels. He has written numerous novels, and although he is most well known for his collaborations with Lincoln Child (including the Agent Pendergast series and Gideon Crew series), he has also written six solo novels, primarily including the Wyman Ford series. He also has authored a number of non-fiction books on history, science, exploration, and true crime.
From 1978 to 1985, Preston worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as a writer, editor, and manager of publications. He served as managing editor for the journal Curator and was a columnist for Natural History magazine.[1] In 1985 he published a history of the museum, Dinosaurs In The Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History, which chronicled the explorers and expeditions of the museum’s early days. The editor of that book at St. Martin’s Press was his future writing partner, Lincoln Child.[2] They soon collaborated on a thriller set in the museum titled Relic. It was subsequently made into a motion picture by Paramount Pictures starring Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, and Linda Hunt.
In 1986, Preston moved to New Mexico and began to write full-time. Seeking an understanding of the first moment of contact between Europeans and Native Americans in America, he retraced on horseback Francisco Vásquez de Coronado‘s violent and unsuccessful search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. That thousand mile journey across the American Southwest resulted in the book Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest. Since that time, Preston has undertaken many long horseback journeys retracing historic or prehistoric trails, for which he was inducted into the Long Riders’ Guild.[3] He has also participated in expeditions in other parts of the world, including a journey deep into Khmer Rouge-held territory in the Cambodian jungle with a small army of soldiers, to become the first Westerner to visit a lost Angkor temple. He was the first person in 3,000 years to enter an ancient Egyptian burial chamber in a tomb known as KV5 in the Valley of the Kings.[4] In 1989 and 1990 he taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. Currently, he’s an active member of the Authors Guild,[5] as well as the International Thriller Writers organization.[6]
For his solo career, Preston’s fictional debut was Jennie, a novel about a chimpanzee who is adopted by an American family. His next novel was The Codex, a treasure hunt novel with a style that was much closer to the thriller genre of his collaborations with Child. The Codex introduced the characters of Tom Broadbent and Sally Colorado. Tom and Sally return in Tyrannosaur Canyon, which also features the debut of Wyman Ford, an ex-CIA agent and (at the time) a monk-in-training. Following Tyrannosaur Canyon, Ford leaves the monastery where he is training, forms his own private investigation company, and replaces Broadbent as the main protagonist of Preston’s solo works. Ford subsequently returns in Blasphemy, Impact, and The Kraken Project.
In May, 2011, Pomona College conferred on Preston the degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa).[12] He is the recipient of writing awards in the United States and Europe.[citation needed]
Preston has criticized the conduct of Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini[15] in the trial of American student Amanda Knox, one of three convicted, and eventually cleared,[16] of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007. In 2009, Preston argued on 48 Hours on CBS that the case against Knox was “based on lies, superstition, and crazy conspiracy theories”.[17] In December 2009, after the verdict had been announced, he described his own interrogation by Mignini on Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN. Preston said of Mignini, “this is a very abusive prosecutor. He makes up theories. He’s … obsessed with satanic sex.”[18]
“Operation Thriller” USO Tour
In 2010, Preston participated in the first USO tour sponsored by the International Thriller Writers organization,[19] along with authors David Morrell, Steve Berry, Andy Harp, and James Rollins. After visiting with military personnel at National Navy Medical Center and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the group spent several days in Kuwait and Iraq, marking “the first time in the USO’s 69-year history that authors visited a combat zone.”[20] Of the experience, Preston said, “As always, we learn a great deal from all of the amazing and dedicated people we meet.”[21]
Authors United
In 2014, during a disagreement over terms between Hachette Book Group and Amazon.com, Inc.,[22] Preston initiated an effort which became known as Authors United.[23] During the contract dispute, books by Hachette authors faced significant shipment delays, blocked availability, and reduced discounts on the Amazon website.[24] Frustrated with tactics he felt unjustly injured authors who were caught in the middle, Preston began garnering the support of like-minded authors from a variety of publishers. In the first open letter from Authors United, over 900 signatories urged Amazon to resolve the dispute and end the policy of sanctions, while calling on readers to contact CEO Jeff Bezos to express their support of authors.[25][26]Not long after, a second open letter, signed by over 1100 authors, was sent to Amazon’s board of directors asking if they personally approved the policy of hindering the sale of certain books.[27]
Describing the motivation behind the campaign, Preston explained: “This is about Amazon’s bullying tactics against authors. Every time they run into difficulty negotiating with a publisher, they target authors’ books for selective retaliation. The authors who were first were from university presses and small presses… Amazon is going to be negotiating with publishers forever. Are they really going to target authors every time they run into a problem with a publisher?”[28]
Ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford returns to Cambodia to investigate the source of radioactive gemstones and uncovers an unusual impact crater. A young woman on the other side of the world photographs a meteoroid‘s passage in the atmosphere with her telescope and deduces that it must have struck on one of the islands just offshore from Round Pond, Maine. A NASA scientist analyzing data from the Mars Mapping Orbiter (MMO) spots unusual spikes in gamma ray activity. These threads intersect with discovery of an alien device that has apparently been on Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars, for at least 100 million years. Something has caused it to activate and fire a strangelet at Earth, setting off the events in the novel.
Timeline
The events in this novel follow those of The Codex, Tyrannosaur Canyon, and Blasphemy. As such, Wyman Ford is the protagonist once again (having appeared in Tyrannosaur Canyon and Blasphemy), and the character of Stanton Lockwood III (who debuted in Blasphemy) also returns.
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996) was an American jazzsinger often referred to as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz and Lady Ella. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
After tumultuous teenage years, Fitzgerald found stability in musical success with the Chick Webb Orchestra, performing across the country, but most often associated with the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Fitzgerald’s rendition of the nursery rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” helped boost both her and Webb to national fame. Taking over the band after Webb died, Fitzgerald left it behind in 1942 to start a solo career that would last effectively the rest of her life.
Signed with manager and Savoy co-founder Moe Gale[1] from early in her career, she eventually gave managerial control for her performance and recording career to Norman Granz, who built up the label Verve Records based in part on Fitzgerald’s vocal abilities. With Verve she recorded some of her more widely noted works, particularly her interpretation of the Great American Songbook.
Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, the daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance “Tempie” Fitzgerald.[2] Her parents were unmarried but lived together for at least two and a half years after she was born. In the early 1920s Fitzgerald’s mother and her new partner, a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph Da Silva,[2] moved to the city of Yonkers, in Westchester County, New York, as part of the first Great Migration of African Americans.[2] Initially living in a single room, her mother and Da Silva soon found jobs. Her half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923.[3] By 1925, Fitzgerald and her family had moved to nearby School Street, then a predominantly poor Italian area.[3] She began her formal education at the age of six and proved to be an outstanding student, moving through a variety of schools before attending Benjamin Franklin Junior High School from 1929.[4]
Fitzgerald had been passionate about dancing from third grade, being a fan of Earl “Snakehips” Tucker in particular, and would perform for her peers on the way to school and at lunchtime.[5] Fitzgerald and her family were Methodists and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she regularly attended worship services, Bible study, and Sunday school.[5] The church provided Fitzgerald with her earliest experiences in formal music making, and she may also have had a short series of piano lessons during this period.[6]
During this period Fitzgerald listened to jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and The Boswell Sisters. Fitzgerald idolized the Boswell Sisters’ lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, “My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it….I tried so hard to sound just like her.”[7]
In 1932, her mother died from serious injuries she received in a car accident [8] when Fitzgerald was 15 years of age. This left her at first in the care of her stepfather but before the end of April 1933, she had moved in with her aunt in Harlem.[9]This seemingly swift change in her circumstances, reinforced by what Fitzgerald biographer Stuart Nicholson describes as rumors of her stepfather’s “ill treatment” of Fitzgerald, leaves him to speculate that Da Silva might have abused her.[9]
Regardless, following these traumas, Fitzgerald began skipping school and letting her grades suffer. During this period she worked at times as a lookout at a bordello and with a Mafia-affiliated numbers runner.[10] Ella Fitzgerald never talked publicly about this time in her life.[11] When the authorities caught up with her, she was first placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, Bronx.[12] However, when the orphanage proved too crowded, she was moved to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York, a state reformatory located about 120 miles north of New York City. Eventually she escaped and for a time she was homeless.
While she seems to have survived during 1933 and 1934 in part from singing on the streets of Harlem, Fitzgerald made her most important amateur singing debut at age 17 on November 21, 1934, in one of the earliest of the famous Amateur Nights at the Apollo Theater.[13][14] She had originally intended to go on stage and dance, but, intimidated by a local dance duo called the Edwards Sisters, she opted to sing instead.[14][15] Performing in the style of Connee Boswell, she sang “Judy” and “The Object of My Affection” and won the first prize of $25.00.[16] In theory, she also won the chance to perform at the Apollo for a week but, seemingly because of her disheveled appearance, the theater never gave her that part of her prize.[17]
In January 1935 Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House.[13] Around this same time, she was introduced to the drummer and bandleader Chick Webb, who had asked his recently signed singer Charlie Linton to help find him a female singer. Though Webb was, as The New York Times later wrote, “reluctant to sign her….because she was gawky and unkempt, a ‘diamond in the rough,'”[7] he offered her the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance at Yale University.[13]
Met with approval by both audiences and her fellow musicians, Fitzgerald was asked to join Webb’s orchestra and soon gained acclaim as part of the group’s renowned performances at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom.[13] Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including “Love and Kisses” and “(If You Can’t Sing It) You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)“.[13] But it was her 1938 version of the nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a song she co-wrote, that brought her wide public acclaim.[18][19] Later that year Ella recorded her second hit, “I Found My Yellow Basket.”
Webb died of spinal tuberculosis on June 16, 1939,[20] and his band was renamed Ella and her Famous Orchestra, with Fitzgerald taking on the role of nominal bandleader.[21] Fitzgerald recorded nearly 150 songs with Webb’s orchestra between 1935 and its final end in 1942. In her New York Times obituary of 1996, Stephen Holder echoed the conventional critical view of the time in describing “the majority” of her recordings during this period as “novelties and disposable pop fluff”.[7] In addition to her work with Webb, Fitzgerald performed and recorded with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. She had her own side project, too, known as Ella Fitzgerald and Her Savoy Eight.
In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band to begin a solo career.[22] Continuing under contract to the Decca label that she had worked with while part of Webb’s orchestra, she had several popular hits while recording with such artists as Bill Kenny & the Ink Spots,[23]Louis Jordan,[24] and the Delta Rhythm Boys.[25]
With Decca’s Milt Gabler as her manager, Fitzgerald began working regularly for the jazz impresario Norman Granz and appeared regularly in his Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts. Her relationship with Granz was further cemented when he became her manager, although it would be nearly a decade before he could record her on one of his many record labels.
With the demise of the Swing era and the decline of the great touring big bands, a major change in jazz music occurred. The advent of bebop led to new developments in Fitzgerald’s vocal style, influenced by her work with Dizzy Gillespie‘s big band. It was in this period that Fitzgerald started including scat singing as a major part of her performance repertoire. While singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald recalled, “I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing.”[16]
Her 1945 scat recording of “Flying Home” arranged by Vic Schoen would later be described by The New York Times as “one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade….Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness.”[7] Her bebop recording of “Oh, Lady Be Good!” (1947) was similarly popular and increased her reputation as one of the leading jazz vocalists.[26]
Verve years
Fitzgerald was still performing at Granz’s JATP concerts by 1955. She left Decca and Granz, now her manager, created Verve Records around her. She later described the period as strategically crucial, saying, “I had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop. I thought be-bop was ‘it’, and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman … felt that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a turning point in my life.”[7]
On March 15, 1955[27] Ella Fitzgerald opened her initial engagement at the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood,[28] after Marilyn Monroe lobbied the owner for the booking.[29] The booking was instrumental in Fitzgerald’s career. Bonnie Greer dramatized the incident as the musical drama, Marilyn and Ella, in 2008. It had previously been widely reported that Fitzgerald was the first black performer to play the Mocambo, following Monroe’s intervention, but this is not true. African-American singers Herb Jeffries,[30]Eartha Kitt,[31] and Joyce Bryant[32] all played the Mocambo in 1952 and 1953, according to stories published at the time in Jet magazine and Billboard.
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, released in 1956, was the first of eight Songbook sets Fitzgerald would record for Verve at irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964. The composers and lyricists spotlighted on each set, taken together, represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the Great American Songbook. Her song selections ranged from standards to rarities and represented an attempt by Fitzgerald to cross over into a non-jazz audience. The sets are the most well-known items in her discography.
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book was the only Songbook on which the composer she interpreted played with her. Duke Ellington and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn both appeared on exactly half the set’s 38 tracks and wrote two new pieces of music for the album: “The E and D Blues” and a four-movement musical portrait of Fitzgerald (the only Songbook track on which Fitzgerald does not sing). The Songbook series ended up becoming the singer’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. The New York Times wrote in 1996, “These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration.”[7]
Days after Fitzgerald’s death, The New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that in the Songbook series Fitzgerald “performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis‘ contemporaneous integration of white and African American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians.”[10]Frank Sinatra, out of respect for Fitzgerald, prohibited Capitol Records from re-releasing his own recordings in separate albums for individual composers in the same way.[citation needed]
While recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks per year in the United States and internationally, under the tutelage of Norman Granz. Granz helped solidify her position as one of the leading live jazz performers.[7] In 1961 Fitzgerald bought a house in the Klampenborg district of Copenhagen, Denmark, after she began a relationship with a Danish man. Though the relationship ended after a year, Fitzgerald regularly returned to Denmark over the next three years, and even considered buying a jazz club there. The house was sold in 1963, and Fitzgerald permanently returned to the United States.[33]
There are several live albums on Verve that are highly regarded by critics. Ella at the Opera House shows a typical JATP set from Fitzgerald. Ella in Rome and Twelve Nights in Hollywood display her vocal jazz canon. Ella in Berlin is still one of her best-selling albums; it includes a Grammy-winning performance of “Mack the Knife” in which she forgets the lyrics but improvises magnificently to compensate.
Verve Records was sold to MGM in 1963 for $3 million and in 1967 MGM failed to renew Fitzgerald’s contract. Over the next five years she flitted between Atlantic, Capitol and Reprise. Her material at this time represented a departure from her typical jazz repertoire. For Capitol she recorded Brighten the Corner, an album of hymns, Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas, an album of traditional Christmas carols, Misty Blue, a country and western-influenced album, and 30 by Ella, a series of six medleys that fulfilled her obligations for the label. During this period, she had her last US chart single with a cover of Smokey Robinson‘s “Get Ready“, previously a hit for the Temptations, and some months later a top-five hit for Rare Earth.
The surprise success of the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic ’72 led Granz to found Pablo Records, his first record label since the sale of Verve. Fitzgerald recorded some 20 albums for the label. Ella in London recorded live in 1974 with pianist Tommy Flanagan, guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Keter Betts and drummer Bobby Durham, was considered by many to be some of her best work. The following year she again performed with Joe Pass on German television station NDR in Hamburg. Her years with Pablo Records also documented the decline in her voice. “She frequently used shorter, stabbing phrases, and her voice was harder, with a wider vibrato”, one biographer wrote.[34] Plagued by health problems, Fitzgerald made her last recording in 1991 and her last public performances in 1993.[35]
In her most notable screen role, Fitzgerald played the part of singer Maggie Jackson in Jack Webb‘s 1955 jazz film Pete Kelly’s Blues.[36] The film costarred Janet Leigh and singer Peggy Lee.[37] Even though she had already worked in the movies (she had sung briefly in the 1942 Abbott and Costello film Ride ‘Em Cowboy),[38] she was “delighted” when Norman Granz negotiated the role for her, and, “at the time….considered her role in the Warner Brothers movie the biggest thing ever to have happened to her.”[34] Amid The New York Times pan of the film when it opened in August 1955, the reviewer wrote, “About five minutes (out of ninety-five) suggest the picture this might have been. Take the ingenious prologue … [or] take the fleeting scenes when the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald, allotted a few spoken lines, fills the screen and sound track with her strong mobile features and voice.”[39]Fitzgerald’s race precluded major big-screen success. After Pete Kelly’s Blues, she appeared in sporadic movie cameos, in St. Louis Blues (1958),[40] and Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960).[41] Much later, she appeared in the 1980s television drama The White Shadow.
Fitzgerald also appeared in TV commercials, her most memorable being an ad for Memorex.[43] In the commercials, she sang a note that shattered a glass while being recorded on a Memorex cassette tape.[44] The tape was played back and the recording also broke the glass, asking: “Is it live, or is it Memorex?”[44] She also starred in a number of commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, singing and scatting to the fast-food chain’s longtime slogan, “We do chicken right!”[45] Her final commercial campaign was for American Express, in which she was photographed by Annie Leibovitz.[46]
From 1943 to 1950, Fitzgerald recorded seven songs with the Ink Spots featuring Bill Kenny. Out of all seven recordings, four reached the top of the pop charts including “I’m Making Believe” and “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” which both reached #1.
Fitzgerald recorded three Verve studio albums with Armstrong, two albums of standards (1956’s Ella and Louis and 1957’s Ella and Louis Again), and a third album featured music from the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess. Fitzgerald also recorded a number of sides with Armstrong for Decca in the early 1950s.
Fitzgerald is sometimes referred to as the quintessential swing singer, and her meetings with Count Basie are highly regarded by critics. Fitzgerald features on one track on Basie’s 1957 album One O’Clock Jump, while her 1963 album Ella and Basie! is remembered as one of her greatest recordings. With the ‘New Testament’ Basie band in full swing, and arrangements written by a young Quincy Jones, this album proved a respite from the ‘Songbook’ recordings and constant touring that Fitzgerald was engaged in during this period. Fitzgerald and Basie also collaborated on the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic ’72, and on the 1979 albums Digital III at Montreux, A Classy Pair and A Perfect Match.
Fitzgerald and Joe Pass recorded four albums together toward the end of Fitzgerald’s career. She recorded several albums with piano accompaniment, but a guitar proved the perfect melodic foil for her. Fitzgerald and Pass appeared together on the albums Take Love Easy (1973), Easy Living (1986), Speak Love (1983) and Fitzgerald and Pass… Again (1976).
Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington recorded two live albums and two studio albums. Her Duke Ellington Songbook placed Ellington firmly in the canon known as the Great American Songbook, and the 1960s saw Fitzgerald and the ‘Duke’ meet on the Côte d’Azur for the 1966 album Ella and Duke at the Cote D’Azur, and in Sweden for The Stockholm Concert, 1966. Their 1965 album Ella at Duke’s Place is also extremely well received.
Fitzgerald had a number of famous jazz musicians and soloists as sidemen over her long career. The trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, the guitarist Herb Ellis, and the pianists Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson, Lou Levy, Paul Smith, Jimmy Rowles, and Ellis Larkins all worked with Ella mostly in live, small group settings.
Possibly Fitzgerald’s greatest unrealized collaboration (in terms of popular music) was a studio or live album with Frank Sinatra. The two appeared on the same stage only periodically over the years, in television specials in 1958 and 1959, and again on 1967’s A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim, a show that also featured Antônio Carlos Jobim. Pianist Paul Smith has said, “Ella loved working with [Frank]. Sinatra gave her his dressing-room on A Man and His Music and couldn’t do enough for her.” When asked, Norman Granz would cite “complex contractual reasons” for the fact that the two artists never recorded together.[34] Fitzgerald’s appearance with Sinatra and Count Basie in June 1974 for a series of concerts at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, was seen as an important incentive for Sinatra to return from his self-imposed retirement of the early 1970s. The shows were a great success, and September 1975 saw them gross $1,000,000 in two weeks on Broadway, in a triumvirate with the Count Basie Orchestra.
Later life and death
Fitzgerald had suffered from diabetes for several years of her later life, which had led to numerous complications.[7] In 1985, Fitzgerald was hospitalized briefly for respiratory problems,[47] in 1986 for congestive heart failure,[48] and in 1990 for exhaustion.[49] In March 1990 she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England with the Count Basie Orchestra for the launch of Jazz FM, plus a gala dinner at the Grosvenor House Hotel at which she performed.[50] In 1993, she had to have both of her legs amputated below the knee due to the effects of diabetes.[51] Her eyesight was affected as well.[7]
In 1996, tired of being in the hospital, she wished to spend her last days at home. Confined to a wheelchair, she spent her final days in her backyard of her Beverly Hills mansion on Whittier, with her son Ray and 12-year-old granddaughter, Alice. “I just want to smell the air, listen to the birds and hear Alice laugh,” she reportedly said. On her last day, she was wheeled outside one last time, and sat there for about an hour. When she was taken back in, she looked up with a soft smile on her face and said, “I’m ready to go now.” She died in her home on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79.[7] A few hours after her death, the Playboy Jazz Festival was launched at the Hollywood Bowl. In tribute, the marquee read: “Ella We Will Miss You.”[52] Her funeral was private,[52] and she was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
Personal life
Fitzgerald married at least twice, and there is evidence that she may have married a third time. Her first marriage was in 1941, to Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer and local dockworker. The marriage was annulled in 1942.[53]
Her second marriage was in December 1947, to the famous bass player Ray Brown, whom she had met while on tour with Dizzy Gillespie’s band a year earlier. Together they adopted a child born to Fitzgerald’s half-sister, Frances, whom they christened Ray Brown, Jr. With Fitzgerald and Brown often busy touring and recording, the child was largely raised by his mother’s aunt, Virginia. Fitzgerald and Brown divorced in 1953, bowing to the various career pressures both were experiencing at the time, though they would continue to perform together.[7]
In July 1957, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian, in Oslo. She had even gone as far as furnishing an apartment in Oslo, but the affair was quickly forgotten when Larsen was sentenced to five months’ hard labor in Sweden for stealing money from a young woman to whom he had previously been engaged.[54]
Fitzgerald was also notoriously shy. Trumpet player Mario Bauzá, who played behind Fitzgerald in her early years with Chick Webb, remembered that “she didn’t hang out much. When she got into the band, she was dedicated to her music….She was a lonely girl around New York, just kept herself to herself, for the gig.”[34] When, later in her career, the Society of Singers named an award after her, Fitzgerald explained, “I don’t want to say the wrong thing, which I always do but I think I do better when I sing.”[16]
Fitzgerald was a quiet but ardent supporter of many charities and non-profit organizations, including the American Heart Association and the City of Hope Medical Center. In 1993, she established the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation.[55]
The primary collections of Fitzgerald’s media and memorabilia reside at and are shared between the Smithsonian Institution and the US Library of Congress [56]
The career history and archival material from Ella’s long career are housed in the Archives Center at the Smithsonian‘s National Museum of American History, while her personal music arrangements are at the Library of Congress. Her extensive cookbook collection was donated to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, and her extensive collection of published sheet music was donated to UCLA.
Callaway, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Patti Austin have all recorded albums in tribute to Fitzgerald. Callaway’s album To Ella with Love (1996) features fourteen jazz standards made popular by Fitzgerald, and the album also features the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Bridgewater’s album Dear Ella (1997) featured many musicians that were closely associated with Fitzgerald during her career, including the pianist Lou Levy, the trumpeter Benny Powell, and Fitzgerald’s second husband, double bassist Ray Brown. Bridgewater’s following album, Live at Yoshi’s, was recorded live on April 25, 1998, what would have been Fitzgerald’s 81st birthday.
Austin’s album, For Ella (2002) features 11 songs most immediately associated with Fitzgerald, and a twelfth song, “Hearing Ella Sing” is Austin’s tribute to Fitzgerald. The album was nominated for a Grammy. In 2007, We All Love Ella, was released, a tribute album recorded for the 90th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s birth. It featured artists such as Michael Bublé, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Diana Krall, k.d. lang, Queen Latifah, Ledisi, Dianne Reeves, Linda Ronstadt, and Lizz Wright, collating songs most readily associated with the “First Lady of Song”. Folk singer Odetta‘s album To Ella (1998) is dedicated to Fitzgerald, but features no songs associated with her. Her accompanist Tommy Flanagan affectionately remembered Fitzgerald on his album Lady be Good … For Ella (1994).
“Ella, elle l’a“, a tribute to Fitzgerald written by Michel Berger and performed by French singer France Gall, was a hit in Europe in 1987 and 1988.[62] Fitzgerald is also referred to in the 1976 Stevie Wonder hit “Sir Duke” from his album Songs in the Key of Life, and the song “I Love Being Here With You”, written by Peggy Lee and Bill Schluger. Sinatra’s 1986 recording of “Mack the Knife” from his album L.A. Is My Lady (1984) includes a homage to some of the song’s previous performers, including ‘Lady Ella’ herself. She is also honored in the song “First Lady” by Canadian artist Nikki Yanofsky.
In 2008, the Downing-Gross Cultural Arts Center in Newport News named its brand new 276-seat theater the Ella Fitzgerald Theater. The theater is located several blocks away from her birthplace on Marshall Avenue. The Grand Opening performers (October 11 and 12, 2008) were Roberta Flack and Queen Esther Marrow.
In 2012, Rod Stewart performed a “virtual duet” with Ella Fitzgerald on his Christmas album Merry Christmas, Baby, and his television special of the same name.[63]
There is a bronze sculpture of Fitzgerald in Yonkers, the city in which she grew up, created by American artist Vinnie Bagwell. It is located southeast of the main entrance to the Amtrak/Metro-North Railroad station in front of the city’s old trolley barn. A bust of Fitzgerald is on the campus of Chapman University in Orange, California. On January 9, 2007, the United States Postal Service announced that Fitzgerald would be honored with her own postage stamp.[43] The stamp was released in April 2007 as part of the Postal Service’s Black Heritage series.[64]
Scott Carl Sigler is a contemporary American author of science fiction and horror as well as an avid podcaster. Scott is the New York Times #1 bestselling author of sixteen novels, six novellas, and dozens of short stories. He is the co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his young adult Galactic Football League series. He lives in San Diego.
Life and work
Raised in Cheboygan, Michigan Sigler’s father passed his love of classic monster films along to his son. His mother, a school teacher, encouraged his reading offering him any book he wanted.[1] Sigler wrote his first monster story, “Tentacles”, at the age of eight.[2] Sigler didn’t travel far for college having attended Olivet College (Olivet, MI) and Cleary College (Ann Arbor, MI) where he earned a BA in Journalism and a BS in Marketing. Scott has had a varied career path having worked fast food, picking fruit, shoveling horse manure, a sports reporter, director of marketing for a software company, software startup founder, marketing consultant, guitar salesman, bum in a rock band,[3] and currently as a social media strategist. He now resides in San Diego, California with his dog, Reesie.
EarthCore was originally published in 2001 by iPublish, an AOL/Time Warner imprint.[4] With the novel doing well as a promotional ebook, Time Warner was planning on publishing the novel. With the economic slump following September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Time Warner did away with the imprint in 2004. Scott then decided to start podcasting his novel in March, 2005 as the world’s first podcast-only novel[5] to build hype and garner an audience for his work. Sigler considered it a “no brainer” to offer the book as a free audio download. Having searched for podcast novels and finding none, Sigler decided to be the first.[6][7] Sigler was able to get EarthCore offered as a paid download on iTunes in 2006.[8] After EarthCore’s success (EarthCore had over 10,000 subscribers[9]), Sigler released Ancestor, Infected, The Rookie, Nocturnal, and Contagious via podcast.[10]
Sigler released an Adobe PDF version of Ancestor in March 2007 through Sigler’s own podcast as well as others. Ancestor was released on April 1, 2007 to much internet hype and, despite having been released two weeks earlier as a free ebook, reached #7 on Amazon.com‘s best-seller list and #1 on Sci-Fi, Horror and Genre-Fiction on the day of release.[11] Sigler is leveraging new media to keep in-touch with his fans, regularly talking with them using social networking sites, via email, and IM. Scott Sigler was featured in a New York Times article on March 1, 2007 by Andrew Adam Newman, which was covering authors using podcasting innovations to garner a broader audience.[12]
In March 2014, Executive Editor Mark Tavani at Ballantine Bantam Dell bought World Rights to a science fiction trilogy by Sigler. In the first book, Alive, a young woman awakes trapped in a confined space with no idea who she is or how she got there. She soon frees other young adults in the room and together they find that they are surrounded by the horrifying remains of a war long past … and matched against an enemy too horrible to imagine. Further adventures will follow in two more books, Alight and Alone. The books will be published under the Del Rey imprint.[13] On Wednesday, July 15, 2016, it was announced that Alive made #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list in the Young Adult E-Book category.[14]
Sigler calls Stephen King a “‘master craftsman’, who writes from the ‘regular guy’ strata from which he hails. His older stuff had no pretense, no ‘higher message,’ no ‘I’m extremely important’ attitude, just rock-solid storytelling and character development. He also would whack any character at any time, and that’s what hooked you in – when characters got into trouble, you didn’t know if they’d live, unlike 99% of the books out there that are trying to develop franchise characters.” According to Sigler, Jack London‘s “The Sea Wolf totally changed my views on life”. Sigler saw King Kong (1976 version) when he was a little kid. He said it, “Scared the crap out of me. I hid behind my dad’s shoulder and begged to leave the theatre. As soon as we were out, I asked when we could see it again – that was the moment I knew I wanted to tell monster stories. I wanted to have that same impact on other people.”
Awards
Sigler has been a runner up in both the 2006 and 2007 Parsec Awards. In 2006 Sigler was a runner up for his short story Hero in the Best Fiction (Short) category and for Infected in the Best Fiction (Long) category. In 2007 Sigler was a runner up for The Rookie in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novel Form) category. In 2008 Sigler’s Contagious, the sequel to Infected was listed at 33 on the New York Times best sellers list.
In 2008 Sigler broke through and won the Parsec Award for Red Man in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) category. He followed up with another win in 2009 for Eusocial Networking in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novella Form) category. 2010 saw him continue to win in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) category with his podcast, The Tank, and in 2011 he again took out the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novella Form) category with Kissyman & the Gentleman.
On July 31, 2015, Scott was inducted into the inaugural class of the Academy of Podcasters Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Fort Worth, Texas.[15]
See the Scott Sigler bibliography page for more detailed information about the above novels and his many other works, including novellas related to the Galactic Football League series, short story collections, other short stories, upcoming projects, etc.
Adaptations
Film
In May, 2007 the novel Infected was optioned by Rogue Pictures and Random House Films;[17] however, the option lapsed in April 2010.[citation needed] The short story Sacred Cow was made into an online only mini-film by StrangerThings.tv and was Stranger Things debut episode.[18] “Cheating Bastard”, a short film about a couple in love with football and their obsession with it, was created by Brent Weichsel and released via Sigler’s RSS feed.
Graphic novel
In 2010 work began on a graphic novel adaptation of Sigler’s Infected.[19] The first issue was released August 1, 2012,[20]but the series was put on hold indefinitely due to delays with subsequent issues.[21]
Recordings
Albums
The Crucible (2016) by Separation Of Sanity. Scott’s original spoken word appears on four tracks: The Pact, Pandemic (inspired by his novel of the same name), Bag Of Blood (his major appearance on the album), and End Of Days.
Readings
Scott reads Union Dues – Off White Lies by Jeffrey R. DeRego on Escape Pod, Episode 49, on April 13, 2006.
Scott reads Reggie vs. Kaiju Storm Chimera Wolf by Matthew Wayne Selznick on Escape Pod, Episode 117, on August 2, 2007.
Donald Trump’s Cabinet Of Generals: David Ignatius Explains | MTP Daily | MSNBC
David Ignatius and Theo Koll – US Foreign Policy in Obama’s Second Term
WaPo’s David Ignatius: ‘A Lot Of Truth’ To WSJ Condemnation Of Obama’s Fiddling While World Burns
David Ignatius “The Director”
David Ignatius Discusses his New Book, ‘Blood Money’
David Ignatius interviewed about his book “BloodMoney”
THE SUN KING
“A thoroughly involving narrative with a sharp, satiric edge, Ignatius’s contemporary take on the tragic confluence of love, power and ambition is a sophisticated look at the media mystique and the movers and shakers in our nation’s capitol.” — Publishers Weekly
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of the most highly regarded writers in the capital, an influential journalist and acclaimed novelist with a keen eye for the subtleties of power and politics. In The Sun King, Ignatius has written a love story for our time, a spellbinding portrait of the collision of ambition and sexual desire.
Sandy Galvin is a billionaire with a rare talent for taking risks and making people happy. Galvin arrives in a Washington suffering under a cloud of righteous misery and proceeds to turn the place upside down. He buys the city’s most powerful newspaper, The Washington Sun and Tribune, and wields it like a sword, but in his path stands his old Harvard flame, Candace Ridgway, a beautiful and icy journalist known to her colleagues as the Mistress of Fact. Their fateful encounter, tangled in the mysteries of their past, is narrated by David Cantor, an acid-tongued reporter and Jerry Springer devotee who is drawn inexorably into the Sun King’s orbit and is transformed by this unpredictable man.
In this wise and poignant novel, love is the final frontier for a generation of baby boomers at midlife–still young enough to reach for their dreams but old enough to glimpse the prospect of loss. The Sun King can light up a room, but can he melt the worldly bonds that constrain the Mistress of Fact? In The Sun King, David Ignatius proves with perceptive wit and haunting power that the phrase “Washington love story” isn’t an oxymoron.
Reviews
“A splendid, star-crossed Gatsby update that roasts on the same skewer Washington’s power elite and the journalists they so easily seduce… Fitzgerald’s boozy gloom brightened with social satire, bittersweet romance, and a comic send-up of all that newspapers hold dear, from a man who’s been there.” — Kirkus
“The emotional integrity at the heart of this novel is searingly honest and makes for a wise and satisfying work.” — Library Journal
He is married to Dr. Eve Thornberg Ignatius, with whom he has three daughters.[7]
Career
Journalism
After completing his education, Ignatius was an editor at the Washington Monthly before moving to the Wall Street Journal, where he spent ten years as a reporter. At the Journal, Ignatius first covered the steel industry in Pittsburgh. He then moved to Washington where he covered the Justice Department, the CIA, and the Senate. Ignatius was the Journal’s Middle East correspondent between 1980 and 1983, during which time he covered the wars in Lebanon and Iraq. He returned to Washington in 1984, becoming chief diplomatic correspondent. In 1985 he received the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting.
In 1986, Ignatius left the Journal for the Washington Post. From 1986 to 1990, he was the editor of the “Outlook” section. From 1990 to 1992 he was foreign editor, and oversaw the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. From 1993 to 1999, he served as assistant managing editor in charge of business news. In 1999, he began writing a twice-weekly column on global politics, economics and international affairs.
In 2000, he became the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He returned to the Post in 2002 when the Post sold its interest in the Herald Tribune. Ignatius continued to write his column once a week during his tenure at the Herald Tribune, resuming twice-weekly columns after his return to the Post. His column is syndicated worldwide by The Washington Post Writers Group. The column won the 2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary and a 2004 Edward Weintal Prize. In writing his column, Ignatius frequently travels to the Middle East and interviews leaders such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Lebanese military organization Hezbollah.
Ignatius’s coverage of the CIA has been criticized as being defensive and overly positive. Melvin A. Goodman, a 42-year CIA veteran, Johns Hopkins professor, and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, has called Ignatius “the mainstream media’s apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency,” citing as examples Ignatius’s criticism of the Obama administration for investigating the CIA’s role in the use of torture in interrogations during the Iraq War, and his charitable defense of the agency’s motivations for outsourcing such activities to private contractors.[8][9][10][10] Columnist Glenn Greenwald has leveled similar criticism against Ignatius.[11]
On a number of occasions, however, Ignatius criticized the CIA and the U.S. government’s approach on intelligence.[12] He was also critical of the Bush administration’s torture policies.[13]
On March 12, 2014, he wrote a two-page descriptive opinion on Putin’s strengths and weaknesses which was published in the Journal and Courier soon after.[14]
On March 26, 2014, Ignatius wrote a piece in the Washington Post on the crisis in Ukraine and how the world will deal with Putin‘s actions. Ignatius’ theory of history is that it is a chaos and that “good” things are not pre-ordained, “decisive turns in history can result from ruthless political leaders, from weak or confused adversaries, or sometimes just from historical accident. Might doesn’t make right, but it does create ‘facts on the ground’ that are hard to reverse.” His piece mentioned 4-star USAF General Philip M. Breedlove, the current NATOSupreme Allied Commander Europe, and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsya. Putin, says Ignatius, “leads what by most political and economic indicators is a weak nation—a declining power, not a rising one.” He places great hope in Angela Merkel.[15]
Novels
In addition to being a journalist, Ignatius is also a successful novelist. He has written seven novels in the suspense/espionage fiction genre, which draw on his experience and interest in foreign affairs and his knowledge of intelligence operations. Reviewers have compared Ignatius’ work to classic spy novels like those by Graham Greene. Ignatius’s novels have also been praised for their realism; his first novel, Agents of Innocence, was at one point described by the CIA on its website as “a novel but not fiction”.[16] His 1999 novel The Sun King, a re-working of The Great Gatsby set in late-20th-century Washington, is his only departure from the espionage genre.[citation needed]
The Director, a spy thriller about a new CIA director and cyber-espionage, is his latest novel.
Opera
In May 2015, MSNBC‘s Morning Joe announced that Ignatius would be teaming up with noted composer Mohammed Fairouz to create a political opera called ‘The New Prince’ based on the teachings of Niccolo Machiavelli. The opera was commissioned by the Dutch National Opera.[17] Speaking with The Washington Post, Ignatius described the broad themes of the opera in terms of three chapters: “The first chapter is about revolution and disorder. Revolutions, like children, are lovable when young, and they become much less lovable as they age. The second lesson Machiavelli tells us is about sexual obsession, among leaders. And then the final chapter is basically is the story of Dick Cheney [and] bin Laden, the way in which those two ideas of what we’re obliged to do as leaders converged in such a destructive way.” [18]
Other
In 2006, he wrote a foreword to the American edition of Moazzam Begg’s Enemy Combatant, a book about the author’s experiences as a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In 2008, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and Ignatius published America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, a book that collected conversations, moderated by Ignatius, between Brzezinski and Scowcroft. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times named it one of the ten best books of 2008.[19]
In 2011, Ignatius held a contest for Washington Post readers to write a spy novel. Ignatius wrote the first chapter and challenged fans to continue the story. Over eight weeks, readers sent in their versions of what befalls CIA agents Alex Kassem and Sarah Mancini and voted for their favorite entries. Ignatius chose the winning entry for each round, resulting in a six-chapter Web serial. Winners of the subsequent chapters included: Chapter 2 “Sweets for the Sweet” by Colin Flaherty; Chapter 3: “Abu Talib” by Jill Borak; Chapter 4. “Go Hard or Go Home” by Vineet Daga; Chapter 5: “Inside Out” by Colin Flaherty; and Chapter 6: “Onward!” by Gina ‘Miel’ Ard.[20]
In early 2012, Ignatius served as an Adjunct Lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University teaching an international affairs course titled: “Understanding the Arab Spring from the Ground Up: Events in the Middle East, their Roots and Consequences for the United States”. He is currently serving as a Senior Fellow at the Future of Diplomacy Program at Harvard University.[21]
Controversy
2009 Davos incident
At the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Ignatius moderated a discussion including then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Israeli President Shimon Peres, UNSecretary-GeneralBan Ki-moon, and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa. As the December 2008–January 2009 conflict in Gaza was still fresh in memory, the tone of the discussion was lively.[22] Ignatius gave Erdoğan 12 minutes to speak, and gave the Israeli President 25 minutes to respond.[22] Erdoğan objected to Peres’ tone and raised voice during the Israeli President’s impassioned defense of his nation’s actions. Ignatius gave Erdoğan a minute to respond (who repeatedly insisted “One minute”, in English), and when Erdoğan went over his allocated minute, Ignatius repeatedly cut the Turkish PM off, telling him and the audience that they were out of time and that they had to adjourn to a dinner.[23] Erdoğan seemed visibly frustrated as he said confrontationally to the Israeli President, “When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill”.[22] Ignatius put his arm on Erdoğan’s shoulder and continued to tell him that his time was up. Erdoğan then gathered his papers and walked out, saying, “I do not think I will be coming back to Davos after this because you do not let me speak.”[23]
Writing about the incident later, Ignatius said that he found himself “in the middle of a fight where there was no longer a middle”. “Because the Israel–Palestinian conflict provokes such heated emotions on both sides of the debate,” Ignatius concluded, “it was impossible for anyone to be seen as an impartial mediator”. Ignatius wrote that his experience elucidated a larger truth about failure of the United States’ attempt to serve as an impartial mediator in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. “American leaders must give up the notion that they can transform the Middle East and its culture through military force”, Ignatius wrote, and instead “get out of the elusive middle, step across the threshold of anger, and sit down and talk” with the Middle Eastern leaders.[24]
Confounding Allende and Castro
On December 17, 2016, Ignatius drew negative attention when he appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday
and was asked by host Scott Simon “Is this a new Cold War? You covered the last one.” As part of his response, Ignatius said:
“This is the kind of thing United States used to do to other countries. We were famous for our covert actions, destabilizing their political systems. … I saw a little piece from a Cuban who lived during the time when the CIA destabilized the Cuban president, Allende.” Simon intervened to correct Ignatius, saying: “Chilean president – Allende – I think.” Ignatius responded “Yes. Forgive me. Yes, the Chilean president.” Ignatius then continued as if there had been no confusion, leaving listeners to wonder when he meant to refer to Cuba and Castro, or to Chile and Allende.
American Pie – Don McLean – Full Length 1989 Video from Original 1971/72 Song
Don McLean- American Pie (with Lyrics)
Donald Trump: Person Of The Year 2016 | POY 2016 | TIME
Time Magazine Person of the Year: Strangest Picks
Isaiah Wilner – “The Man Time Forgot”
USA – Seventy-five years of Time Magazine
Time Magazine Is Fake News
Henry R. Luce and the 20th Century
Uploaded on Apr 26, 2010
A discussion with two biographers of Henry R. Luce, the Yale graduate who founded Time, Inc. Alan Brinkley, an historian at Columbia University, and Lance Morrow, a contributor at Time, spoke about Luce and his impact on the 20th Century. Professor Shelly Kagan moderated the discussion; Yale University President Richard Levin gave the introduction. The event was sponsored by the Yale Daily News.
The Man Who Revolutionized Magazine Publishing: The Rise of the American News Media (2002)
Published on Dec 5, 2015
Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967), was a Chinese-American magazine magnate, who was called “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day”. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080…
He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans. Time summarized and interpreted the week’s news; Life was a picture magazine of politics, culture, and society that dominated American visual perceptions in the era before television; Fortune explored in depth the economy and the world of business, introducing to executives avant-garde ideas such as Keynesianism; and Sports Illustrated explored the motivations and strategies of sports teams and key players. Counting his radio projects and newsreels, Luce created the first multimedia corporation. He was born in China to missionary parents. He envisaged that the United States would achieve world hegemony, and, in 1941, he declared the 20th century would be the “American Century”.
Nightly discussions of the concept of a news magazine led Luce and Hadden, both age 23, to quit their jobs in 1922. Later that same year, they formed Time Inc. Having raised $86,000 of a $100,000 goal, they published the first issue of Time on March 3, 1923. Luce served as business manager while Hadden was editor-in-chief. Luce and Hadden annually alternated year-to-year the titles of president and secretary-treasurer. In 1925, Luce decided to move headquarters to Cleveland, while Hadden was on a trip to Europe. Cleveland was cheaper, and Luce’s first wife, Lila, wanted out of New York. When Hadden returned, he was horrified and moved Time back to New York. Upon Hadden’s sudden death in 1929, Luce assumed Hadden’s position.
Luce launched the business magazine Fortune in February 1930 and acquired Life in order to relaunch it as a weekly magazine of photojournalism in November 1936; he went on to launch House & Home in 1952 and Sports Illustrated in 1954. He also produced The March of Time weekly newsreel. By the mid 1960s, Time Inc. was the largest and most prestigious magazine publisher in the world. (Dwight Macdonald, a Fortune staffer during the 1930s, referred to him as “Il Luce”, a play on the Italian Dictator Mussolini, who was called “Il Duce”).)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, aware that most publishers were opposed to him, issued a decree in 1943 that blocked all publishers and media executives from visits to combat areas; he put General George Marshall in charge of enforcement. The main target was Luce, who had long opposed FDR. Historian Alan Brinkley argued the move was “badly mistaken”, for had Luce been allowed to travel, he would have been an enthusiastic cheerleader for American forces around the globe. But stranded in New York City, Luce’s frustration and anger expressed itself in hard-edged partisanship.[4] Luce, supported by Editor-in-Chief T. S. Matthews, appointed Whittaker Chambers as acting Foreign News editor in 1944, despite the feuds Chambers had with reporters in the field.[5]
Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964, maintained a position as an influential member of the Republican Party.[6] An instrumental figure behind the so-called “China Lobby”, he played a large role in steering American foreign policy and popular sentiment in favor of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling in their war against the Japanese. (The Chiangs appeared in the cover of Time eleven times between 1927 and 1955.[7])
It has been reported that Luce, during the 1960s, tried LSD and reported that he had talked to God under its influence.[8]
Once ambitious to become Secretary of State in a Republican administration, Luce penned a famous article in Life magazine in 1941, called “The American Century”, which defined the role of American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century (and perhaps beyond).
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Reflections on the Current Scene”
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Feminism”
Christopher Hitchens on News, Media, Entertainment and Propaganda (1997)
“THE END IS NEAR!” TIME Magazine Releases Cryptic Cover November 2016! TIME’S UP!
Edward Bernays called it PROPAGANDA
What is Propaganda
Devastating Expose on American Journalism and Media Concentration: Leading Thinkers Bernie Sanders
Mainstream Media Lies to the Masses – Media Lies – Media Lies Documentary
Propaganda and Manipulation: How mass media engineers and distorts our perceptions
More on propaganda and collective insanity
Propaganda & Engineering Consent for Empire with Mark Crispin Miller
Ben Shapiro on Fake News, Crumbling Mainstream Media, and Russia’s Hacking (Part 3)
Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin: Trump, the Alt Right, Fake News, and More (Full Interview)
College Indoctrination Documentary
Education Is a System of Indoctrination of the Young – Noam Chomsky
27. Your Indoctrination
Ben Shapiro on indoctrination of America’s youth in universities
What is “Fake News?”
The Truth About Fake News | Russia Hacked U.S. Election For Donald Trump?
WELCOME TO TRUTH | Full Documentary 2014
The Future of Newspapers and Magazines
The Future of Journalism: Tom Rosenstiel at TEDxAtlanta
Citizen journalism | Paul Lewis | TEDxThessaloniki
The slow journalism revolution | Rob Orchard | TEDxMadrid
Why the majority is always wrong | Paul Rulkens | TEDxMaastricht
Why I read a book a day (and why you should too): the law of 33% | Tai Lopez | TEDxUBIWiltz
George Carlin – Political Correctness is fascism pretending to be Manners………………
George Carlin the illusion of freedom
The Owners of the Country
How ‘Elites’ Became One of the Nastiest Epithets in American Politics
Our new president is a private-jet-setting billionaire Ivy League graduate, a real estate tycoon, a TV star and a son of inherited wealth. But he is no longer, by his own calculations, a member of the “elite.” Nor are the men (and the few women) now joining his inner circle — 1-percenters and corporate executives, Harvard and Yale alumni, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Goldman Sachs bankers. The true elite apparently sits elsewhere, among those who, in Sarah Palin’s notable 2008 formulation, think “that they’re — I guess — better than anyone else.”
As an adjective, the word “elite” still conveys something positive, even aspirational: elite athlete, elite model, elite travel services. But as a noun, embodied by actual living people, it has become one of the nastiest epithets in American politics. “Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans,” complains Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon (of Harvard, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood). In this formulation, elites are a destructive, condescending collective, plotting against the beleaguered masses outside their ranks.
And in these attacks, the president-elect and his team are deploying one of the most effective partisan political stereotypes of the modern age. For most of American history, anti-elite sentiment was a matter of up versus down, not left versus right. But about half a century ago, the conservative movement set out to claim anti-elite politics as its own. That meant redefining the term away from class and toward culture, where the “elite” could be identified by its liberal ideas, coastal real estate and highbrow consumer preferences. The right-wing Club for Growth captured this type in a famous 2004 attack ad, instructing the Democrat Howard Dean to “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”
Trump adjusted the formula for the hot topics of the 2016 campaign. “I was on the right side of that issue, as you know, with the people,” he boasted after Brexit, adding that “Hillary, as always, stood with the elites.” His complaints against “political correctness” conjure a world of absurdist campus politics, where overprivileged students squabble over gender pronouns and the fine points of racial victimization. “Media elites” come in for special attack, cordoned off in pens to be mocked and jeered at during rallies, labeled both liars and incompetents.
But Trump has also ventured beyond mere name-calling, turning the 2016 election into a competition between knowledge systems: the tell-it-like-it-is “people” versus the know-it-all “elites.” His campaign insisted for months that pollsters and technocrats and media would be proven wrong by his electoral success. The fact that he did win dealt a blow to an entire worldview, one in which empirical inquiry and truth-telling were supposed to triumph in the end. The question, now, is whether it’s possible to run an executive branch based on hostility toward experts and professionals of all political stripes — and how many billionaires and Ivy Leaguers Trump can appoint before this rhetorical pose begins to break down altogether.
The notion that distant elites might be conspiring against the people comes straight from the Founding Fathers, whose Declaration of Independence lamented the “long train of abuses and usurpations” inflicted upon ordinary Americans by an arrogant British king. From there on, United States history might be seen as a repeating cycle of anti-elite revolt. The Jacksonians rebelled against the Founders’ aristocratic pretensions. Northern “free labor” went to war against the oligarchical slavocracy. And the Populist revolts of the late 19th century adapted this story to modern capitalism, with farmers and laborers rebelling against robber barons, bankers, time-management experts and college-educated professionals.
The first historians to study those Populists described them as heroic crusaders, champions of the “people” against the “powers.” But by the middle of the 20th century, alarmed by the rise of fascism and homegrown demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy, a new generation of scholars took a more anxious view of the anti-elite spirit. In his 1955 book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter dismissed the Populists as backward-looking, provincial anti-Semites, the latent fascists of their day. Eight years later, his “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” documented a dangerous suspicion of “the critical mind” that seemed to course through the national culture. From his perspective, the 1952 election captured everything wrong with American political life, with Dwight Eisenhower’s “philistinism” winning over Adlai Stevenson’s “intellect.”
Hofstadter did not usually describe his ideal intellectually minded citizens as members of an “elite.” That word conveyed something different — a ruling class that held direct political and economic power. The most famous articulation of this view came from the sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 assessment of America’s “power elite.” “They rule the big corporations,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment.” In Mills’s view, these people were tied together not by culture or ideology but by their positions at the helms of large, ever-more-complex institutions. As individuals, they might be Republicans or Democrats, and might live in Ohio or California. The point was that they were in charge of things.
But that vision never gained much traction in mainstream politics, where a more partisan, targeted definition was starting to emerge. William F. Buckley Jr. carved out some essentials in his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” drawing a neat distinction between respectable Ivy-educated men like himself and the socialistic eggheads of the professoriate. Ronald Reagan chose the term “elite” to bring it all together in his famed 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” delivered on behalf of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. “This is the issue of this election,” he said: “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
Lyndon Johnson won that election in a blowout, but Reagan’s vision of a smug and detached liberal elite helped spark the oncoming “culture wars,” pitting a supposedly indignant Middle America against the liberal snobs of the coasts. By the 1990s, with the rise of right-wing media stars like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, bashing the “liberal elite” had become a favorite blood sport of the American right.
Despite all the abuse hurled their way, some “liberal elites” have accepted at least part of their detractors’ critique, particularly on the progressive left. It was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that the social critic Christopher Lasch published “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” which mourned that “upper-middle-class liberals” had turned into “petulant, self-righteous, intolerant” scolds, thoroughly out of touch with the concerns of Middle America. Since then, the torch has passed to a younger generation of writers, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, whose 2012 “Twilight of the Elites” called for rethinking the entire ethos of liberal “meritocracy” — a system, he argued, that tends to fuel self-congratulation and incompetence at the top while offering little but contempt and dim prospects for those at the bottom.
So as 2017 begins, we find ourselves in a strange and uncertain political moment. Antipathy toward a wealthy, preening managerial class seems to be gaining popularity across the political spectrum — and, oddly, to have helped elect a wealthy, preening incoming president. Meanwhile, both liberal and conservative “elites” are scrambling to figure out what happens if the president-elect continues to reject basic political norms and even routine intelligence briefings. Under a Trump presidency, such “elites” may have no choice but to attempt a radical redefinition of their role in American life. Otherwise, the man in the White House will do it for them.
Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967) was an American magazine magnate who was called “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day”.[1] He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans. Time summarized and interpreted the week’s news; Life was a picture magazine of politics, culture, and society that dominated American visual perceptions in the era before television; Fortune explored in depth the economy and the world of business, introducing to executives avant-garde ideas such as Keynesianism; and Sports Illustrated explored the motivations and strategies of sports teams and key players. Counting his radio projects and newsreels, Luce created the first multimedia corporation. He was born in China to missionary parents. He envisaged that the United States would achieve world hegemony, and, in 1941, he declared the 20th century would be the “American Century“.[2][3]
At 15, he was sent to the US to attend the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, where he edited the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly. It was there he first met Briton Hadden,[3] who would become a lifelong partner. At the time, Hadden served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, and Luce worked as an assistant managing editor. Both went on to Yale College, where Hadden served as chairman and Luce as managing editor of The Yale Daily News. Luce was also a member of Alpha Delta Phi and Skull and Bones. After being voted “most brilliant” of his class and graduating in 1920, he parted ways with Hadden to embark for a year on historical studies at Oxford University, followed by a stint as a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News.
In December 1921, Luce rejoined Hadden to work at The Baltimore News. Recalling his relationship with Hadden, Luce later said, “Somehow, despite the greatest differences in temperaments and even in interests, we had to work together. We were an organization. At the center of our lives — our job, our function — at that point everything we had belonged to each other.”[citation needed]
Magazines
Nightly discussions of the concept of a news magazine led Luce and Hadden, both age 23, to quit their jobs in 1922. Later that same year, they partnered with Robert Livingston Johnson and another Yale classmate to form Time Inc.[4] Having raised $86,000 of a $100,000 goal, they published the first issue of Time on March 3, 1923. Luce served as business manager while Hadden was editor-in-chief. Luce and Hadden annually alternated year-to-year the titles of president and secretary-treasurer while Johnson served as vice president and advertising director. In 1925, Luce decided to move headquarters to Cleveland, while Hadden was on a trip to Europe. Cleveland was cheaper, and Luce’s first wife, Lila, wanted out of New York. When Hadden returned, he was horrified and moved Time back to New York. Upon Hadden’s sudden death in 1929, Luce assumed Hadden’s position.
Luce launched the business magazine Fortune in February 1930 and acquired Life in order to relaunch it as a weekly magazine of photojournalism in November 1936; he went on to launch House & Home in 1952 and Sports Illustrated in 1954. He also produced The March of Time weekly newsreel. By the mid 1960s, Time Inc. was the largest and most prestigious magazine publisher in the world. (Dwight Macdonald, a Fortune staffer during the 1930s, referred to him as “Il Luce”, a play on the Italian Dictator Mussolini, who was called “Il Duce”).)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, aware that most publishers were opposed to him, issued a decree in 1943 that blocked all publishers and media executives from visits to combat areas; he put General George Marshall in charge of enforcement.[citation needed] The main target was Luce, who had long opposed Roosevelt. Historian Alan Brinkley argued the move was “badly mistaken” and said had Luce been allowed to travel, he would have been an enthusiastic cheerleader for American forces around the globe.[citation needed] However, stranded in New York City, Luce’s frustration and anger expressed itself in blatant partisanship.[5]
Luce, supported by Editor-in-Chief T. S. Matthews, appointed Whittaker Chambers as acting Foreign News editor in 1944, despite the feuds that Chambers had with reporters in the field.[6]
Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964, maintained a position as an influential member of the Republican Party.[7] An instrumental figure behind the so-called “China Lobby“, he played a large role in steering American foreign policy and popular sentiment in favor of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, in their war against the Japanese. (The Chiangs appeared in the cover of Time eleven times between 1927 and 1955.[8])
It has been reported that Luce, during the 1960s, tried LSD and reported that he had talked to God under its influence.[9]
Once ambitious to become Secretary of State in a Republican administration, Luce penned a famous article in Life magazine in 1941, called “The American Century“, which defined the role of American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century (and perhaps beyond).[7]
An ardent anti-Soviet, he once demanded John Kennedy invade Cuba, later to remark to his editors that if he did not, his corporation would act like Hearst during the Spanish–American War. The publisher would advance his concepts of US dominance of the “American Century” through his periodicals with the ideals shared and guided by members of his social circle, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State and his brother, director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. To highlight the cozy extent of their alliance, rumors swirled that the publisher shared the wartime mistress of the spymaster with Clare Booth Luce.[10]
Luce had two children, Peter Paul and Henry Luce III, with his first wife, Lila Hotz. He married his second wife, Clare Boothe Luce in 1935, who had an 11-year-old daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, whom he raised as his own. He died in Phoenix, Arizona in 1967. According to the Henry Luce Foundation, he died suddenly at age 68 while visiting his home on Fishers Island, New York, of cardiac arrest. At his death, he was said to be worth $100 million in Time Inc. stock.[11] Most of his fortune went to the Henry Luce Foundation. During his life, Luce supported many philanthropies such as Save the Children Federation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and United Service to China, Inc. He is interred at Mepkin Plantation in South Carolina.
Jump up^Maisto, Stephen A., Galizio, Mark, & Connors, Gerald J. (2008). Drug Use and Abuse: Fifth Edition. Belmont: Thomson Higher Education. ISBN 0-495-09207-X
Jump up^Talbot, David. “The Devils’ Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.” (2015) Harper-Collins, pub., New York, New York pp. 236-238, 444.
Brinkley, Alan. What Would Henry Luce Make of the Digital Age?, TIME (April 19, 2010) excerpt and text search
Elson, Robert T. Time Inc: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (1968); vol. 2: The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History, 1941-1960 (1973), official corporate history
Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (2006) excerpt and text search
Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (1994).
Swanberg was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1907, and earned his B.A. at the University of Minnesota in 1930.[5]
With grudging and only partial help from his father, who wanted his son to be a cabinet maker like himself, Swanberg earned his degree, only to find that employment as a journalist with such local daily newspapers as the St. Paul Daily News and the Minneapolis Star was unsatisfactory, as their staff were shrinking during the Great Depression. Swanberg instead held a succession of low-paying manual labor jobs. After five years he followed a college friend to New York City in September 1935. After months of anxious job-hunting he secured an interview at the Dell Publishing Company with president George T. Delacorte Jr. himself, and was hired as an assistant editor of three lowbrow magazines. Money saved in the next months enabled him to return briefly to the Midwest to marry his college sweetheart Dorothy Green, and bring her to New York. He soon began to climb up the editorial ladder at Dell, and by 1939 he was doing well enough to buy a house in Connecticut.
When the United States entered World War II, Swanberg was 34 years old, the father of two children and suffering from a hearing disability. Rejected by the army, he enlisted in the Office of War Information in 1943 and, after training was sent to England following D-Day. In London, amid the V-1 and V-2 attacks, he prepared and edited pamphlets to be air-dropped behind enemy lines in France and later in Norway.[6] With the end of the war he returned in October 1945 to Dell and the publishing world.
Swanberg did not return to magazine editing but instead did freelance work within and without Dell. By 1953 he began carving out time for researching his first book (Sickles), which Scribner’s purchased, beginning a long-term association. Swanberg’s early hopes of newspaper work never materialized, but by the mid-1950s he had established himself as scholarly biographer. His efforts proved to be labor-intensive and required up to four years apiece, even when assisted by the research and transcription efforts of his wife Dorothy. Upon turning 80 in 1987, Swanberg attempted one last biography, about William Eugene “Pussyfoot” Johnson (1862–1945).[7] He was at work on that project when he succumbed to heart failure at his typewriter in Southbury, Connecticut on September 17, 1992.
Swanberg’s 1961 book Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst was recommended for a Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography by the advisory board but rejected by the trustees of Columbia University, apparently because they thought that Hearst was not dignified enough to be the subject of the award. It was the first time in 46 years that the trustees rejected a recommendation from the advisory board, and the news caused sales to soar.[1]
Works
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about William Andrew Swanberg, OCLC/WorldCat[clarification needed] encompasses roughly 30+ works in 100+ publications in 5 languages and 16,000+ library holdings.[8]
Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Award, 1961, for Citizen Hearst
In 1962 the Pulitzer Board awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography to Citizen Hearst. The trustees of Columbia University, who administer the prize, overturned the award refusing to honor a book whose subject (William Randolph Hearst) cannot be regarded as an “eminent example of the biographer’s art as specified in the prize definition.”[2]
The Right Stuff is a 1979 book by Tom Wolfe about the pilots engaged in U.S. postwar research with experimental rocket-powered, high-speed aircraft as well as documenting the stories of the first Project Mercuryastronauts selected for the NASA space program. The Right Stuff is based on extensive research by Wolfe, who interviewed test pilots, the astronauts and their wives, among others. The story contrasts the “Mercury Seven“[1] and their families with test pilots such as Chuck Yeager, who was considered by many contemporaries as the best of them all, but who was never selected as an astronaut.
Wolfe wrote that the book was inspired by the desire to find out why the astronauts accepted the danger of space flight. He recounts the enormous risks that test pilots were already taking, and the mental and physical characteristics—the titular “right stuff”—required for and reinforced by their jobs. Wolfe likens the astronauts to “single combat warriors” from an earlier era who received the honor and adoration of their people before going forth to fight on their behalf.
First-state dust jacket, showing initial design never released in a public edition[2]
In 1972 Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone assigned Wolfe to cover the launch of NASA’s last moon mission, Apollo 17. Wolfe became fascinated with the astronauts, and his competitive spirit compelled him to try to outdo Norman Mailer‘s nonfiction book about the first moon mission, Of a Fire on the Moon. He published a four-part series for Rolling Stone in 1973 titled “Post-Orbital Remorse”, about the depression that some astronauts experienced after having been in space. After the series, Wolfe began researching the whole of the space program, in what became a seven-year project from which he took time to write The Painted Word, a book on art, and to complete Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, a collection of shorter pieces.[3]
In 1977 he returned to his astronaut book full-time. Wolfe originally planned to write a complete history of the space program, though after writing through the Mercury program, he felt that his work was complete and that it captured the astronauts’ ethos — the “right stuff” that astronauts and test pilots of the 1940s and 1950s shared — the unspoken code of bravery and machismo that compelled these men to ride on top of dangerous rockets. While conducting research, he consulted with General Chuck Yeager and, after receiving a comprehensive review of his manuscript, was convinced that test pilots like Yeager should form the backdrop of the period. In the end, Yeager becomes a personification of the many postwar test pilots and their “right stuff.”[4] The phrase itself may have originated in the Joseph Conrad story “Youth”, where it was used.
In the foreword to a new edition, published in 1983 when the film adaptation was released, Wolfe wrote that his “book grew out of some ordinary curiosity” about what “makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle… and wait for someone to light the fuse.”[7]
The storyline also involves the political reasons for putting people into space, asserting that the Mercury astronauts were actually a burden to the program and were only sent up for promotional reasons. Reasons for including living beings in spacecraft are barely touched upon, but the first option considered was to use a chimpanzee (and, indeed, chimpanzees were sent up first).
Another option considered were athletes already accustomed to physical stress, such as circus trapeze artists. Wolfe states that PresidentDwight D. Eisenhower, however, insisted on pilots, even though the first crew members would not actually fly the spacecraft. When Gus Grissom lands at sea and exits his space capsule, saving the capsule seems more important to the recovery team than saving the pilot because of the value of the data.
Wolfe contrasts the Seven with the Edwards AFB test pilots, among whom was Chuck Yeager, who was shut out of the astronaut program after NASA officials decided to use college-degreed pilots, not ones who gained their commissions as enlisted men, such as participants in the USAAF Flying Sergeants Program in World War II. Chuck Yeager spent time with Tom Wolfe explaining accident reports “that Wolfe kept getting all wrong.” Publishing insiders say these sessions between Wolfe and Yeager led Wolfe to highlight Yeager’s character, presence, thoughts, and anecdotes throughout the book. As an example, Yeager prides his speech to the Society of Test Pilots that the first rider in the Mercury development program would be a monkey, not a real test pilot, and Wolfe plays this drama out on the angst felt by the Mercury Astronauts over those remarks. Yeager himself downplayed the theory of “the right stuff,” attributing his survival of potential catastrophes to simply knowing his airplane thoroughly, along with some good luck.
Another test pilot highlighted in the book is Scott Crossfield. Crossfield and Yeager were fierce but friendly rivals for speed and altitude records.
The screenplay was adapted by Philip Kaufman from the book, with some contributions from screenwriter William Goldman (Goldman dissociated himself with the film after quarrelling with Kaufman about the story). The film was also directed by Kaufman.
While the movie took liberties with certain historical facts as part of “dramatic license”, criticism focused on one: the portrayal of Gus Grissom panicking when his Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft sank following splashdown. Most historians, as well as engineers working for or with NASA and many of the related contractor agencies within the aerospace industry, are now convinced that the premature detonation of the spacecraft hatch’s explosive bolts was caused by failure not associated with direct human error or deliberate detonation at the hands of Grissom.[citation needed]
This determination had, in fact, been made long before the movie was filmed, and even Tom Wolfe‘s book only states that this possibility was considered, not that it was actually judged as being the cause of the accident. In fact, Grissom was assigned to command the first flights of both Gemini and Apollo. Ironically, Grissom died in the Apollo 1 fire because there was no quick-opening hatch on the Block 1 Apollo Command Module – a design choice made because NASA had determined that the explosion in the hatch on Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 had been most likely self-initiated.[citation needed]
Another fact that had been altered in the film was the statement by Trudy Cooper, who commented that she “wondered how they would’ve felt if every time their husband went in to make a deal, there was a one-in-four chance he wouldn’t come out of that meeting.” According to the book, this actually reflected the 23% chance of dying during a 20-year career as a normal pilot. For a test pilot, these odds were higher, at 53%, but were still considerably less than the movie implied. In addition, the movie merely used the fictional Mrs. Cooper as a vehicle for the statement; the real Mrs. Cooper is not known to have said this.[8]
Wolfe made no secret that he disliked the film, especially because of changes from his original book. William Goldman, involved in early drafts of the script, also disliked the choices made by Kaufman, saying in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade that “Phil [Kaufman]’s heart was with Yeager. And not only that, he felt the astronauts, rather than being heroic, were really minor leaguers, mechanical men of no particular quality, not great pilots at all, simply the product of hype.”[9] Critics, however, generally were favorable toward the film.
References
Citations
Jump up^Wolfe 2001, p. 143. Note: Wolfe uses this term exactly once.
Charity, Tom. The Right Stuff (BFI Modern Classics). London: British Film Institute, 1991. ISBN 0-85170-624-X.
Goldman, William (1989). Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting (reissue ed.). Grand Central Publishing. ISBN0-446-39117-4.
Ragen, Brian Abel, ed. Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion. West Port, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001. ISBN 0-313-31383-0.
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, ISBN 0-374-25032-4.
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Bantam, 1979, ISBN 0-553-24063-3.
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Bantam, 2001, 1979, ISBN 0-553-38135-0.
Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Louise (née Agnew), a landscape designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr., an agronomist.[2][3]
Wolfe grew up on Gloucester Road in the historic Richmond North Side neighborhood of Sherwood Park. He recounts some of his childhood memories of growing up there in a foreword to a book about the nearby historic Ginter Park neighborhood.
Wolfe was student council president, editor of the school newspaper and a star baseball player at St. Christopher’s School, an Episcopalian all-boys school in Richmond, Virginia.
Upon graduation in 1947, he turned down admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University, both all-male schools at the time; at Washington and Lee, Wolfe was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. Wolfe majored in English and practiced his writing outside the classroom as well. He was the sports editor of the college newspaper and helped found a literary magazine, Shenandoah. Of particular influence was his professor Marshall Fishwick, a teacher of American studies educated at Yale. More in the tradition of anthropology than literary scholarship, Fishwick taught his classes to look at the whole of a culture, including those elements considered profane. The very title of Wolfe’s undergraduate thesis, “A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America,” evinced his fondness for words and aspirations toward cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated cum laude in 1951.
Wolfe had continued playing baseball as a pitcher and had begun to play semi-professionally while still in college. In 1952 he earned a tryout with the New York Giants but was cut after three days, which Wolfe blamed on his inability to throw good fastballs. Wolfe abandoned baseball and instead followed his professor Fishwick’s example, enrolling in Yale University‘s American studies doctoral program. His PhD thesis was titled The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929–1942.[4] In the course of his research, Wolfe interviewed many writers, including Malcolm Cowley, Archibald MacLeish, and James T. Farrell.[5] A biographer remarked on the thesis: “Reading it, one sees what has been the most baleful influence of graduate education on many who have suffered through it: it deadens all sense of style.”[6] His thesis was originally rejected but he finally passed by rewriting it being objective instead of subjective. Upon leaving Yale he wrote a friend explaining through expletives his personal opinions about his thesis.
Journalism and New Journalism
Though Wolfe was offered teaching jobs in academia, he opted to work as a reporter. In 1956, while still preparing his thesis, Wolfe became a reporter for the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. Wolfe finished his thesis in 1957 and in 1959 was hired by The Washington Post. Wolfe has said that part of the reason he was hired by the Post was his lack of interest in politics. The Post’s city editor was “amazed that Wolfe preferred cityside to Capitol Hill, the beat every reporter wanted.” He won an award from The Newspaper Guild for foreign reporting in Cuba in 1961 and also won the Guild’s award for humor. While there, he experimented with fiction-writing techniques in feature stories.[7]
In 1962, Wolfe left Washington for New York City, taking a position with the New York Herald Tribune as a general assignment reporter and feature writer. The editors of the Herald Tribune, including Clay Felker of the Sunday section supplement New York magazine, encouraged their writers to break the conventions of newspaper writing.[8] During the 1962 New York City newspaper strike, Wolfe approached Esquire magazine about an article on the hot rod and custom car culture of Southern California. He struggled with the article until finally a desperate editor, Byron Dobell, suggested that Wolfe send him his notes so they could piece the story together.
Wolfe procrastinated until, on the evening before the article was due, he typed a letter to Dobell explaining what he wanted to say on the subject, ignoring all journalistic conventions. Dobell’s response was to remove the salutation “Dear Byron” from the top of the letter and publish it intact as reportage. The result, published in 1963, was “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” The article was widely discussed—loved by some, hated by others—and helped Wolfe publish his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a collection of his writings in the Herald-Tribune, Esquire, and other publications.[9]
This was what Wolfe called New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques, mixing them with the traditional ideal of dispassionate, even-handed reporting. More specifically, Wolfe experimented with four literary devices not normally associated with feature writing—scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, multiple points of view, and detailed description of one’s status-life symbols (the materialistic choices one makes)—to produce this stylized form of journalism, which would later be commonly referred to as literary journalism.[10] Of status symbols, Wolfe has said, “I think every living moment of a human being’s life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death in some other way, is controlled by a concern for status.”[11]
Wolfe also championed what he called “saturation reporting,” a reportorial approach where the journalist “shadows” and observes the subject over an extended period of time. “To pull it off,” says Wolfe, “you casually have to stay with the people you are writing about for long stretches . . . long enough so that you are actually there when revealing scenes take place in their lives.”[12] Saturation reporting differs from “in-depth” and “investigative” reporting, which involve the direct interviewing of numerous sources and/or the extensive analyzing of external documents relating to the story. Saturation reporting, according to communication professor Richard Kallan, “entails a more complex set of relationships wherein the journalist becomes an involved, more fully reactive witness, no longer distanced and detached from the people and events reported.”[13]
One of the most striking examples of New Journalism is Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The book, an account of the adventures of the Merry Pranksters, a famous sixties counter-culture group, was highly experimental in its use of onomatopoeia, free association, and eccentric punctuation—such as multiple exclamation marks and italics—to convey the manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey and his followers.
In addition to his own forays into this new style of journalism, Wolfe edited a collection of New Journalism with E.W. Johnson, published in 1973 and titled The New Journalism. This book brought together pieces from Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and several other well-known writers with the common theme of journalism that incorporated literary techniques and that could be considered literature.[14]
Non-fiction books
In 1965, a collection of his articles in this style was published under the title The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and Wolfe’s fame grew. A second volume of articles, The Pump House Gang, followed in 1968. Wolfe wrote on popular culture, architecture, politics, and other topics that underscored, among other things, how American life in the 1960s had been transformed by post-WWII economic prosperity. His defining work from this era is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (published the same day as The Pump House Gang in 1968), which for many epitomized the 1960s. Although a conservative in many ways and certainly not a hippie (in 2008, he claimed never to have used LSD and to have tried marijuana only once[15]) Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade.
In 1979, Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of the pilots who became America’s first astronauts. Famously following their training and unofficial, even foolhardy, exploits, he likened these heroes to “single combat champions” of a bygone era, going forth to battle in the space race on behalf of their country. In 1983, the book was adapted as a successful feature film.
In 2016 Wolfe published The Kingdom of Speech, which is a controversial[16] critique of Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky.[17]
Art critiques
Wolfe also wrote two highly skeptical social histories of modern art and modern architecture, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, in 1975 and 1981, respectively. The Painted Word mocked the excessive insularity of the art world and its dependence on what he saw as faddish critical theory, while From Bauhaus to Our House explored the negative effects of the Bauhaus style on the evolution of modern architecture.[18]
Made for TV movie
A fictional television movie appeared on PBS in 1977, “Tom Wolfe’s Los Angeles”, a suitably satirical story set in Los Angeles. Wolfe appears in the movie himself.[19][20]
Novels
Throughout his early career, Wolfe had planned to write a novel that would capture the wide spectrum of American society. Among his models was William Makepeace Thackeray‘s Vanity Fair, which described the society of 19th century England. Wolfe remained occupied writing nonfiction books and contributing to Harper’s until 1981, when he ceased his other work to concentrate on the novel.
Wolfe began researching the novel by observing cases at the Manhattan Criminal Court and shadowing members of the Bronx homicide squad. While the research came easily, the writing did not immediately follow. To overcome his writer’s block, Wolfe wrote to Jann Wenner, editor of Rolling Stone, to propose an idea drawn from Charles Dickens and Thackeray. The Victorian novelists that Wolfe viewed as his models had often written their novels in serial installments. Wenner offered Wolfe around $200,000 to serialize his work.[21] The deadline pressure gave him the motivation he had hoped for, and from July 1984 to August 1985 each biweekly issue of Rolling Stone contained a new installment. Wolfe was later not happy with his “very public first draft”[22] and thoroughly revised his work. Even Sherman McCoy, the novel’s central character, changed: originally a writer, the book version cast McCoy as a bond salesman. Wolfe researched and revised for two years, and his The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987. The book was a commercial and critical success, spending weeks on bestseller lists and earning praise from much of the literary establishment on which Wolfe had long heaped scorn.[23]
Because of the success of Wolfe’s first novel, there was widespread interest in his second. This novel took him more than 11 years to complete; A Man in Full was published in 1998. The book’s reception was not universally favorable, though it received glowing reviews in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. An enormous initial printing of 1.2 million copies was announced and the book stayed at number one on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks. John Updike wrote a critical review for The New Yorker complaining that the novel “amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” This touched off an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media between Wolfe and Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. In 2001, Wolfe published an essay referring to these three authors as “My Three Stooges.”
After publishing Hooking Up (a collection of short pieces, including the 1997 novella Ambush at Fort Bragg) in 2001, he followed up with his third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), which chronicles the decline of a poor, bright scholarship student from Alleghany County, North Carolina, in the context of snobbery, materialism, institutionalised anti-intellectualism and sexual promiscuity she finds at a prestigious contemporary American university. The novel met with a mostly tepid response by critics but won praise from many social conservatives, who saw the book’s account of college sexuality as revealing of a disturbing moral decline. The novel won a Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the London-based Literary Review, a prize established “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel”. Wolfe later explained that such sexual references were deliberately clinical.
In early 2008, it was announced that Wolfe was leaving his longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His fourth novel, Back to Blood, was published in October 2012 by Little, Brown. According to The New York Times, Wolfe was paid close to US$7 million for the book.[24] According to the publisher, Back to Blood is about “class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America’s future has arrived first.”[25]
Recurring themes
Several themes are present in much of Wolfe’s writing, including his novels. One such theme is male power-jockeying, which is a major part of The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons as well as several of his journalistic pieces. Male characters in his fiction often suffer from feelings of extreme inadequacy or hugely inflated egos, sometimes alternating between both. He satirizes racial politics, most commonly between whites and blacks; he also highlights class divisions between characters. Men’s fashions often play a large part in his stories, being used to indicate economic status. Much of his recent work also addresses neuroscience, a subject which he admitted a fascination with in “Sorry, Your Soul Just Died,” one of the essays in Hooking Up, and which played a large role in I Am Charlotte Simmons—the title character being a student of neuroscience, and characters’ thought processes, such as fear, humiliation and lust, frequently being described in the terminology of brain chemistry. Wolfe also frequently gives detailed descriptions of various aspects of his characters’ anatomies.[26]
Two of his novels (A Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons) feature major characters (Conrad Hensley and Jojo Johanssen, respectively) who are set on paths to self-discovery by reading classical Roman and Greek philosophy.
Law and banking firms in Wolfe’s writing often have satirical names formed by the surnames of the partners. “Dunning, Sponget and Leach” and “Curry, Goad and Pesterall” appear in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and “Wringer, Fleasom and Tick” in A Man in Full. Ambush at Fort Bragg contains a law firm called “Crotalus, Adder, Cobran and Krate” (all names or homophones of venomous snakes).
Some characters appear in multiple novels, creating a sense of a “universe” that is continuous throughout Wolfe’s fiction. The character of Freddy Button, a lawyer from Bonfire of the Vanities, is mentioned briefly in I Am Charlotte Simmons. A character named Ronald Vine, an interior decorator who is mentioned in The Bonfire of the Vanities, reappears in A Man in Full as the designer of Charlie Croker’s home.
A fictional sexual practice called “that thing with the cup” appears in several of his writings, including The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full and a (non-fiction) essay in Hooking Up.
The surname “Bolka” appears in three Wolfe novels—as the name of a rendering plant in A Man in Full, as a partner in an accounting firm in Bonfire of the Vanities, and as a college lacrosse player from the Balkans in I Am Charlotte Simmons.
The white suit
Wolfe adopted the white suit as a trademark in 1962. He bought his first white suit planning to wear it in the summer in the style of Southern gentlemen. However, he found that the suit he purchased was too heavy for summer use, so he wore it in winter, which created a sensation.[27] Wolfe has maintained this uniform ever since, sometimes worn with a matching white tie, white homburg hat, and two-tone shoes. Wolfe has said that the outfit disarms the people he observes, making him, in their eyes, “a man from Mars, the man who didn’t know anything and was eager to know.”[28]
Views
In 1989, Wolfe wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine titled “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast“, which criticized modern American novelists for failing to engage fully with their subjects, and suggested that modern literature could be saved by a greater reliance on journalistic technique. This attack on the mainstream literary establishment was interpreted as a boast that Wolfe’s work was superior to more highly regarded authors.[29]
Wolfe was a supporter of George W. Bush and said he voted for him for president in 2004 because of what he called Bush’s “great decisiveness and willingness to fight.” (Bush apparently reciprocates the admiration, having read all of Wolfe’s books, according to friends in 2005.[30]) After this fact emerged in a New York Times interview, Wolfe said that the reaction in the literary world was as if he had said, “I forgot to tell you—I’m a child molester.” Because of this incident, he sometimes wears an American flag pin on his suit, which he compared to “holding up a cross to werewolves.”[31]
Wolfe’s views and choice of subject material, such as mocking left-wing intellectuals in Radical Chic and glorifying astronauts in The Right Stuff, have sometimes led to his being labeled conservative,[32] and his depiction of the Black Panther Party in Radical Chic led to a member of the party calling him a racist.[33] Wolfe rejects such labels; in a 2004 interview, he said that his “idol” in writing about society and culture is Émile Zola, who, in Wolfe’s words, was “a man of the left” but “went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not—and was not interested in—telling a lie.”[32]
Asked to comment by the Wall Street Journal on blogs in 2007 to mark the tenth anniversary of their advent, Wolfe wrote that “the universe of blogs is a universe of rumors” and that “blogs are an advance guard to the rear.” He also took the opportunity to criticize Wikipedia, saying that “only a primitive would believe a word of” it. He noted a story about him in his Wikipedia entry at the time, which he said had never happened.[34]
Personal life
Wolfe lives in New York City with his wife Sheila, who designs covers for Harper’s magazine. They have two children, a daughter, Alexandra, and a son, Tommy.[35]
A writer for Examiner Magazine who interviewed Wolfe in 1998 said, “He has no computer and does not surf, or even know how to use, the Internet”, adding, however, that Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full does have a subplot involving “a muckraking cyber-gossip site, à la the Drudge Report or Salon.”[35]
Influence
Wolfe is credited with introducing the terms “statusphere,” “the right stuff,” “radical chic,” “the Me Decade,” “social x-ray,” and “pushing the envelope” into the English lexicon.[36][dubious– discuss] He is sometimes credited with inventing the term “trophy wife” as well, but this is incorrect: he described emaciated wives as “X-rays” in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities but did not use the term “trophy wife”.[37] According to journalism professor Ben Yagoda, Wolfe is also responsible for the use of the present tense in magazine profile pieces; before he began doing so in the early 1960s, profile articles had always been written in the past tense.[38]
Wolfe was featured on the February 2006 episode “The White Stuff” of Speed Channel‘s Unique Whips, where his Cadillac‘s interior was customized to match his trademark white suit.[45]
Wolfe guest-starred alongside Jonathan Franzen, Gore Vidal and Michael Chabon in The Simpsons episode “Moe’N’a Lisa“, which aired November 19, 2006. He was originally slated to be killed by a giant boulder, but that ending was edited out.[46] Wolfe was also used as a sight gag on The Simpsons episode “Insane Clown Poppy“, which aired on November 12, 2000. Homer spills chocolate on Wolfe’s trademark white suit, and Wolfe rips it off in one swift motion, revealing an identical suit underneath.
Robert Ludlum (May 25, 1927 – March 12, 2001) was an American author of 27 thriller novels, best known as the creator of Jason Bourne from the original The Bourne Trilogyseries. The number of copies of his books in print is estimated between 290 million and 500 million.[2][3][4] They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.[5]
Prior to becoming an author, he had been a United States Marine,[10] a theatrical actor and producer. In the 1950s, he produced shows at the Grant Lee theater in Fort Lee, NJ. From 1960 to 1970, he managed and produced shows at the Playhouse on the Mall at Bergen Mall in Paramus, New Jersey.[11] His theatrical experience may have contributed to his understanding of the energy, escapism and action that the public wanted in a novel. He once remarked: “I equate suspense and good theater in a very similar way. I think it’s all suspense and what-happens-next. From that point of view, yes, I guess, I am theatrical.”[5]
During the 1970s, Ludlum lived in Leonia, New Jersey, where he spent hours each day writing at his home.[12]
Death
Ludlum died on March 12, 2001, at his home in Naples, Florida, while recovering from severe burns caused by a mysterious fire which occurred on February 10.[13][14][15]
Writing analysis and criticism
Ludlum’s novels typically feature one heroic man, or a small group of crusading individuals, in a struggle against powerful adversaries whose intentions and motivations are evil and who are capable of using political and economic mechanisms in frightening ways. The world in his writings is one where global corporations, shadowy military forces and government organizations all conspire to preserve (if it is good) or undermine (if it is evil) the status quo.
Ludlum’s novels were often inspired by conspiracy theories, both historical and contemporary. He wrote that The Matarese Circle was inspired by rumors about the Trilateral Commission, and it was published only a few years after the commission was founded. His depictions of terrorism in books such as The Holcroft Covenant and The Matarese Circle reflected the theory that terrorists, rather than being merely isolated bands of ideologically motivated extremists, are actually pawns of governments or private organizations who are using them to facilitate the establishment of authoritarian rule.
Some of Ludlum’s novels have been made into films and mini-series, although the story lines might depart significantly from the source material. In general, a miniseries is more faithful to the original novel on which it is based.
1977 – The Rhinemann Exchange — miniseries — Stephen Collins as David Spaulding, Lauren Hutton as Leslie Jenner Hawkewood
Bourne are a series of three novels by Robert Ludlum based on the fictional spy Jason Bourne. The series has since been further extended by Eric Van Lustbader after the death of Robert Ludlum.
The Bourne Identity has been adapted into live action twice. The first adaptation is a 1988 television film starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith. The second is a 2002 feature film series starring Matt Damon, which proved to be a strong critical and commercial success, launching the Bourne film series, which consists of five films, with the fifth being released in July 2016.[1]
Eric Van Lustbader (born 1946[1]) is a writer of thriller and fantasy novels. He has published as Eric Lustbader, Eric V. Lustbader, and Eric Van Lustbader.
Van Lustbader was born and raised in Greenwich Village, where he developed interests in art and writing. He lived downstairs from Lauren Bacall and built orange-crate racers in Washington Square Park with Keith and David Carradine. He is a graduate of Columbia College, with a degree in sociology, but his real education came much earlier at The City and Country School where, as he is fond of saying, “I learned all the important lessons that would stay with me for life.”
Before turning to writing full-time, he enjoyed successful careers in the New York City public school system, where he holds licenses in both elementary and early childhood education, and in the music business, where he worked for Elektra Records and CBS Records. He was the first person in the US to write about Elton John and to predict his success. As a consequence, he, John and John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin became friends. Writing for Cash Box Magazine, he also predicted the successes of such bands asSantana, Roxy Music, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, David Bowie and The Who.
When I am down and, oh my soul, so weary;
When troubles come and my heart burdened be;
Then, I am still and wait here in the silence,
Until you come and sit awhile with me.
You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;
You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;
I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;
You raise me up: To more than I can be.
You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;
You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;
I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;
You raise me up: To more than I can be.
There is no life – no life without its hunger;
Each restless heart beats so imperfectly;
But when you come and I am filled with wonder,
Sometimes, I think I glimpse eternity.
You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;
You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;
I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;
You raise me up: To more than I can be.
You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;
You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;
I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;
You raise me up: To more than I can be.
You raise me up: To more than I can be.
Scarborough Fair – Celtic Woman live performance HD
Hayley Westenra, the newest member of Celtic Woman performs “Scarborough Fair” at Slane Castle, Ireland . . .
Are you going to Scarborough fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
He once was a true love of mine
Tell him to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without no seam nor needlework
Then he’ll be a true love of mine
Tell him to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Then he’ll be a true love of mine
Are you going to Scarborough fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
He once was a true love of mine….. ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ – √j˙·٠•●♥
Celtic Woman, New Journey Live at Slane Castle, Ireland 2006
Celtic Woman – The Voice
Celtic Woman – The Call
Celtic Woman The Sky and the Dawn and the Sun
Celtic Woman – True Colours
Celtic Woman – Galway Bay
Celtic Woman – O, America!
Lyrics
O, America you’re calling,
I can hear you calling me…
You are calling me to be true to thee,
True to thee… I will be.
O, America no weeping,
Let me heal your wounded heart.
I will keep you in my keeping,
Till there be… a new start.
And I will answer you, and I will take your hand,
And lead you… to the sun…
And I will stand by you…do all that I can do,
And we will be… as one.
O, America I hear you,
From your prairies to the sea,
From your mountains grand, and all through this land,
You are beautiful to me.
And… O, America you’re calling,
I can hear you calling me…
You are calling me to be true to thee,
True to thee… I will be.
And I will answer you, and I will take your hand,
And lead you… to the sun…
And I will stand by you… do all that I can do,
And we will be…as one.
O, America you’re calling…
I will ever answer thee.
Celtic Woman – A Tribute to Broadway: I Dreamed a Dream / Circle of Life
Celtic Woman – Bridge Over Troubled Water
Celtic Woman – You’ll Never Walk Alone
When you walk through the storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of the lark
Walk on, through the wind
Walk on, through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
You’ll never walk alone
When you walk through the storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of the lark
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
You’ll never walk, you’ll never walk alone
Celtic Woman – Little Drummer Boy
Celtic Woman – Away In A Manger
Celtic Woman-Silent Night
Celtic Woman – O Holy Night
Celtic Woman – Home For Christmas (Live From Dublin 2013)
CELTIC WOMAN SHOW
Celtic Woman at the Helix Center in Dublin, Ireland
Celtic Woman Greatest Hits – Celtic Woman Best Songs
BACKSTAGE Celtic Woman Songs the from heart
Celtic Woman : 10th Anniversary
Meet the Artist – David Downes
Meet the Artist – Máiréad Nesbitt
Meet the Artist – Lisa Kelly
Send Me a Song – Lisa Kelly
Let It Go – Lisa Kelly
Lisa Kelly
Lisa Kelly & Mairead Nesbitt Undercover Interview
Meet the Artist – Chloë Agnew
Chloe Agnew Walking in the air
Hayley Westenra – May It Be
Celtic Woman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Celtic Woman
Celtic Woman performs at Macquarie Shopping Centre, Sydney, in August of 2012.
From left to right, Lisa Lambe, Susan McFadden, Chloe Agnew, and Mairead Nesbitt.
Celtic Woman is an all-female Irish musical ensemble conceived and created by David Kavanagh, Sharon Browne[1][2] and David Downes, a former musical director of the Irish stage show Riverdance.[3][4] In 2004, he recruited five Irish female musicians who had not previously performed together: vocalists Chloë Agnew, Órla Fallon, Lisa Kelly and Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, and fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt, and shaped them into the first lineup of the group that he named “Celtic Woman,” a specialty breed. Downes chose a repertoire that ranged from traditional Celtic tunes to modern songs.
The foundation for Celtic music’s popularity outside Ireland and Europe was built by tapping into the success of artists such as Enya, Moya Brennan and Clannad, along with stage shows Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. Celtic Woman has been described as being “Riverdance for the voice.”[7]
The current members of Celtic Woman are (in alphabetical order of family name):
Máiréad Carlin (5 December 1988) is an Irish singer and a member of the ensemble Celtic Woman.[10] Carlin was born in Derry, Northern Ireland. She began her career at the age of 15 when she won the title role of ‘The Rose’ in BBC Talents ‘Young Singers’ competition in The Little Prince (opera) by Rachel Portman. Máiréad has since performed for the President of Ireland, celebrated the Irish Anthem for the England-Ireland Rugby International to a TV audience of millions and recently, she has shared the stage with Snow Patrol and The Priests at the 2013 BBC TV Gala Concert ‘Sons and Daughters’ to mark Derry’s year as City of Culture.[10] She also recorded the City of Culture anthem ‘Let The River Run’ with Glee star Damian McGinty.[10] Carlin subsequently released the single under her own label Iris Records/Walled City Records. After finishing her degree, Máiréad was signed to Decca Records and recorded her debut album, ‘Songbook’ with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Air Studios and British Grove Studios. On 5 August 2013, the Celtic Woman website reported that Chloë Agnew would be taking a break from Celtic Woman to work on solo projects, and on 23 August 2013, it reported that Máiréad Carlin would be taking Chloë’s place.
Susan McFadden (8 February 1983) is an actress and singer born in Dublin, Ireland. She has also been a member of the all-female Celtic music group, Celtic Woman, since 2012. She is the younger sister of former Westlife member, Brian McFadden. In 2008, McFadden recorded two songs for the CD Act One – Songs From The Musicals Of Alexander S. Bermange, an album of 20 brand new recordings by 26 West End stars, released in November 2008 on Dress Circle Records. She played the lead role of Milly in the stage adaption of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, with Steven Houghton. McFadden starred in the original west end cast of the musical Legally Blonde at the Savoy Theatre in London’s West End playing Elle Woods after originating the role of Serena. Official reviews and audience reaction were extremely positive. On 5 January 2012, McFadden was named as a replacement for Lisa Kelly, then going on maternity leave, in the all- female ensemble Celtic Woman.[11] McFadden debuted with Celtic Woman in February at Nashville, Tennessee for the kickoff of the “Believe” North American Tour and continued with the European, Australian and South African Tours in 2012. After Lisa Kelly announced her departure from the group in January 2013, McFadden has since become a full-time member of Celtic Woman.
Éabha McMahon (9 December 1992) is Celtic Woman’s newest member. She replaced Lynn Hilary in their brand new tour, Destiny.
Máiréad Nesbitt (pronounced “mah-raid”) (19 April 1979) is an Irishclassical and Celtic music performer, most notably as a fiddle player and violinist. She is currently the fiddler for the group Celtic Woman. She has been a piano player since the age of four, and began playing the violin at age six. She spent some time as fiddler for the Irish group Coolfin, and recorded an album with them.[12] Nesbitt broke into the wider world in 1996 when she was invited to perform in the Michael Flatley show Lord of the Dance.[13]There, she played lead fiddle until 1998, at which time she went with Flatley to his second show, Feet of Flames. She toured in this production, again as lead fiddler, until leaving in 2001. Nesbitt also played on the original soundtracks to both shows, as well as for the soundtrack to Riverdance. In 2004, Nesbitt was invited to play violin for a performance at the Helix Theatre in Dublin, called “Celtic Woman.”[14] The popularity of this and subsequent performances on television and live albums led to five tours across theUnited States. Celtic Woman has released a total of eight albums to date: Celtic Woman,Celtic Woman: A Christmas Celebration,Celtic Woman: A New Journey,Celtic Woman: The Greatest Journey,Celtic Woman: Songs from the Heart,Celtic Woman: Lullaby,Celtic Woman: Believe, and Celtic Woman: Home for Christmas. Nesbitt is featured as a soloist on Walt Disney’s direct to DVD film Tinker Bell.Joel McNeely composed music specifically to fit Nesbitt’s distinctive style, and collaborated with her to further polish the music for Celtic authenticity.[13][15] Shortly before Thanksgiving, 2011, Nesbitt married Jim Mustapha, Jr., lighting director for Celtic Woman, in Maui, Hawaiʻi.
Past
The past members of Celtic Woman are (in alphabetical order of family name):
Chloë Agnew (9 June 1989) in Dublin, Ireland is an Irish singer who is a former member of the Celtic music group Celtic Woman, as well as its youngest member. In 1998, Agnew represented Ireland and was the winner of the Grand Prix at the First International Children’s Song Competition in Cairo with a song called The Friendship Tree. She then began to perform pantomime at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin and continued in that role for four years. In 2000, aged 11, Agnew approached director David Downes about recording a song to raise money for the children of Afghanistan. With his help, she recorded Angel of Mercy for the album This Holy Christmas Night, which raised over £20,000 for the Afghan Children’s Charity Fund in 2001. That same year, she joined the Christ Church Cathedral Girls’ Choir, and remained a member for three years.[16] In 2002, she was signed to Celtic Collections, and with the backing of Downes, she recorded her debut album, Chloë. In 2004, she released her second album, Chloë: Walking in the Air.She also recorded a companion DVD for her second album, released in Europe in 2004 and in North America in 2007. She appeared as part of the group Celtic Woman at The Helix in Dublin in 2004. As of August 2013, she has recorded eight albums with the group and has taken part in several world tours. On 5 August 2013, the Celtic Woman website announced that Agnew would be taking a break from Celtic Woman to focus on solo projects. Her position was filled by Derry-born singer Máiréad Carlin. Agnew has a soprano vocal range. After leaving Celtic Woman, she was chosen to be the special guest of the Celtic Thunder cruise. She, along with former Celtic Thunder member Paul Byrom, was also a special guest of Lisa Kelly’s concerts called The Voice of Ireland and A Celtic Christmas. Agnew was also part of Ethan Bortnick‘s concert with another former Celtic Thunder member Damian McGinty.
Órlagh Fallon (24 August 1974), professionally known as Órla Fallon, is an Irish soloist, songwriter and former member of the group Celtic Woman and the chamber choir Anúna.[17][18] Her debut album, The Water is Wide, was released in Europe in 2000 and in North America in 2006. In 2005, she was featured on The Duggans album Rubicon along with peers Moya Brennan and other members of Clannad. In 2004, Fallon sent a demo offer to composer David Downes, who was then working on the concept of Celtic Woman. Due to her unique vocal abilities, Downes contacted Fallon and asked if she would like to be a part of Celtic Woman, then only envisaged to be a one-night show. Fallon agreed, and became one of the founding members of the group. In some songs, Fallon has performed the harp as well as singing – some examples of the songs she has performed are “Isle of Innisfree” and “Carrickfergus.” She has also performed the harp for fellow Celtic Woman member Chloe Agnew’s performance of Guun’s “Ave Maria.” Fallon was featured in the self-titled debut album Celtic Woman,Celtic Woman: A Christmas Celebration, and Celtic Woman: A New Journey, as well as in the tie-in PBS television specials and DVDs filmed in 2004, 2007, and 2006 respectively. She also toured with the group in 2005 on the inaugural North American Tour, the 2006-07 A New Journey tour, and again in 2007-08 on the second A New Journey tour. In 2009, Fallon announced that she would be leaving Celtic Woman to have a full break and spend time with her family, and was replaced as a member of Celtic Woman by actress and vocalist Alex Sharpe. In 2009, Fallon appeared as a guest vocalist on Jim Brickman‘s “It’s a Beautiful World” tour and PBS special, and released her second album Distant Shore in September of that year. This was followed in March 2010 with her third album Music of Ireland: Welcome Home. In December 2010, Fallon released a PBS Celtic Christmas special and tie-in CD, titled Órla Fallon’s Celtic Christmas, the first time any former Celtic Woman member had starred in their own PBS special. In this special, as well as Fallon’s own songs, there were also songs which featured a few guest singers, including former fellow Celtic Woman member Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, in which they sung a duet together (“Do you hear what I hear”), and American Idol runner up David Archuleta, who joined Fallon on stage to perform “Silent Night,” “Pat a Pan,” and the finale song of “Here we come A-Wassailing,” which Ní Mhaolchatha was also featured in. This was the second Christmas album she recorded, the first being Winter, Fire & Snow: A Celtic Christmas Collection in September 2010. In March 2011, Fallon released another album, Órla Fallon: My Land, which tied in with another PBS special.[19][20] Another solo album,Lullaby Time, was released in 2012. She married her husband John and together they have a son Freddie.
Lynn Hilary (21 April) is an Irish singer, guitarist, and songwriter. She also has performed as a featured soprano soloist in the all-female ensemble Celtic Woman. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, and completed a Bachelor of Music performance degree in 2005 at the DIT College of Music.[21] Initially singing classical music,[22] Hilary joined the Irish choral group Anúna[17][23] in 2000. She also performed the lead vocal of the piece “Cloudsong” from Riverdance at the Opening Ceremony of the 2003 Special Olympics in Croke Park, Dublin, and toured the US with Riverdance in 2006 as a featured soloist.[24] In 2007, longtime Celtic Woman member Méav Ní Mhaolchatha decided to leave the group to focus on her solo career. As a result, Hilary joined the group in time to feature in the A New Journey tour, which started on 10 October 2007 in Estero, FL. She was the first time member to join the group since its inception in 2004.[25] On 14 February 2014, it was announced that Lynn would be returning to Celtic Woman for their Emerald tour in March while Lisa Lambe goes on a short ‘leave of absence.’ Lambe is expected to return in the summer and it is unknown at this point whether Lynn’s return to Celtic Woman is temporary or permanent. Hilary will be releasing her first album since 2009, titled “Saturn Return” which is due later in 2014. According to the Celtic Woman website, Hilary has rejoined with the music ensemble for their next album and will continue to be a member of Celtic Woman until the end of 2015.
Lisa Kelly (IrishLaoise Ní Cheallaigh) (7 May 1977) is a singer of both classical and Celtic music. She has taken part in many musical theatre productions and concerts, and is a founding and former member of the musical group Celtic Woman.[26][27][28][29][30]She has played several principal roles, such as “Velma Kelly” in Chicago, “Florence” in Chess, “Laurey” in Oklahoma!, “Maria” in West Side Story and “Sandy” in Grease. After deciding to take a break from her day job in the computer industry to return to theatre, she played the lead role in the Christmas pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. This led to her being cast in the American production of Riverdance – The Show as lead female vocalist in 2000, a position she held for five years while touring. While touring with Riverdance, Lisa met Australian dancer Scott Porter, who later became her husband. During this time, Lisa also met fellow vocalist Lynn Hilary, who would later go on to become a member of Celtic Woman in 2007 as a replacement forMéav Ní Mhaolchatha. Kelly was one of the Riverdance vocalists who appeared in the 2003 Special Olympics opening ceremony when they performed ‘Cloudsong.’ This was in support of Lynn, who had the leading vocal role at the start of the song. In 2002, Lisa was asked to record a solo album with director David Downes on the Celtic Collections label. The resulting debut album, Lisa, was released in 2003. Songs featured on this CD are “Carrickfergus”, “Siúil A Rún”, “The Deer’s Cry”, “Lift the Wings”, “The Soft Goodbye”, “Home and the Heartland”, “Homecoming”, “Now We Are Free”, “Dubhdarra”, “May It Be“, and “Send Me a Song”. Lisa was again approached by Downes in 2004, and asked to be part of Celtic Woman, originally planned as a one-night event at Dublin’s Helix Theatre. The group has since released several albums and DVD performances of their concerts and embarked on several world tours. During the A New Journey tour, and again during the “Believe” 2012 tour, Lisa took a break for the birth of her children. She was replaced by Alex Sharpe who later became a full-time member of Celtic Woman when Orla Fallon left. Later, in the Believe tour, she was replaced by Susan McFadden. In 2009, Lisa Kelly sang the main title song If You Believe for the Disney movie Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure. Lisa was one of four people involved who were connected to Celtic Woman – the others being violinist/fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt, musical director and composer David Downes, and former member and vocalist Méav Ní Mhaolchatha. In December 2011, Lisa announced that she was taking a maternity leave and would not participate in the 2012 Believe Tour. She was replaced by Susan McFadden, the younger sister of Brian McFadden. At the time it was thought to be a short-term departure only; however, in January 2013 Lisa announced her departure from Celtic Woman and moved to Peachtree City, Georgia, USA, where she announced the opening of The Lisa Kelly Voice Academy, indicating a switch from performing to teaching. The new voice academy is being run in conjunction with her husband Scott Porter, the former CEO of Celtic Woman Ltd. She also starred in the concert titled The Voice of Ireland, featuring fellow Celtic Woman performer Chloë Agnew and former Celtic Thunder member Paul Byrom. On 13 December 2014, she starred in the concert titled A Celtic Christmas, featuring fellow Celtic Woman performer Chloë Agnew, former Celtic Woman choir performer Dermot Kiernan, and former Celtic Thunder member Paul Byrom, along with performances by the Kelly Porter Dance Academy.
Lisa Lambe (1 August 1984) is an Irish singer and actress and a former member of the ensemble Celtic Woman. After Celtic Woman’s Songs From the Heart Tour, in November 2010, Lynn Hilary announced that she was leaving the group to return to Ireland. It was later announced that Lisa Lambe would join the group as part of the 2011 tour lineup. On the official Celtic Woman website, she said that she was “delighted to be joining Celtic Woman! It is a privilege to be part of this amazing show and I am looking forward to it being an incredible experience.”[10] In early 2014, Celtic Woman announced Lisa Lambe would leave to reprise her role as Sorcha in Breaking Dad, the sequel to Between a Foxrock and a Hard Place, in which she had previously played a role and whose run at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, lasted from 25 April to 17 May. However, she was scheduled to return in the summer.
Méav Ní Mhaolchatha (/ˈmeɪvniːˈweɪlxɑːhɑː/mayvneewayl-khah-hah), mononymously known as Méav, is an Irish singer, songwriter and recording artist specialising in the traditional music of her homeland. She was one of the original soloists in the musical ensemble Celtic Woman, which has sold over six million albums. Méav has a husband named Tom and two daughters named Anna and Catherine. Between 1994 and 1998 Méav was a member of the Irish chamber choir Anúna.[17] As a choral singer and soloist, she recorded four albums with Anúna: Omnis (1995), Omnis Special Edition (1996), Deep Dead Blue (1996), and Behind the Closed Eye (1997).[31] In 2006 a collection of her solo and choral work with Anúna, Celtic Dreams, was released on Valley Entertainment Records. She appeared as a member of Anúna in Riverdance: The Show. Méav gained musical stardom as a founding member of the group Celtic Woman in 2004. Her singing is a prominent element of Celtic Woman’s first three albums, Celtic Woman,Celtic Woman: A Christmas Celebration, and Celtic Woman: A New Journey.
In 2005, Méav was expecting her first child and took maternity leave to await the birth of her first daughter, Anna. During tours, she was replaced by Irish singer Deirdre Shannon. In 2006, she returned to record the New Journey CD and DVD and toured extensively with the group in the US and Japan in 2006 and 2007. She has been featured in Celtic Woman: The Greatest Journey Essential Collection. In 2007, following the filming of Celtic Woman’s Christmas DVD at the Helix, Dublin, Méav left Celtic Woman to concentrate on her solo career. She performed a series of solo concerts in New England, USA. In 2009, she returned to the stage performing in her native Dublin to rave reviews. She also gave birth to her second daughter, Catherine and recorded “Where the Sunbeams Play” for the Disney film Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure. In 2010, she was a special guest of Órla Fallon’s Celtic Christmas concert in Nashville, singing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” in a duet with Fallon, her solo version of “O Holy Night” accompanied by harp and the finale song “Here We Come A-wassailing” with the rest of the cast, including American singing stars David Archuleta and Vince Gill, recorded, aired on PBS and released on CD and DVD. Méav also featured as a guest soloist on the Celtic Woman Christmas album Home for Christmas. This was the first time Méav had appeared with Celtic Woman since she left the group in 2007. Méav was also featured in the Celtic Woman PBS special, “Home for Christmas”, which was recorded on 7 August 2013. It was announced just recently[when?] that Méav would return to Celtic Woman for a month in Lynn’s place, and that Lynn would return in April.
Deirdre Shannon is an Irish singer who has toured with a variety of Celtic music groups, such as Anúna,[17] Celtic Thunder and Celtic Woman.[32] Shannon began her professional career in 1996 when she was selected to be a member of the Irish choir Anúna. On 1 October 2006, Shannon released her solo album, simply entitled Deirdre Shannon. She has also been a principal singer in the group in Celtic Woman, but she was never featured in the studio DVDs. Playing the role of the Gentlewoman, Shannon also sings “Harry’s Game” as well as other songs in Celtic Thunder: Storm which was released on CD and DVD on 20 September 2011.
Alex Sharpe (4 May 1972) is an Irish performer known for her live roles in London’s West End and on the Irish stage (both the Olympic and Gaiety Theatres). She is well known for performing with Celtic Woman from 2008 to 2010. She was a featured soloist at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 60th birthday celebration (2008) with the RTE Orchestra and she recently released a solo album titled Be Still My Soul (2014). She began her career portraying Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin.[33] Her career in Musical Theatre continued, as she played Janet in The Rocky Horror Show, Young Sally in Follies in Concert, Jenny in Aspects of Love, and Mila in Aloha Kamano by Sean Purcell.[33] She was asked to play Éponine in Les Misérables for the Cameron Mackintosh Company in England and Ireland and in the Concert Tour of Les Misérables.[33][34] Alex created the role of Bernadette in the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Ben Elton Musical The Beautiful Game. On her return to Ireland she played the role of Kate Foley inThe Wireman in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin.[33] When founding member of Celtic Woman Lisa Kelly went on maternity leave, Sharpe became a temporary member of the ensemble in 2008. In 2009, Sharpe became a permanent member of Celtic Woman, in effect replacing Órla Fallon. She has toured with the ensemble on their 2009 ‘Isle of Hope’ tour, and has recorded a CD and DVD with the group, both entitled Celtic Woman: Songs from the Heart, released in January 2010.[35] The group toured North America from February to May 2010 on their ‘Songs from the Heart’ tour.[36] After the tour finished, Sharpe announced she would be leaving Celtic Woman to be with her family full-time.[37] In 2014 she released a solo album titled “Be Still My Soul.” She has a twelve-year-old son, Jacob.
Hayley Westenra (10 April 1987)[38][39] is a New Zealand singer, classical crossover artist,[40] songwriter and UNICEF Ambassador. Her first internationally released album, Pure, reached No. 1 on the UK classical charts in 2003 and has sold more than two million copies worldwide. Pure is the fastest-selling international début classical album to date, having made Westenra an international star at age 16. In August 2006, she joined the Irish group Celtic Woman, was featured on their Celtic Woman: A New Journey CD and DVD, toured with them on their 2007 Spring Tour, and was also featured on their DVD, The Greatest Journey: Essential Collection, released in 2008. Westenra recorded the end-title song for Disney‘s movie Mulan II.[41] They also featured her in the national Radio Disney music education tour for middle-school students. On 24 August 2003, Westenra performed on the stage with opera tenor José Carreras and Bryn Terfel in front of the capacity crowd of 10,000 people from Faenol Festival in Wales.[42][43] In 2004, Westenra was recorded a live DVD, Hayley Westenra: Live from New Zealand, featured duet with baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes and soprano Sophie Westenra in St. James Theatre. David Horn, the producer of her live TV special, which aired on PBS‘ Great Performances, said, “Her singing is so gorgeous, it’s reminiscent of the great boy-soprano sound of Anglican church choirs.”[44][45][46]
Albums
Celtic Woman was taped on 15 September 2004 for PBS television at The Helix, Dublin, Ireland, in front of a sold-out audience. Organized by producer Sharon Browne, Chairman & CEO Dave Kavanagh, television producer and director Avril MacRory, and musical director and composer David Downes, this performance was first broadcast on PBS during March 2005 in the United States, and within weeks the group’s eponymous debut album, Celtic Woman, reached No. 1 on Billboard‘s World Music chart, eventually breakingAndrea Bocelli‘s long-standing record of chart-topping longevity on 22 July 2006 by having stayed at No. 1 for 68 weeks.[47] The album held the top position on the Billboard World Music chart for 81 weeks total.[48] Much of the group’s success in America has been credited to the extensive PBS publicity throughout 2005. The live performance at The Helix was released on DVD alongside the studio album.
The release of the second album, Celtic Woman: A Christmas Celebration, on 19 October 2006 knocked their first album to the No. 2 spot on the World Music chart.[48]
In preparation for their third studio album, Celtic Woman performed at Slane Castle in County Meath, Ireland, on 23 and 24 August 2006, with this show airing on PBS during December 2006. The studio album, titled Celtic Woman: A New Journey, was released on 30 January 2007. As with their debut, the live performance was released on DVD simultaneously. This album immediately hit the Billboard 200 at No. 4[49] and the Billboard World Music chart at No. 1,[50] moving their previous two releases down a notch and securing the top three positions on that chart for the group.
In response to the popularity of the performance at Slane Castle in 2006, PBS aired a special concert of Celtic Woman performing again in The Helix Theatre, Dublin, Ireland on 7 December 2007. This performance included songs from the group’s second album,Celtic Woman: A Christmas Celebration.
The group recently released their sixth album, Lullaby, available through PBS pledge or the QVC shopping website.[52] On 15 February 2011, it was released by other major retailers as a limited edition album. It reached No. 1 on the World Charts and No. 3 on the Children’s Charts, a first for Celtic Woman.
The group filmed a new special on 6 and 7 September 2011 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta for PBS broadcast and DVD release. It is titled Celtic Woman: Believe. The show aired on PBS stations on 3 December 2011. The CD/DVD was released on 24 January 2012.[53]
In July 2013, Celtic Woman released a promotional video on its YouTube channel for a new PBS special, due to be screened in early 2014. On 24 February 2014, Celtic Woman released a new CD/DVD set and PBS Special, called Celtic Woman: Emerald – Musical Gems. It features Lisa Lambe, Chloë Agnew, Mairead Nesbitt, and Susan McFadden. The DVD was filmed in April 2013 at a tour stop in South Bend, Indiana and was aired on PBS, starting in March.[54]
Celtic Woman has performed three tours in America, with additional performances overseas. The group appeared live in more than a dozen US cities in 2005 for their original album debut.[55] The group toured the United States twice with their “Celtic Woman: A New Journey” tour, visiting 88 cities in 2007 and over 75 cities in 2008. In early April 2008 it was announced that The High Kings would be opening the act for the group through June 2008.[56]
The 2009 Isle of Hope Tour was announced in late 2008, and features a blend of original music from composer David Downes and Brendan Graham (the author of the group favourite “You Raise Me Up“), renditions of songs such as “Fields of Gold” and “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” and traditional performances of “Danny Boy”, “The Sky and the Dawn and the Sun” and “Spanish Lady”. This tour finished on 22 November 2009.
The 2010–11 tour called Songs from the Heart, featured some of the same music and some new music. The tour featured Chloë Agnew, Lisa Kelly, Lynn Hilary, Alex Sharpe, and Mairead Nesbitt. It began in February 2010.[57][58] PBS television presented a special concert starting 28 November 2009. It was taped in HD at the Powerscourt House & Gardens in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland. It included a 27-member film orchestra, Discovery Gospel choir, 12-member Aontas Choir, 10-member Extreme Rhythm Drummers with an 11-piece bag pipe ensemble.[59]
A second “Songs from the Heart” tour opened in February 2011 with Agnew, Kelly, new member Lisa Lambe, and Nesbitt and consisted of about 80 concerts in North America in spring 2011[60] and 10 performances in Germany and Austria during summer 2011.[61]
The Symphony Tour featuring songs from their Christmas Album A Christmas Celebration took place during December 2011.[62]
The BELIEVE 2012 North American Tour ran between February 2012 and April 2012.[63] Following directly onto this, the BELIEVE European tour took place between May and June 2012.[64] Lisa Kelly, who was expecting her fourth child, did not participate in the 2012 tours,[65] and was replaced by Susan McFadden,[65] the younger sister of former Westlife member Brian McFadden.
Another Symphony Tour was announced for the 2012 Christmas season, featuring Agnew, Lambe, Nesbitt and McFadden. The tour began on 1 December and continued on till 22 December. Celtic Woman took “Believe” on tour again from February to June 2013, with the same line-up. On 15 January 2013, Lisa Kelly announced her intentions to open “The Lisa Kelly Voice Academy”, located in Peachtree City, GA. In addition to this, Kelly confirmed that she will not be returning to Celtic Woman. Her husband, Scott Porter, also announced his departure as CEO of Celtic Woman.
Celtic Woman took “Believe” to Europe in October 2013 and visited the US on their Symphony Tour in December 2013. The Australian Tour for “Believe”, previously scheduled for September 2013, was rescheduled to January 2014. Celtic Woman toured in the US from February to June 2014 on their Emerald Tour to celebrate the heritage of the Emerald Isles and to promote their new album called Celtic Woman: Emerald Musical Gems. Lynn Hilary will be coming back for the Emerald Tour as Lisa Lambe is leaving in mid-March for a role in the play Breaking Dad, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s sequel to Between Foxrock and a Hard Place, in which Lisa had played Sorcha. Breaking Dad, will run from 25 April to 17 May at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, Ireland.[66] As well as the US, Celtic Woman visited Brazil, the UK, and Europe in Autumn 2014 on their Emerald Tour – making their debut in Brazil and the UK.
Additionally, Celtic Woman toured the US for their Symphony Tour in December 2014 and again for the Tenth Anniversary Tour in March 2015 to celebrate the group’s 10th anniversary. Also, Celtic Woman’s November 2014 European Tour, which was part of the Emerald World Tour, was rescheduled from November 2014 to February 2015, and is now part of the Tenth Anniversary Tour instead of the Emerald Tour. They will also visit Australia for the 10th Anniversary Tour in September 2015 for the first time since the Believe Tour in January 2014, and will return to the UK again in November 2015.[dated info]
Membership
The original performers in Celtic Woman were Chloë Agnew, Órla Fallon, Lisa Kelly, Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, and Máiréad Nesbitt. During Méav’s pregnancy in 2005, Deirdre Shannon was selected to fill her place during tours. Méav returned to the group in time to record A New Journey and tour for that album, coinciding with Deirdre’s departure from the group in February 2006.
The second line-up change was announced on 6 September 2006, with the announcement that Hayley Westenra officially joined Celtic Woman on 24 August 2006.[67] As well as being featured on the album and DVD for A New Journey, Hayley alternated with Méav during tour events to maintain the live five-person line-up.[68]
On 20 August 2007, Méav left Celtic Woman to focus on her solo career. Méav’s replacement, Lynn Hilary, made her first appearance on 10 October 2007 in Estero, Florida, United States.[69][70]
In December 2007, Lisa Kelly, who was expecting a new child in 2008, took maternity leave from the group. Alex Sharpe filled her position on the A New Journey tour during this leave.[71] It was announced on the group’s website in 2009 that Órla Fallon was taking a full break to spend time with her family and to focus on recording a new solo album, and that as a result of this, Alex would be replacing Órla as a member of Celtic Woman.
For the 2009 Isle of Hope Tour, the group comprised vocalists Chloë Agnew, Lynn Hilary, Lisa Kelly, and Alex Sharpe; and fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt. This group completed the entire 2009 tour as well as the first leg of the Songs from the Heart tour, from February to May 2010, with this line-up. After the tour ended, it was announced that Alex Sharpe would take a full-time break from Celtic Woman to spend time with her family.[5]
After the Songs from the Heart tour, in November 2010, Lynn Hilary announced that she was leaving the group to return to Ireland.[72] Singer and actress Lisa Lambe joined the group as a replacement for Lynn in early 2011.
In December 2011, Lisa Kelly announced that she would be taking maternity leave from the group after the “Symphony Tour” was over. The group’s website announced in January 2012 that actress Susan McFadden would be filling in for Kelly until she returned to the group. However, Kelly announced the opening of “The Lisa Kelly Voice Academy” in Peachtree City, Georgia, in January 2013 indicating that she was moving on from performing to teaching. Susan has since become a full member of the line-up and will appear on the new Celtic Woman PBS special and DVD, due for release in early 2014.
In 2012, Méav Ní Mhaolchatha returned briefly to Celtic Woman to record Celtic Woman: Home for Christmas, the first time she had appeared with the group since her departure in 2007. Méav returned to the group again, albeit on a temporary basis, in August 2013 to film the Celtic Woman: Home for Christmas PBS show and DVD. At the same time, it was announced on the Celtic Woman website on 5 August 2013 that Chloë Agnew would be taking a break from Celtic Woman to work on solo projects. In addition to this, she was not featured in the PBS special and DVD for Celtic Woman: Home for Christmas. On 23 August 2013 it was announced that Derry-born singer Mairead Carlin would be taking Chloë’s place.[10]
Shortly before the beginning of the Emerald Tour on 14 February 2014, management announced that Lisa Lambe would be leaving the tour at the beginning of March, with Lynn Hilary returning to take her place. Lambe was, however, slated to return during the summer, though no specific date was given.[citation needed]
It was announced late 2014 that Lisa Lambe will be leaving Celtic Woman for a while to work on a solo album.[citation needed] Former Celtic Woman, Lynn Hilary, will again be returning in Lambe’s place. It was later announced that former Celtic Woman Alex Sharpe will be returning for the 10th Anniversary tour along with Méav Ní Mhaolchatha. The current lineup is Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, Lynn Hilary, Alex Sharpe, Mairead Nesbitt, Mairead Carlin, and Susan McFadden, with all but Nesbitt and McFadden serving 2 at a time on a rotating basis for the US tour ending June 2015. The lineup for the fall is McFadden, Carlin, Nesbitt and newest member Éabha McMahon.
When asked how the group members got along, member Lisa Kelly responded,
According to Chloë Agnew, the friendship between the vocalists was the number one question they were asked. She explained:
“I think people are always looking for a ‘Desperate Housewives’ story, that they all hate each other and nobody actually gets along. It’s all for show. And the truth of the matter is, it’s not. The reality is we do all get along. The five of us are like sisters, best friends.”[74]
The original Celtic Woman five performed “Song for the Mira” with multiple Grammy Award winner Anne Murray for her 2007 EMI release “Anne Murray Duets: Friends & Legends.” A “Song of the Mira” performance/interview montage appears on a DVD which was included with “Anne Murray’s Christmas Album,” released in 2008.
Awards and honours
In 2007 Celtic Woman won an EBBA Award.[83] Each year the European Border Breakers Awards (EBBA) recognise the success of ten emerging artists or groups who reached audiences outside their own countries with their first internationally released album in the past year.
Johnny Horton In Concert ~ The Incredibly Rare Live Performances
21 songs, 55 minutes of rare, live Johnny Horton performances from the 1950s and 1960s. All the hits are here, North To Alaska, Battle Of New Orleans, Sink The Bismarck, Johnny Reb, Springtime In Alaska and early classics as well. Enjoy
Johnny Horton Battle Of New Orleans
Johnny Horton – Battle of New Orleans Lyrics
Johnny Horton- Battle of Bull Run
John Paul Jones – Johnny Horton
Johnny Horton – Whispering Pines
Johnny Horton — Cherokee Boogie
Johnny Horton – Honky Tonk Man
JOHNNY HORTON Honky Tonk Man LIVE at the louisiana hayride
Theater Talk: Actor Richard Griffiths of “The History Boys”; Bob Martin of “The Drowsy Chaperone”
Alan Bennett in conversation: part one
Alan Bennett in conversation: part two
Alan Bennett The Lady in The Van Interview
A Chip in the Sugar – Alan Bennett – Talking Heads
Alan Bennett – Sunset Across the Bay (TV Play 1975)
Alan Bennett – Telegram
Alan Bennett & John Fortune: “Men’s Talk”
Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller
Oxbridge Philosophy – Alan Bennett & Jonathan Miller
The Lady In The Van – Alan Bennett Featurette – Starring Maggie Smith – At Cinemas Now
The Lady In The Van Trailer #2 – Starring Maggie Smith – At Cinemas November 13
Maggie Smith
Dame Margaret Natalie Smith, CH DBE (born 28th December 1934) is an English actress. She made her stage debut in 1952 and has had an extensive, varied career in stage, film and television spanning over sixty years. Smith has appeared in over 50 films and is one of Britain’s most recognisable actresses. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1990 New Year Honours for services to the performing arts, and Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to drama.
Dame Maggie Smith’s brilliant career
Beyond the Fringe (Complete)
Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. It played in London’s West End and then on New York’s Broadway in the early 1960s, and is widely regarded as seminal to the rise of satire in 1960s Britain.
Take A Pew – Alan Bennett
Richard Griffiths (1947-2013)
The History Boys – Broadway
Almost complete recording of the original production during its run on Broadway. Not mine but thanks for sharing whoever it was 🙂
Howard Hughes – The Man And The Madness – Documentary – Biography
A documentary on the eccentric billionaire who was a pioneer in both aviation and film production. Unfortunately his obsessive-compulsive behavior and drug abuse made him a mysterious, bizarre recluse in the eyes of the public and the media. Interviews with business associates and newly discovered archival footage shed light on the Hughes enigma.
Local Billionaire Marries Socialite – This Forgotten Day in Houston
Hell’s Angels 1930 Re-Release Trailer
Hell’s Angels – Anjos do Inferno (Completo) Legendado 1930
Hells Angels Premiere
The Story of Howard Hughes – Documentary Films
The Secret History: Howard Hughes, Bizarre Billionaire (1/5)
The Secret History: Howard Hughes, Bizarre Billionaire (2/5)
The Secret History: Howard Hughes, Bizarre Billionaire (3/5)
The Secret History: Howard Hughes, Bizarre Billionaire (4/5)
The Secret History: Howard Hughes, Bizarre Billionaire (5/5)
The Affliction of Howard Hughes: OCD – Aviator – Martin Scorsese – Leonardo DiCaprio
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business tycoon, entrepreneur, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, inventor, filmmaker and philanthropist. During his lifetime, he was known as one of the wealthiest self-made people in the world. As a maverick film tycoon, Hughes gained prominence in Hollywood from the late 1920s, making big-budget and often controversial films like The Racket (1928), Hell’s Angels (1930), Scarface (1932), and The Outlaw (1943).
Hughes’ birthplace is recorded as either Humble or Houston, Texas. The date is also uncertain, though Hughes claimed that his birthday was Christmas Eve. A 1941affidavitbirth certificate of Hughes, signed by his aunt Annette Gano Lummis and Estelle Boughton Sharp, states that he was born on December 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas.[N 1] However, his baptismal record of October 7, 1906, in the parish register of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa, has his birth listed as September 24, 1905, without reference to the place of birth.[N 2]
His parents were Howard R. Hughes, Sr., a successful inventor and businessman from Missouri of English descent,[6] and Allene Stone Gano. His father had patented thetwo-cone roller bit, which allowed rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible places. The senior Hughes made the shrewd and lucrative decision to commercialize the invention by leasing the bits instead of selling them, and founded the Hughes Tool Company in 1909. Hughes’s uncle was the famed novelist, screenwriter, and film director Rupert Hughes.
Hughes demonstrated interest in science and technology at a young age. In particular, he had great engineering aptitude, building Houston’s first “wireless” radiotransmitter at age 11.[7] He went on to be one of the first licensed ham radio operators in Houston, having the assigned callsign W5CY (originally 5CY).[8] At 12, Hughes was photographed in the local newspaper, identified as being the first boy in Houston to have a “motorized” bicycle, which he had built from parts from his father’s steam engine.[9] He was an indifferent student, with a liking for mathematics, flying, and mechanics. He took his first flying lesson at 14, and later attended math and aeronautical engineering courses at Caltech.[7][9]
Allene Hughes died in March 1922 from complications of an ectopic pregnancy. Howard Hughes, Sr., died of a heart attack in 1924. Their deaths apparently inspired Hughes to include the creation of a medical research laboratory in the will that he signed in 1925 at age 19. Howard Sr.’s will had not been updated since Allene’s death, and Hughes inherited 75 percent of the family fortune.[10] On his 19th birthday, Hughes was declared an emancipated minor, enabling him to take full control of his life.[11]
Hughes was an excellent and enthusiastic golfer from a young age, often scoring near par figures, and held a handicap of three during his twenties. He played frequently with top players, including Gene Sarazen. Hughes rarely played competitively, and gradually gave up his interest in the sport to pursue other interests.[12]
Hughes withdrew from Rice University shortly after his father’s death. On June 1, 1925, he married Ella Botts Rice, daughter of David Rice and Martha Lawson Botts of Houston. They moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself as a filmmaker.
Hughes enjoyed a highly successful business career beyond engineering, aviation, and filmmaking, though many of his career endeavors involved varying entrepreneurial roles. The Summa Corporation was the name adopted for the business interests of Howard Hughes after he sold the tool division of Hughes Tool Company in 1972. The company serves as the principal holding company for Hughes’s business ventures and investments. It is primarily involved in aerospace and defense, electronics, mass media, manufacturing, and hospitality industries, but has maintained a strong presence in a wide variety of industries including real estate, petroleum drilling and oilfield services, consulting, entertainment, and mining. Much of his fortune was later used for philanthropic causes, notably towards health care and medical research.
Entertainment
Hughes entered the entertainment industry after dropping out of Rice University and moving to Los Angeles. His first two films, Everybody’s Acting (1927) and Two Arabian Knights (1928), were financial successes, the latter winning the first Academy Award for Best Director of a comedy picture.
Hughes spent $3.8 million to make the flying film Hell’s Angels (1930). It earned nearly $8 million, about double the production and advertising costs. Hell’s Angels received one Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
He produced another hit, Scarface (1932), a production delayed by censors’ concern over its violence.
The Outlaw (1943) was completed in 1941 and featured Jane Russell. It also received considerable attention from industry censors, this time owing to Russell’s revealing costumes. Hughes designed a special bra for his leading lady, although Russell decided against wearing it.
For a period of time in the 1940s to late 1950s, Hughes Tool Company ventured into the film and media industry where it then owned the RKO companies, including: RKO Pictures; RKO Studios; RKO Theatres, a chain of movie theatres; the RKO Radio Network, a network of radio stations.
In 1948, Hughes gained control of RKO, a struggling major Hollywood studio, by acquiring 25 percent of the outstanding stock from Floyd Odlum‘s Atlas Corporation. Within weeks of taking control, he dismissed three-quarters of the work force, and production was shut down for six months in 1949 while he undertook the investigation of the politics of all remaining studio employees. Completed pictures would be sent back for re-shooting if he felt that his star (especially female) was not properly presented, or if a film’s anti-communist politics were not sufficiently clear. In 1952, an abortive sale to a Chicago-based group with no experience in the industry disrupted studio operations even further.
Hughes sold the RKO theaters in 1953 as settlement of the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.antitrust case. With the sale of the profitable theaters, the shaky status of the film studio became increasingly apparent. A steady stream of lawsuits from RKO’s minority shareholders became an increasing nuisance, charging him with financial misconduct and corporate mismanagement, especially because Hughes wanted to focus on his aircraft-manufacturing and TWA holdings during the Korean War years. Eager to be rid of the distraction, Hughes offered to buy out all other stockholders.
He had gained near-total control of RKO by the end of 1954, at a cost of nearly $24 million, becoming the closest thing to a sole owner of a Hollywood studio seen in three decades. Six months later, Hughes sold the studio to the General Tire and Rubber Company for $25 million. Hughes retained the rights to pictures that he had personally produced, including those made at RKO. He also retained Jane Russell’s contract. For Howard Hughes, this was the virtual end of his 25-year involvement in motion pictures; his reputation as a financial wizard emerged unscathed. He reportedly walked away from RKO having made $6.5 million in personal profit.[13]
General Tire was interested mainly in exploiting the value of the RKO library for television programming, though it made some attempts to continue producing films. After a year and a half of mixed success, General Tire shut down film production at RKO for good at the end of January 1957. The studio lots in Hollywood and Culver City were sold to Desilu Productions later that year for $6.15 million.
Beyond extending his business prowess in the manufacturing, aviation, entertainment, and hospitality industries, Hughes was a successful real estate investor. Hughes was deeply involved in the American real estate industry where he amassed vast holdings of undeveloped land both in Las Vegas and in the desert surrounding the city that had gone unused during his lifetime. In 1968, the Hughes Tool Companypurchased the North Las Vegas Air Terminal.
Originally known as Summa Corporation, The Howard Hughes Corporation was formed in 1972 when the oil tools business of Hughes Tool Company, then owned by Howard Hughes, Jr., was floated on the New York Stock Exchange under the Hughes Tool name. This forced the remaining businesses of the “original” Hughes Tool to adopt a new corporate name Summa. The name “Summa”, Latin for “highest”, was adopted without the approval of Hughes himself, who preferred to keep his own name on the business and suggested HRH Properties (for Hughes Resorts and Hotels, and also his own initials).
Initially staying in the Desert Inn, Hughes refused to vacate his room and instead decided to purchase the entire hotel. Hughes extended his financial empire to include Las Vegas real estate, hotels and media outlets, spending an estimated $300 million and using his considerable powers to take-over many of the well known hotels, especially the organized crime connected venues and he quickly became one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He was instrumental in changing the image of Las Vegas from its Wild West roots into a more refined cosmopolitan city.
Technology
Another portion of Hughes’s business interests lies in aviation, airlines, and the aerospace and defense industries. Hughes was a lifelong aircraft enthusiast and pilot. At Rogers Airport in Los Angeles, he learned to fly from pioneer aviators, including Moye Stephens. He set many world records and commissioned the construction of custom aircraft for himself while heading Hughes Aircraft at the airport in Glendale. Operating from there, the most technologically important aircraft he commissioned was the Hughes H-1 Racer. On September 13, 1935, Hughes, flying the H-1, set the landplane airspeed record of 352 mph (566 km/h) over his test course near Santa Ana, California (Giuseppe Motta reached 362 mph in 1929 and George Stainforth reached 407.5 mph in 1931, both in seaplanes). This was the last time in history that the world airspeed record was set in an aircraft built by a private individual. A year and a half later, on January 19, 1937, flying the same H-1 Racer fitted with longer wings, Hughes set a new transcontinental airspeed record by flying non-stop from Los Angeles to Newark in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds (beating his own previous record of 9 hours, 27 minutes). His average ground speed over the flight was 322 mph (518 km/h).[14]
The H-1 Racer featured a number of design innovations: it had retractable landing gear (as Boeing Monomail had five years before) and all rivets and joints set flush into the body of the aircraft to reduce drag. The H-1 Racer is thought to have influenced the design of a number of World War II fighters such as the Mitsubishi Zero, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 and the F8F Bearcat;[15] although that has never been reliably confirmed. The H-1 Racer was donated to the Smithsonian in 1975 and is on display at the National Air and Space Museum.
Round-the-world flight
On July 14, 1938, Hughes set another record by completing a flight around the world in just 91 hours (3 days, 19 hours, 17 minutes), beating the previous record set in 1933 by Wiley Post in a single engineLockheed Vega by almost four days. Hughes returned home ahead of photographs of his flight. Taking off from New York City, Hughes continued to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Fairbanks, Minneapolis, then returning to New York City. For this flight he flew a Lockheed 14 Super Electra (NX18973, a twin-engine transport with a four-man crew) fitted with the latest radio and navigational equipment. Hughes wanted the flight to be a triumph of American aviation technology, illustrating that safe, long-distance air travel was possible. While he had previously been relatively obscure despite his wealth, being better known for dating Katharine Hepburn, New York City now gave Hughes a ticker-tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes.[16] In 1938, the William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas—known at the time as Houston Municipal Airport—was renamed after Hughes, but the name was changed back after people objected to naming the airport after a living person.
The Hughes D-2 was conceived in 1939 as a bomber with five crew members, powered by 42-cylinder Wright R-2160 Tornado engines. In the end it appeared as two-seat fighter-reconnaissance aircraft designated the D-2A, powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-2800-49 engines. The aircraft was constructed using the Duramold process. The prototype was brought to Harper’s Dry Lake California in great secrecy in 1943 and first flew on June 20 of that year.[18] Acting on a recommendation of the president’s son, Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, who had become friends with Hughes, in September 1943 the USAAF ordered 100 of a reconnaissance development of the D-2, known as the F-11. Hughes then attempted to get the military to pay for the development of the D-2. In November 1944, the hangar containing the D-2A was reportedly hit by lightning and the aircraft was destroyed. The D-2 design was abandoned, but led to the extremely controversial Hughes XF-11. The XF-11 was a large all-metal, two-seat reconnaissance aircraft, powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-4360-31 engines, each driving a set of contra-rotating propellers. Only the two prototypes were completed; the second one with a single propeller per side.[19]
Near-fatal crash of the Sikorsky S-43
In the spring of 1943 Hughes spent nearly a month in Las Vegas, test flying his Sikorsky S-43 amphibian aircraft, practicing touch-and-go landings on Lake Mead in preparation for flying the H-4 Hercules. The weather conditions at the lake during the day were ideal and he enjoyed Las Vegas at night. On May 17, 1943, Hughes flew the Sikorsky from California carrying two CAA aviation inspectors, two of his employees and actress Ava Gardner. Hughes dropped Gardner off in Las Vegas and proceeded to Lake Mead to conduct qualifying tests in the S-43. The test flight did not go well. The Sikorsky crashed, killing CAA inspector Ceco Cline and Hughes employee Richard Felt. Hughes suffered a severe gash on the top of his head when he hit the upper control panel and had to be rescued by one of the others on board.[20] Hughes paid divers $100,000 to raise the aircraft and later spent more than $500,000 restoring the aircraft.[21]
Hughes was involved in a near-fatal aircraft accident on July 7, 1946, while performing the first flight of the prototype U.S. Army Air Forcesreconnaissance aircraft, the XF-11, near Hughes airfield at Culver City, California. An oil leak caused one of the contra-rotating propellers to reverse pitch, causing the aircraft to yaw sharply and lose altitude rapidly. Hughes tried to save the craft by landing it at the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but just seconds before reaching the course, the XF-11 started to drop dramatically and crashed in the Beverly Hills neighborhood surrounding the country club.[22][23]
When the XF-11 finally came to a halt after destroying three houses, the fuel tanks exploded, setting fire to the aircraft and a nearby home at 808 North Whittier Drive, owned by Lt Col. Charles E. Meyer.[24] Hughes managed to pull himself out of the flaming wreckage but lay beside the aircraft until he was rescued by MarineMaster Sgt. William L. Durkin, who happened to be in the area visiting friends.[25] Hughes sustained significant injuries in the crash, including a crushed collar bone, multiple cracked ribs,[26] crushed chest with collapsed left lung, shifting his heart to the right side of the chest cavity, and numerous third-degree burns. An oft-told story said that Hughes sent a check to the Marine weekly for the remainder of his life as a sign of gratitude. However, Durkin’s daughter denied that he took any money for the rescue.[27]
Despite his physical injuries, Hughes was proud that his mind was still working. As he lay in his hospital bed, he decided that he did not like the bed’s design. He called in plant engineers to design a customized bed, equipped with hot and cold running water, built in six sections, and operated by 30 electric motors, with push-button adjustments.[28] The hospital bed was designed by Hughes specifically to alleviate the pain caused by moving with severe burn injuries. Despite the fact that he never had the chance to use the bed that he designed, Hughes’s bed served as a prototype for the modern hospital bed.[29] Hughes’s doctors considered his recovery almost miraculous. Hughes, however, believed that neither miracle nor modern medicine contributed to his recovery. Instead he vigorously asserted that the natural life-giving properties of fresh squeezed orange juice were responsible. (He only drank orange juice he had personally witnessed being freshly squeezed.) [29]
Many[who?] attribute his long-term dependence on opiates to his use of codeine as a painkiller during his convalescence.[30] The trademark mustache he wore afterward was used to hide a scar on his upper lip resulting from the accident.[31]
The War Production Board (not the military) originally contracted with Henry Kaiser and Hughes to produce the gigantic HK-1 Hercules flying boat for use during World War II to transport troops and equipment across the Atlantic as an alternative to seagoing troop transport ships that were vulnerable to German U-boats. The project was opposed by the military services, thinking it would siphon resources from higher priority programs, but was advocated by Hughes’s powerful allies in Washington, D.C. After disputes, Kaiser withdrew from the project and Hughes elected to continue it as the H-4 Hercules. However, the aircraft was not completed until after the end of World War II.[32][33]
The Hercules was the world’s largest flying boat, the largest aircraft made from wood,[34] and, at 319 feet 11 inches (97.51 m), had the longest wingspan of any aircraft (the next largest wingspan was about 310 ft (94 m)). (The Hercules is no longer the longest or heaviest aircraft ever built; both of those titles are currently held by the Antonov An-225 Mriya.)
The Hercules flew only once for one mile (1.6 km), and 70 feet (21 m) above the water, with Hughes at the controls, on November 2, 1947.[35]
The Hercules was nicknamed the “Spruce Goose” by critics, but was actually made largely from birch (not spruce), rather than of aluminum, because the contract required that Hughes build the aircraft of non-strategic materials. It was built in Hughes’s Westchester, California facility. In 1947, Howard Hughes was summoned to testify before theSenate War Investigating Committee to explain why the H-4 development had been so troubled, and why the F-11 had resulted in only two prototypes after $22 million spent. General Elliott Roosevelt and numerous other USAAF officers were also called to testify in hearings that transfixed the nation during August and again in November 1947. In a hotly disputed testimony over TWA‘s route awards and malfeasance in the defense acquisition process, Hughes turned the tables on his main interlocutor, Maine SenatorOwen Brewster, and the hearings were widely interpreted as a Hughes victory. After display at the Long Beach, California harbor, the Hercules was moved to McMinnville, Oregon, where it is now part of the Evergreen Aviation Museum.[36]
Hughes Aircraft Company, a division of Hughes Tool Company, was originally founded by Hughes in 1932, in a rented corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, California, to build the H-1 racer. During and after World War II, Hughes fashioned his company into a major defense contractor. The Hughes Helicopters division started in 1947 when helicopter manufacturer Kellett sold their latest design to Hughes for production. The company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor manufacturing numerous technology related products that include spacecraft vehicles, military aircraft, radar systems, electro-optical systems, the first working laser, aircraft computer systems, missile systems, ion-propulsion engines (for space travel), commercial satellites, and other electronics systems.
In 1948, Hughes created a new division of the company, the Hughes Aerospace Group. The Hughes Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division were later spun off in 1948 to form their own divisions and ultimately became the Hughes Space and Communications Company in 1961. In 1953, Howard Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the newly formed Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a tax-exempt charitable organization. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for $5.2 billion. In 1997, General Motors sold Hughes Aircraft to Raytheon and in 2000, sold Hughes Space & Communications to Boeing. A combination of Boeing, GM and Raytheon acquired the Hughes Research Laboratories, where it focused on advanced developments in microelectronics, information & systems sciences, materials, sensors, and photonics; their workspace spans from basic research to product delivery. It has particularly emphasized capabilities in high performance integrated circuits, high power lasers, antennas, networking, and smart materials.
Airlines
In 1939, at the urging of Jack Frye, president of Trans World Airlines (TWA), Hughes quietly purchased a majority share of TWA stock for nearly $7 million and took control of the airline. Upon assuming ownership, Hughes was prohibited by federal law from building his own aircraft. Seeking an aircraft that would perform better than TWA’s fleet ofBoeing 307 Stratoliners, Hughes and Frye approached Boeing’s competitor, Lockheed. Hughes had a good relationship with Lockheed since they had built the aircraft he used in his record flight around the world in 1938. Lockheed agreed to Hughes and Frye’s request that the new aircraft be built in secrecy. The result was the revolutionaryConstellation and TWA purchased the first 40 of the new airliners off the production line.
In 1956, Hughes placed an order for 63 Convair 880s for TWA at a cost of $400 million. Although Hughes was extremely wealthy at this time, outside creditors demanded that Hughes relinquish control of TWA in return for providing the money. In 1960, Hughes was ultimately forced out of TWA, although he owned 78% of the company and battled to regain control.
Before Hughes’ removal, the TWA jet financing issue precipitated the end of Hughes’ relationship with Noah Dietrich. Dietrich claimed Hughes developed a plan by which Hughes Tool Company profits would be inflated to sell the company for a windfall that would pay the bills for the 880s. Dietrich agreed to go to Texas to implement the plan on the condition that Hughes agreed to a capital gains arrangement he had long promised Dietrich. When Hughes balked, Dietrich resigned immediately. “Noah”, Dietrich quoted Hughes as replying, “I cannot exist without you!” Dietrich stood firm and eventually had to sue to retrieve personal possessions from his office after Hughes ordered it locked.
In 1966, a U.S. federal court forced Hughes to sell his TWA shares because of concerns over conflict of interest between his ownership of both TWA and Hughes Aircraft. The sale of his TWA shares netted him a profit of $547 million.
In 1970, Hughes went back into the airline business, buying San Francisco-based Air West and renaming it Hughes Airwest. Air West had been formed in 1968 by the merger of Bonanza Air Lines, Pacific Air Linesand West Coast Airlines, all of which operated in the western U.S. By the late 1970s, Hughes Airwest operated an all-jet fleet comprised of Boeing 727-200, Douglas DC-9-10, and McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30jetliners serving an extensive route network in the western U.S. with flights to Mexico and western Canada as well.[37] By 1980, the airline’s route system reached as far east as Houston Hobby Airport and Milwaukee with a total of forty-two (42) destinations being served.[38] Hughes Airwest was then acquired by and merged into Republic Airlines (1979–1986) in late 1980. Republic was subsequently acquired by and merged intoNorthwest Airlines which in turn was eventually merged into Delta Air Lines.
Personal life
In 1929 Hughes’ wife, Ella, returned to Houston and filed for divorce. Hughes dated many famous women, including Billie Dove, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers andGene Tierney. He also proposed to Joan Fontaine several times, according to her autobiography No Bed of Roses. Jean Harlow accompanied him to the premiere of Hell’s Angels, but Noah Dietrich wrote many years later that the relationship was strictly professional, as Hughes apparently personally disliked Harlow. In his 1971 book, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, Dietrich said that Hughes genuinely liked and respected Jane Russell, but never sought romantic involvement with her. According to Russell’s autobiography, however, Hughes once tried to bed her after a party. Russell (who was married at the time) refused him, and Hughes promised it would never happen again. The two maintained a professional and private friendship for many years. Hughes remained good friends with Tierney who, after his failed attempts to seduce her, was quoted as saying “I don’t think Howard could love anything that did not have a motor in it.” Later, when Tierney’s daughter Daria was born deaf and blind and with a severe learning disability, because of Tierney’s being exposed to rubella during her pregnancy, Hughes saw to it that Daria received the best medical care and paid all expenses.[39]
In 1933, Hughes purchased unseen the Rover, a luxury steam yacht previously owned by British shipping magnate Lord Inchcape. “I have never seen the Rover but bought it on the blue prints, photographs and the reports of Lloyd’s surveyors. My experience is that the English are the most honest race in the world.”[40] Hughes renamed the yacht Southern Cross and later sold her to Swedish entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren.[41]
On July 11, 1936, Hughes struck and killed a pedestrian named Gabriel S. Meyer with his car, at the corner of 3rd Street and Lorraine in Los Angeles.[42] Hughes was certified as sober at the hospital he was taken to after the accident, but an attending doctor made a note that Hughes had been drinking. A witness to the accident told police that Hughes was driving erratically and too fast, and that Meyer had been standing in the safety zone of a streetcar stop. Hughes was booked on suspicion of negligent homicide and held overnight in jail until his attorney, Neil McCarthy, obtained a writ of habeas corpus for his release pending a coroner’s inquest.[43][44] By the time of the coroner’s inquiry, however, the witness had changed his story and claimed that Meyer had moved directly in front of Hughes’s car. Nancy Bayly (Watts), who was in the car with Hughes at the time of the accident, corroborates this version. On July 16, 1936, Hughes was held blameless by a coroner’s jury at the inquest into Meyer’s death.[45] Hughes told reporters outside the inquiry, “I was driving slowly and a man stepped out of the darkness in front of me.”
On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters. The couple met in the 1940s, before Peters became a film actress.[46] They had a highly publicized romance in 1947 and there was talk of marriage, but she said she could not combine it with her career.[47] Some later claimed that Peters was “the only woman [Hughes] ever loved”,[48] and he reportedly had his security officers follow her everywhere even when they were not in a relationship. Such reports were confirmed by actor Max Showalter, who became a close friend of Peters while shooting Niagara (1953).[49] Showalter told in an interview that because he frequently met with Peters, Hughes’ men threatened to ruin his career if he did not leave her alone.[49]
In 1953, Hughes launched the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Miami, Florida, and currently located in Chevy Chase, Maryland, formed with the express goal of basic biomedical research, including trying to understand, in Hughes’ words, the “genesis of life itself”, due to his lifelong interest in science and technology. Hughes’ first will, which he signed in 1925 at the age of 19, stipulated that a portion of his estate should be used to create a medical institute bearing his name.[50] When a major battle with the IRS loomed ahead, Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a for-profit entity of a fully tax-exempt charity. Hughes’ internist, Verne Mason, who treated Hughes after his 1946 aircraft crash, was chairman of the institute’s medical advisory committee.[51] The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s new board of trustees sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for $5.2 billion, allowing the institute to grow dramatically.
The deal was the topic of a protracted legal battle between Hughes and the Internal Revenue Service, which Hughes ultimately won. After his death in 1976, many thought that the balance of Hughes’ estate would go to the institute, although it was ultimately divided among his cousins and other heirs, given the lack of a will to the contrary. The HHMI was the 4th largest private organization as of 2007 and the largest devoted to biological and medical research, with an endowment of $16.3 billion as of June 2007.[52]
Nixon scandal
Shortly before the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon was alarmed when it was revealed that his brother, Donald, received a $205,000 loan from Hughes. It has long been speculated[by whom?] that Nixon’s drive to learn what the Democrats were planning in 1972 was based in part on his belief that the Democrats knew about a later bribe that his friend Bebe Rebozo had received from Hughes after Nixon took office.[citation needed]
In late 1971, Donald Nixon was collecting intelligence for his brother in preparation for the upcoming presidential election. One of Donald’s sources was John H. Meier, a former business adviser of Hughes who had also worked with Democratic National Committee Chair Larry O’Brien.[53]
Meier, in collaboration with former Vice President of the United States Hubert Humphrey and others, wanted to feed misinformation to the Nixon campaign. Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because Larry O’Brien had a great deal of information on Richard Nixon’s illicit dealings with Howard Hughes that had never been released;[54][55] O’Brien didn’t actually have any such information, but Meier wanted Nixon to think he did. Donald told his brother that O’Brien was in possession of damaging Hughes information that could destroy his campaign.[56] Terry Lenzner, who was the chief investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee, speculates that it was Nixon’s desire to know what O’Brien knew about Nixon’s dealings with Hughes that may have partially motivated the Watergate break-in.[57]
In 1972, Hughes was approached by the CIA to help secretly recover SovietsubmarineK-129, which had sunk near Hawaii four years earlier. Thus, the special-purpose salvage vessel Glomar Explorer was born. Hughes’ involvement provided the CIA with a plausible cover story, having to do with civilian marine research at extreme depths and the mining of undersea manganese nodules. In the summer of 1974, Glomar Explorer attempted to raise the Soviet vessel.[58]
However, during the recovery a mechanical failure in the ship’s grapple caused half of the submarine to break off and fall to the ocean floor. This section is believed to have held many of the most sought-after items, including its code book and nuclear missiles. Two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and some cryptographic machines were recovered, along with the bodies of six Soviet submariners who were subsequently given formal burial at sea in a filmed ceremony. The operation, known as Project Azorian (but incorrectly referred to by the press as Project Jennifer), became public in February 1975 when burglars obtained secret documents from Hughes’ headquarters in June 1974.[59] Though he lent his name to the operation, Hughes and his companies had no actual involvement in the project. The Glomar Explorer was eventually acquired byTransocean Inc., an offshore oil and gas drilling rig company.
Obsessive–compulsive disorder and physical decline[edit]
As early as the 1930s, Hughes displayed signs of mental illness, primarily obsessive-compulsive disorder. Close friends reported that he was obsessed with the size of peas, one of his favorite foods, and used a special fork to sort them by size.
While directing The Outlaw, Hughes became fixated on a small flaw in one of Jane Russell‘s blouses, claiming that the fabric bunched up along a seam and gave the appearance of two nipples on each breast. He reportedly wrote a detailed memorandum to the crew on how to fix the problem. Richard Fleischer, who directed His Kind of Woman with Hughes as executive producer, wrote at length in his autobiography about the difficulty of dealing with the tycoon. In his book, Just Tell Me When to Cry, Fleischer explained that Hughes was fixated on trivial details and was alternately indecisive and obstinate. He also revealed that Hughes’s unpredictable mood swings made him wonder if the film would ever be completed.
In 1947, after the U.S. Government rejected his massive H-4 Hercules, Hughes who had suffered a near-fatal aircraft crash in 1946 told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio’s darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk, later urinating in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes that he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides giving them explicit instructions not to look at him nor speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continually watching movies. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, he had not bathed nor cut his hair and nails for weeks although this may have been due to allodynia (pain response to stimuli that would normally not cause pain).[30]
After the screening room incident, Hughes moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he also rented rooms for his aides, his wife, and numerous girlfriends. He would sit naked in his bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over his genitals, watching movies. This may have been because Hughes found the touch of clothing painful due to the allodynia. He probably watched movies constantly to distract him from his pain—a common practice among patients with intractable pain, especially those who do not receive adequate treatment.[30] In one year, Hughes spent an estimated $11 million at the hotel.
Hughes began purchasing all restaurant chains and four star hotels that had been founded within the state of Texas. This included, if for only a short period, many unknown franchises currently out of business. He placed ownership of the restaurants with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and all licenses were resold shortly after.
Another time, he became obsessed with the 1968 film Ice Station Zebra, and had it run on a continuous loop in his home. According to his aides, he watched it 150 times.[60][61][62]
Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects, to insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains or other imperfections on people’s clothes and demand that they take care of them. Once one of the most visible men in America, Hughes ultimately vanished from public view—though tabloids continued to follow rumors of his behavior and whereabouts. He was reported to be terminally ill, mentally unstable, or even dead.
Injuries from numerous aircraft crashes caused Hughes to spend much of his later life in pain, and he eventually became addicted to codeine, which he injected intramuscularly.[30] Hughes had his hair cut and nails trimmed only once a year, likely due to the pain caused by the RSD/CRPS, which was caused by the plane crashes.[30]
Hughes had this 1954 Chrysler New Yorker equipped with an aircraft-grade air filtration system that took up the entire trunk
Las Vegas baron and recluse
The wealthy and aging Howard Hughes, accompanied by his entourage of personal aides, began moving from one hotel to another, always taking up residence in the top floor penthouse. In the last ten years of his life, 1966 to 1976, Hughes lived in hotels in many cities—including Beverly Hills, Boston, Las Vegas, Nassau, Freeport, Vancouver,[63]London, Managua, and Acapulco.
On November 24, 1966 (Thanksgiving Day),[64] Hughes arrived in Las Vegas by railroad car and moved into the Desert Inn. Because he refused to leave the hotel, and to avoid further conflicts with the owners, Hughes bought the Desert Inn in early 1967. The hotel’s eighth floor became the nerve center of Hughes’ empire and the ninth-floor penthouse became his personal residence. Between 1966 and 1968, he bought several other hotel-casinos—including the Castaways, New Frontier, the Landmark Hotel and Casino, and the Sands.[65] He bought the small Silver Slipper casino just so he could have its trademark neon silver slipper moved. Visible from Hughes’ bedroom, it apparently had kept him up at night.
After Hughes left the Desert Inn, hotel employees discovered his drapes had not been opened in the nine years he lived there, and had rotted through.[66] An unusual incident marked an earlier Hughes connection to Las Vegas: during his 1954 engagement at the Last Frontier hotel in Las Vegas, flamboyant entertainer Liberace mistook Howard Hughes for his lighting director, instructing him to instantly bring up a blue light should he start to play Clair de lune. Hughes nodded in compliance—but the hotel’s entertainment director arrived and introduced Hughes to Liberace.[67]
Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas to something more glamorous. As Hughes wrote in a memo to an aide, “I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car.” Hughes bought several local television stations (including KLAS-TV).
Hughes’ considerable business holdings were overseen by a small panel unofficially dubbed “The Mormon Mafia” because of the many Latter-day Saints on the committee, led by Frank William Gay.[68] In addition to supervising day-to-day business operations and Hughes’ health, they also went to great pains to satisfy Hughes’ every whim. Hughes once became fond of Baskin-Robbins‘ banana nut ice cream, so his aides sought to secure a bulk shipment for him—only to discover that Baskin-Robbins had discontinued the flavor. They put in a request for the smallest amount the company could provide for a special order, 200 gallons (750 L), and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only chocolate marshmallow ice cream. The Desert Inn ended up distributing free banana nut ice cream to casino customers for a year.[69] In a 1996 interview, ex–Howard Hughes communicator Robert Maheu said, “There is a rumor that there is still some banana nut ice cream left in the freezer. It is most likely true.”
As an owner of several major Las Vegas businesses, Hughes wielded much political and economic influence in Nevada and elsewhere. During the 1960s and early 1970s, he disapproved of underground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. Hughes was concerned about the risk from residual nuclear radiation, and attempted to halt the tests. When the tests finally went through despite Hughes’ efforts, the detonations were powerful enough that the entire hotel where he was staying trembled with the shock waves.[70] In two separate, last-ditch maneuvers, Hughes instructed his representatives to offer million-dollar bribes to both presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.[71]
In 1970, Jean Peters filed for divorce. The two had not lived together for many years. Peters requested a lifetime alimony payment of $70,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, and waived all claims to Hughes’ estate. Hughes offered her a settlement of over a million dollars, but she declined it. Hughes did not insist on a confidentiality agreement from Peters as a condition of the divorce. Aides reported that Hughes never spoke ill of her. She refused to discuss her life with Hughes and declined several lucrative offers from publishers and biographers. Peters would state only that she had not seen Hughes for several years before their divorce and had only dealt with him by phone.
Hughes was living in the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Managua in Nicaragua, seeking privacy and security,[72] when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake damaged Managua in December 1972. As a precaution, Hughes moved to the Nicaraguan National Palace and stayed there as a guest of Anastasio Somoza Debayle before leaving for Florida on a private jet the following day.[73] He subsequently moved into the Penthouse at the Xanadu Princess Resort on Grand Bahama Island, which he had recently purchased. He lived almost exclusively in the penthouse of the Xanadu Beach Resort & Marina for the last four years of his life. Hughes had spent a total of $300 million on his many properties in Las Vegas.[64]
Memoir hoax
In 1972, author Clifford Irving caused a media sensation when he claimed he had co-written an authorized autobiography of Hughes. Hughes was so reclusive that he did not immediately publicly refute Irving’s statement, leading many to believe the Irving book was genuine. However, before the book’s publication Hughes finally denounced Irving in a teleconference and the entire project was eventually exposed as a hoax.[74] Irving was later convicted of fraud and spent 17 months in prison. In 1974, the Orson Welles film F for Fake included a section on the Hughes biography hoax. In 1977, The Hoax by Clifford Irving was published in Great Britain, telling his story of these events. The 2007 film The Hoax, starring Richard Gere, is also based on these events.[75]
Hughes was reported to have died on April 5, 1976, at 1:27 p.m. on board an aircraft owned by Robert Graf and piloted by Jeff Abrams. He was en route from his penthouse at the Acapulco Fairmont Princess Hotel in Mexico to the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. Other accounts indicate that he died in the flight from Freeport, Grand Bahama, to Houston.[76]
After receiving a call, his senior counsel, Frank P. Morse, ordered his staff to get his body on a plane and return him to the United States. It was common that foreign countries would hold corpse as ransom so that an estate could not be settled. Morse ordered the pilots to announce Hughes’ death once they crossed U.S. territory. (Morse, 2015)
His reclusive activities (and possibly his drug use) made him practically unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long—his tall 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 pounds (41 kg), and the FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body.[77] Howard Hughes’ alias, John T. Conover, was used when his body arrived at a morgue in Houston on the day of his death. There, his body was received by Dr. Jack Titus.[78]
A subsequent autopsy recorded kidney failure as the cause of death.[79] Hughes was in extremely poor physical condition at the time of his death. He suffered frommalnutrition. While his kidneys were damaged, his other internal organs, including his brain, were deemed perfectly healthy.[30]X-rays revealed five broken-off hypodermic needles in the flesh of his arms.[30] To inject codeine into his muscles, Hughes had used glass syringes with metal needles that easily became detached.[30]
Hughes is buried in the Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas, next to his parents.[80]
The red brick house where Hughes lived as a teenager at 3921 Yoakum St., Houston today serves as the headquarters of the Theology Department of the University of St. Thomas.
Estate
Approximately three weeks after Hughes’ death, a handwritten will was found on the desk of an official of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. The so-called “Mormon Will” gave $1.56 billion to various charitable organizations (including $625 million to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute); nearly $470 million to the upper management in Hughes’ companies and to his aides; $156 million to first cousin William Lummis; and $156 million split equally between his two ex-wives Ella Rice and Jean Peters.
Hughes left his entire estate, in his last will, and according to his senior counsel (Frank P. Morse) to the Hughes Medical Institute as he had no connection to family and was seriously ill. This is contrary to the many wills that have surfaced after his death. The original will, that included payments to aides, never surfaced and was apparently in a home surrounding the Desert Inn Golf Course, belonging to the mother of an assistant. He had no desire to leave any money to family, aides, churches, including William Gay and Frank Morse (Morse, 1976). Hughes was not Mormon and had no reason to leave his estate to that church. Frank P. Morse is still the attorney of record for Hughes. Gay has devoted his life to the Mormon Church. (Morse, 2015)
A further $156 million was endowed to a gas-station owner named Melvin Dummar, who told reporters that late one evening in December 1967, he found a disheveled and dirty man lying along U.S. Highway 95, 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas. The man asked for a ride to Las Vegas. Dropping him off at the Sands Hotel, Dummar said the man told him he was Hughes. Dummar then claimed that days after Hughes’ death, a “mysterious man” appeared at his gas station, leaving an envelope containing the will on his desk. Unsure if the will was genuine, and unsure of what to do, Dummar left the will at the LDS Church office. In June 1978, after a seven-month trial, a Nevada court rejected the Mormon Will as a forgery, and declared that Hughes had died intestate. Jonathan Demme‘s film Melvin and Howard, written by Bo Goldman and starringJason Robards and Paul Le Mat, was based on Dummar’s story.
Hughes’ $2.5 billion estate was eventually split in 1983 among 22 cousins, including William Lummis, who serves as a trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Hughes Aircraft was owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which sold it to General Motors in 1985 for $5.2 billion. The court rejected suits by the states of California and Texas claiming they were owed inheritance tax. In 1984, Hughes’ estate paid an undisclosed amount to Terry Moore, who claimed she and Hughes had secretly married on a yacht in international waters off Mexicoin 1949 and never divorced. Moore never produced proof of a marriage, but her book, The Beauty and the Billionaire, became a bestseller.
Willard Whyte, a billionaire from the 1971 James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, is based on Howard Hughes. Hughes, a friend of producer Albert Broccoli, let his hotel and casino be used in the filming.
“Howard Hughes Documentary”, broadcast in 1992 as an episode of the Time Machine documentary series, was introduced by Peter Graves, later released by A&E Home Video.[82]
Before The Aviator (2004), there were several attempts to create a biopic based on the life of Hughes. For years, director-actor Warren Beatty wanted to play Hughes and direct a big-screen film of the mogul. It was to be released alongside Beatty’s film Reds, but owing to the lack of the right script, the project was abandoned. However, in 2015, Beatty will play as Hughes with an ensemble cast in Untitled Warren Beatty project in which he also directed. Set during the later part of Hughes’s life, the film is about a love affair between a younger woman and the reclusive billionaire.
The Aviator (2004), directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and winning five, the acclaimed film focuses primarily on Hughes’ achievements in aviation and in the movies and on the increasing handicaps imposed on him by his obsessive–compulsive behavior, and ends shortly after the successful flight of the Hercules in 1947.
Howard Hughes: The Real Aviator documentary was broadcast in 2004, and went on to win the Grand Festival Award for Best Documentary at the 2004 Berkeley Video & Film Festival.[83]
The American Aviator: The Howard Hughes Story was broadcast in 2006 on the Biography Channel. It was later released to home media as a DVD with a copy of the full-length film The Outlaw starring Jane Russell.[84]
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), as a plot-related prequel to Iron Man 2 (2010), in which Howard Stark (played by Dominic Cooper), father of Tony Stark (Iron Man), showed his inventions of future technology, clearly picturing Hughes’ persona and enthusiasm. His subsequent appearances in the TV series Marvel’s Agent Carter further this persona, as well as depicting him as sharing the real Hughes’ reputation as a womanizer. Stan Lee has noted that Tony, who shared several of these traits himself, was based on Hughes.[85]
Television
In The Simpsons episode “$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)“, Mr. Burns refuses to leave his room after the opening of his casino and develops a paranoid obsession with germs and cleanliness; his hair and nails become unkempt, all of which parody Hughes’ later life. He also makes a small model airplane called the Spruce Moose (a reference to Hughes’ Spruce Goose), which he believes is a real, flyable plane.
In the Beverly Hillbillies episode, The Clampett-Hewes Empire, Mr. Drysdale gets enthusiastic when he hears the news that Jed Clampett is going into the airport business with “Howard Hughes” and does everything he can to make “Mr. Hughes” as welcome as possible (even putting together a small girl chorus singing “We Love You Howard Hughes”)…until he discovers to his chagrin the “Howard Hughes” Jed Clampett is partnering with is not the famous billionaire airplane aficionado; he’s nothing but a plain old, impoverished, henpecked husband farmer whose last name is Hewes (H-E-W-E-S).
Games
Andrew Ryan, partially based on Hughes, is a fictional character in the 2007 video game, BioShock. He was an industrialist business magnate in the Post-WW2 1940s, and seeking to avoid governments, religions and other ‘parasitic’ influences, ordered the secret construction of an underwater city, Rapture. 15+ Years later, when Ryan’s vision for an Objectivist utopia in Rapture falls into dystopia, he hides himself away and uses armies of mutated humans, “Splicers”, to defend himself and fight against those trying to take over his City, including the player-character Jack within the first game.[86]
Robert House, largely based on Hughes, is a fictional character in the 2010 video game, Fallout: New Vegas. He was a naturally gifted engineer and aerospace enthusiast, much like the real Hughes. The game takes place in an alternate reality in 2281 after a catastrophic nuclear war in 2077. Mr. House defends Las Vegas against most of the missiles, and preserves his life through robotics, cryogenics and computers—eventually controlling the post-apocalyptic New Vegas, which the player character experiences. Many references are made to the life of Hughes, including a family-owned tool company, a crashed plane in Lake Mead, and an in-game photo similar to the famous photo of Hughes standing before a Boeing P-12.
In L.A. Noire, Hughes makes an appearance presenting his Hercules H-4 aircraft in the game introduction.[87]
In Team Fortress 2 a hat referencing him can be obtained, named Barnstormer, the description of which references his film career, his aeronautics past, and some of his obsessions. The class that uses this hat is also a reference, since it is the Engineer.
Literature
Howard Hughes appears as a character in Death and Honor (Putnam, 2008), W.E.B. Griffin‘s fictional account of the clandestine espionage activities of agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services (the “OSS”) during World War II. In the novel, Hughes is portrayed as an unofficial intelligence community insider.
Howard Hughes also appears as a character in James Ellroy‘s L.A. Quartet and Underworld USA Trilogy. In the latter saga, Hughes is described as reclusive, eccentric and mentally disturbed. He plans to take over the mafia’s casinos in Las Vegas to establish a “germ-free environment” for his residence.
Stan Lee has repeatedly stated he created the Marvel Comics character Iron Man‘s civilian persona, Tony Stark, drawing inspiration from Howard Hughes’ colorful lifestyle and personality. Additionally, the first name of Stark’s father is Howard.[88]
In the novel Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Mary Kathleen O’Looney has several traits that were obviously modeled after Howard Hughes (living as a paranoid homeless person while simultaneously being immensely rich and the CEO of a huge corporation, her orders validated by her fingerprints only).
Howard Hughes is discussed in an essay by Joan Didion, “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38”. The essay is included in the collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Music
“Howard Hughes’ Blues” is a song about Hughes by John Hartford; it is a track on Hartford’s album Morning Bugle.
Hughes is referenced in the 1975 hit single, ‘Wall Street Shuffle’ by the top-selling UK band, 10cc.
In the Stan Ridgway song “I Wanna Be a Boss”, the narrator refers to himself as planning to be more famous than Hughes, including references to growing a long beard and watching Ice Station Zebra in the nude.[89]
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa (/ˈvɑrɡəsˈjoʊsə/;[2]Spanish: [ˈmaɾjo ˈβaɾgas ˈʎosa]; born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.[3] Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of theLatin American Boom.[4] Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.[5]
Many of Vargas Llosa’s works are influenced by the writer’s perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, however, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa has made many criticisms of nationalism in different parts of the world.[7] Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism, to a sometimes playfulpostmodernism.
Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political lefttowards liberalism or neoliberalism. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with his policies. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democrático coalition, advocating neoliberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori. He is the person who, in 1990, “coined the phrase that circled the globe”,[8] declaring on Mexican television, “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship”, a statement which became an adage during the following decade.
Early life and family
Mario Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family[9] on March 28, 1936, in the Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa.[10] He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta (the former a radio operator in an aviation company, the latter the daughter of an old criollo family), who separated a few months before his birth.[10] Shortly after Mario’s birth, his father revealed that he was having an affair with a German woman; consequently, Mario has two younger half-brothers: Enrique and Ernesto Vargas.[11]
Vargas Llosa lived with his maternal family in Arequipa until a year after his parents’ divorce, when his maternal grandfather was named honorary consul for Peru in Bolivia.[10] With his mother and her family, Vargas Llosa then moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he spent the early years of his childhood.[10] His maternal family, the Llosas, were sustained by his grandfather, who managed a cotton farm.[12] As a child, Vargas Llosa was led to believe that his father had died—his mother and her family did not want to explain that his parents had separated.[13] During the government of Peruvian President José Bustamante y Rivero, Vargas Llosa’s maternal grandfather obtained a diplomatic post in the Peruvian coastal city of Piura and the entire family returned to Peru.[13] While in Piura, Vargas Llosa attended elementary school at the religious academy Colegio Salesiano.[14] In 1946, at the age of ten, he moved to Lima and met his father for the first time.[14] His parents re-established their relationship and lived in Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb, during his teenage years.[15] While in Lima, he studied at the Colegio La Salle, a Christian middle school, from 1947 to 1949.[16]
When Vargas Llosa was fourteen, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima.[17] At the age of 16, before his graduation, Vargas Llosa began working as an amateur journalist for local newspapers.[18] He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper, La Industria, and witnessed the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, La huida del Inca.[19]
In 1953, during the government of Manuel A. Odría, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima’s National University of San Marcos, to study law and literature.[20] He married Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle’s sister-in-law, in 1955 at the age of 19; she was 10 years older.[18] Vargas Llosa began his literary career in earnest in 1957 with the publication of his first short stories, “The Leaders” (“Los jefes”) and “The Grandfather” (“El abuelo”), while working for two Peruvian newspapers.[21] Upon his graduation from the National University of San Marcos in 1958, he received a scholarship to study at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain.[22] In 1960, after his scholarship in Madrid had expired, Vargas Llosa moved to France under the impression that he would receive a scholarship to study there; however, upon arriving in Paris, he learned that his scholarship request was denied.[23] Despite Mario and Julia’s unexpected financial status, the couple decided to remain in Paris where he began to write prolifically.[23] Their marriage lasted only a few more years, ending in divorce in 1964.[24] A year later, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa,[24] with whom he had three children: Álvaro Vargas Llosa (born 1966), a writer and editor; Gonzalo (born 1967), a businessman; and Morgana (born 1974), a photographer.
Writing career
Beginning and first major works
Vargas Llosa’s first novel, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros), was published in 1963. The book is set among a community of cadets in a Lima military school, and the plot is based on the author’s own experiences at Lima’s Leoncio Prado Military Academy.[25] This early piece gained wide public attention and immediate success.[26] Its vitality and adept use of sophisticated literary techniques immediately impressed critics,[27] and it won the Premio de la Crítica Española award.[26] Nevertheless, its sharp criticism of the Peruvian military establishment led to controversy in Peru. Several Peruvian generals attacked the novel, claiming that it was the work of a “degenerate mind” and stating that Vargas Llosa was “paid by Ecuador” to undermine the prestige of the Peruvian Army.[26]
In 1965, Vargas Llosa published his second novel, The Green House (La casa verde), about a brothel called “The Green House” and how its quasi-mythical presence affects the lives of the characters. The main plot follows Bonifacia, a girl who is about to receive the vows of the church, and her transformation into la Selvatica, the best-known prostitute of “The Green House”. The novel was immediately acclaimed, confirming Vargas Llosa as an important voice of Latin American narrative.[28]The Green House won the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967, contending with works by veteran Uruguayanwriter Juan Carlos Onetti and by Gabriel García Márquez.[29] This novel alone accumulated enough awards to place the author among the leading figures of the Latin American Boom.[30] Some critics still considerThe Green House to be Vargas Llosa’s finest and most important achievement.[30] Indeed, Latin American literary critic Gerald Martin suggests that The Green House is “one of the greatest novels to have emerged from Latin America”.[30]
Vargas Llosa’s third novel, Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral), was published in 1969, when he was 33. This ambitious narrative is the story of Santiago Zavala, the son of a government minister, and Ambrosio, his chauffeur.[31] A random meeting at a dog pound leads the pair to a riveting conversation at a nearby bar known as “The Cathedral”.[32] During the encounter, Zavala searches for the truth about his father’s role in the murder of a notorious Peruvian underworld figure, shedding light on the workings of a dictatorship along the way. Unfortunately for Zavala, his quest results in a dead end with no answers and no sign of a better future.[33] The novel attacks the dictatorial government of Odría by showing how a dictatorship controls and destroys lives.[26] The persistent theme of hopelessness makes Conversation in the Cathedral Vargas Llosa’s most bitter novel.[33]
In 1971, Vargas Llosa published García Márquez: Story of a Deicide (García Márquez: historia de un deicidio), which was his doctoral thesis for the Complutense University of Madrid.[35][36] Although Vargas Llosa wrote this book-length study about his then friend, the Colombian Nobel laureate writer Gabriel García Márquez, they did not speak to each other again. In 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face inMexico City at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, ending the friendship.[37] Neither writer had publicly stated the underlying reasons for the quarrel.[38] A photograph of García Márquez sporting a black eye was published in 2007, reigniting public interest in the feud.[39] Despite the decades of silence, in 2007, Vargas Llosa agreed to allow part of his book to be used as the introduction to a 40th-anniversary edition of García Márquez’sOne Hundred Years of Solitude, which was re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America that year.[40]Historia de un Deicidio was also reissued in that year, as part of Vargas Llosa’s complete works.
Following the monumental work Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa’s output shifted away from more serious themes such as politics and problems with society. Latin American literary scholar Raymond L. Williams describes this phase in his writing career as “the discovery of humor”.[41] His first attempt at a satirical novel was Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleón y las visitadoras), published in 1973.[42]This short, comic novel offers vignettes of dialogues and documents about the Peruvian armed forces and a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas.[43] These plot elements are similar to Vargas Llosa’s earlier novel The Green House, but in a different form. As such, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is essentially a parody of both The Green House and the literary approach that novel represents.[43] Vargas Llosa’s motivation to write the novel came from actually witnessing prostitutes being hired by the Peruvian Army and brought to serve soldiers in the jungle.[44]
From 1974 to 1987, Vargas Llosa focused on his writing, but also took the time to pursue other endeavors.[45] In 1975, he co-directed an unsuccessful motion-picture adaptation of his novel, Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service.[45] In 1976 he was elected President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers and oldest human rights organisation, a position he held until 1979.[45] During this time, Vargas Llosa constantly traveled to speak at conferences organized by internationally renowned institutions, such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge, where he was Simón Bolívar Professor and an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College in 1977–78.[46][47][48]
In 1977, Vargas Llosa was elected as a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language, a membership he still holds today. That year, he also published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor), based in part on his marriage to his first wife, Julia Urquidi, to whom he dedicated the novel.[49] She later wrote a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn’t Say), in which she gives her personal account of their relationship. She states that Vargas Llosa’s account exaggerates many negative points in their courtship and marriage while minimizing her role of assisting his literary career.[50]Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is considered one of the most striking examples of how the language and imagery of popular culture can be used in literature.[51] The novel was adapted in 1990 into a Hollywood feature film, Tune in Tomorrow.
Later novels
Vargas Llosa in 1982
Vargas Llosa’s fourth major novel, The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo), was published in 1981 and was his first attempt at a historical novel.[52] This work initiated a radical change in Vargas Llosa’s style towards themes such as messianism and irrational human behaviour.[53] It recreates the War of Canudos, an incident in 19th-century Brazil in which an armed millenarian cult held off a siege by the national army for months.[54] As in Vargas Llosa’s earliest work, this novel carries a sober and serious theme, and its tone is dark.[54] Vargas Llosa’s bold exploration of humanity’s propensity to idealize violence, and his account of a man-made catastrophe brought on by fanaticism on all sides, earned the novel substantial recognition.[55] Because of the book’s ambition and execution, critics have argued that this is one of Vargas Llosa’s greatest literary pieces.[55] Even though the novel has been acclaimed in Brazil, it was initially poorly received because a foreigner was writing about a Brazilian theme.[56] The book was also criticized as revolutionary and anti-socialist.[57] Vargas Llosa says that this book is his favorite and was his most difficult accomplishment.[57]
After completing The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa began to write novels that were significantly shorter than many of his earlier books. In 1983, he finished The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Historia de Mayta, 1984).[52] The novel focuses on a leftist insurrection that took place on May 29, 1962 in the Andean city of Jauja.[52] Later the same year, during the Sendero Luminoso uprising, Vargas Llosa was asked by the Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde Terry to join the Investigatory Commission, a task force to inquire into the massacre of eight journalists at the hands of the villagers of Uchuraccay.[58] The Commission’s main purpose was to investigate the murders in order to provide information regarding the incident to the public.[59] Following his involvement with the Investigatory Commission, Vargas Llosa published a series of articles to defend his position in the affair.[59] In 1986, he completed his next novel, Who Killed Palomino Molero (¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?), which he began writing shortly after the end of the Uchuraccay investigation.[59] Though the plot of this mystery novel is similar to the tragic events at Uchuraccay, literary critic Roy Boland points out that it was not an attempt to reconstruct the murders, but rather a “literary exorcism” of Vargas Llosa’s own experiences during the commission.[60] The experience also inspired one of Vargas Llosa’s later novels, Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes), originally published in 1993 in Barcelona.[61]
It would be almost 20 years before Vargas Llosa wrote another major work: The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo), a political thriller, was published in 2000 (and in English in 2001). According to Williams, it is Vargas Llosa’s most complete and most ambitious novel since The War of the End of the World.[62] Critic Sabine Koellmann sees it in the line of his earlier novels such as “Conversación en la catedral” depicting the effects of authoritarianism, violence and the abuse of power on the individual.[63] Based on the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who governed the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, the novel has three main strands: one concerns Urania Cabral, the daughter of a former politician and Trujillo loyalist, who returns for the first time since leaving the Dominican Republic after Trujillo’s assassination 30 years earlier; the second concentrates on the assassination itself, the conspirators who carry it out, and its consequences; and the third and final strand deals with Trujillo himself in scenes from the end of his regime.[62] The book quickly received positive reviews in Spain and Latin America,[64] and has had a significant impact in Latin America, being regarded as one of Vargas Llosa’s best works.[62]
In 2003 he wrote The Way to Paradise where he studies Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin.
In 2006, Vargas Llosa wrote The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la niña mala), which journalist Kathryn Harrison argues is a rewrite (rather than simply a recycling) of Gustave Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary (1856).[65] In Vargas Llosa’s version, the plot relates the decades-long obsession of its narrator, a Peruvian expatriate in Paris, with a woman with whom he first fell in love when both were teenagers.
Later life and political involvement
Like many other Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro.[28] He studied Marxism in depth as a university student and was later persuaded by communist ideals after the success of the Cuban Revolution.[66] Gradually, Vargas Llosa came to believe that Cuban socialism was incompatible with what he considered to be general liberties and freedoms.[67] The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred with the so-called ‘Padilla Affair’, when the Castro regime imprisoned the poet Heberto Padilla for a month in 1971.[68] Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote to Castro protesting the Cuban political system and its imprisonment of the artist.[69] Vargas Llosa has identified himself with liberalism rather than extreme left-wing political ideologies ever since.[70] Since he relinquished his earlier leftism, he has opposed both left- and right-wing authoritarian regimes.[71]
With his appointment to the Investigatory Commission on the Uchuraccay massacre in 1983, he experienced what literary critic Jean Franco calls “the most uncomfortable event in [his] political career”.[61]Unfortunately for Vargas Llosa, his involvement with the Investigatory Commission led to immediate negative reactions and defamation from the Peruvian press; many suggested that the massacre was a conspiracy to keep the journalists from reporting the presence of government paramilitary forces in Uchuraccay.[59] The commission concluded that it was the indigenous villagers who had been responsible for the killings; for Vargas Llosa the incident showed “how vulnerable democracy is in Latin America and how easily it dies under dictatorships of the right and left”.[72] These conclusions, and Vargas Llosa personally, came under intense criticism: anthropologist Enrique Mayer, for instance, accused him of “paternalism”,[73] while fellow anthropologist Carlos Iván Degregori criticized him for his ignorance of the Andean world.[74] Vargas Llosa was accused of actively colluding in a government cover-up of army involvement in the massacre.[59] US Latin American literature scholar Misha Kokotovic summarizes that the novelist was charged with seeing “indigenous cultures as a ‘primitive’ obstacle to the full realization of his Western model of modernity”.[75] Shocked both by the atrocity itself and then by the reaction his report had provoked, Vargas Llosa responded that his critics were apparently more concerned with his report than with the hundreds of peasants who would later die at the hands of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla organization.[76]
Vargas Llosa at the founding act ofUPD, September 2007
Over the course of the decade, Vargas Llosa became known as a “neoliberal“, although he personally dislikes the term and considers it “pure nonsense” and only used for derision.[77] In 1987, he helped form and soon became a leader of the Movimiento Libertad.[78] The following year his party entered a coalition with the parties of Peru’s two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaúnde Terry (of the Popular Action party) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (of the Partido Popular Cristiano), to form the tripartite center-right coalition known as Frente Democrático (FREDEMO).[78] He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the FREDEMO coalition. He proposed a drastic economic austerity program that frightened most of the country’s poor; this program emphasized the need for privatization, a market economy, free trade, and most importantly, the dissemination of private property.[79] Although he won the first round with 34% of the vote, Vargas Llosa was defeated by a then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori, in the subsequent run-off.[79] Vargas Llosa included an account of his run for the presidency in the memoir A Fish in the Water (El pez en el agua, 1993).[80] Since his political defeat, he has focused mainly on his writing, with only occasional political involvement.[81]
A month after losing the election, at the invitation of Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa attended a conference in Mexico entitled, “The 20th Century: The Experience of Freedom”. Focused on the collapse of communist rule in central and eastern Europe, it was broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September. Addressing the conference on 30 August 1990, Vargas Llosa embarrassed his hosts by condemning the Mexican system of power based on the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had been in power for 61 years. Criticizing the PRI by name, he commented, “I don’t believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety.” He declared, “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the USSR, not Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship.”[82][8] The statement, “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship” became a cliché in Mexico[83] and internationally, until the PRI fell from power in 2000.
Vargas Llosa has mainly lived in Madrid since the 1990s,[84] but spends roughly three months of the year in Peru with his extended family.[79] He also frequently visits London where he occasionally spends long periods. Vargas Llosa acquired Spanish citizenship in 1993, though he still holds Peruvian nationality. The writer often reiterates his love for both countries. In his Nobel speech he observed: “I carry Peru deep inside me because that is where I was born, grew up, was formed, and lived those experiences of childhood and youth that shaped my personality and forged my calling”. He then added: “I love Spain as much as Peru, and my debt to her is as great as my gratitude. If not for Spain, I never would have reached this podium or become a known writer”.[85]
In 1994 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy)[86] and has been involved in the country’s political arena. In February 2008 he stopped supporting the People’s Party in favor of the recently created Union, Progress and Democracy, claiming that certain conservative views held by the former party are at odds with his classical liberal beliefs. His political ideologies appear in the bookPolítica razonable, written with Fernando Savater, Rosa Díez, Álvaro Pombo, Albert Boadella and Carlos Martínez Gorriarán.[87] He continues to write, both journalism and fiction, and to travel extensively. He has also taught as a visiting professor at a number of prominent universities.[88]
In April 2011, the writer took part in the Peruvian general election, 2011 by saying he was going to vote for Alejandro Toledo (Peruvian former president 2001–2006). After casting his vote, he said his country should stay in the path of legality and freedom.[92][93]
As for hobbies, Vargas Llosa is very fond of association football, and is a renowned supporter of Universitario de Deportes.[94] The writer himself has confessed in his book A Fish in the Water since childhood he has been a fan of the ‘cream colored’ team from Peru, which was first seen in the field one day in 1946 when he was only 10 years old.[95] In February 2011, Vargas Llosa was awarded with an honorary life membership of this football club, in a ceremony which took place in the Monumental Stadium of Lima.[96][97]
Style of writing
Plot, setting, and major themes
Vargas Llosa’s style encompasses historical material as well as his own personal experiences.[98] For example, in his first novel, The Time of the Hero, his own experiences at the Leoncio Prado military school informed his depiction of the corrupt social institution which mocked the moral standards it was supposed to uphold.[25] Furthermore, the corruption of the book’s school is a reflection of the corruption of Peruvian society at the time the novel was written.[27] Vargas Llosa frequently uses his writing to challenge the inadequacies of society, such as demoralization and oppression by those in political power towards those who challenge this power. One of the main themes he has explored in his writing is the individual’s struggle for freedom within an oppressive reality.[99] For example, his two-volume novel Conversation in the Cathedral is based on the tyrannical dictatorship of Peruvian President Manuel A. Odría.[100] The protagonist, Santiago, rebels against the suffocating dictatorship by participating in the subversive activities of leftist political groups.[101] In addition to themes such as corruption and oppression, Vargas Llosa’s second novel, The Green House, explores “a denunciation of Peru’s basic institutions”, dealing with issues of abuse and exploitation of the workers in the brothel by corrupt military officers.[41]
Many of Vargas Llosa’s earlier novels were set in Peru, while in more recent work he has expanded to other regions of Latin America, such as Brazil and the Dominican Republic.[102] His responsibilities as a writer and lecturer have allowed him to travel frequently and led to settings for his novels in regions outside of Peru.[45]The War of the End of the World was his first major work set outside Peru.[26] Though the plot deals with historical events of the Canudos revolt against the Brazilian government, the novel is not based directly on historical fact; rather, its main inspiration is the non-fiction account of those events published by Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha in 1902.[54]The Feast of the Goat, based on the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, takes place in the Dominican Republic;[62] in preparation for this novel, Vargas Llosa undertook a comprehensive study of Dominican history.[103] The novel was characteristically realist, and Vargas Llosa underscores that he “respected the basic facts, [. . .] I have not exaggerated”, but at the same time he points out “It’s a novel, not a history book, so I took many, many liberties.”[104]
One of Vargas Llosa’s more recent novels, The Way to Paradise (El paraíso en la otra esquina), is set largely in France and Tahiti.[105] Based on the biography of former social reformer Flora Tristan, it demonstrates how Flora and Paul Gauguin were unable to find paradise, but were still able to inspire followers to keep working towards a socialist utopia.[106] Unfortunately, Vargas Llosa was not as successful in transforming these historical figures into fiction. Some critics, such as Barbara Mujica, argue that The Way to Paradise lacks the “audacity, energy, political vision, and narrative genius” that was present in his previous works.[107]
Modernism and postmodernism
The works of Mario Vargas Llosa are viewed as both modernist and postmodernist novels.[108] Though there is still much debate over the differences between modernist and postmodernist literature, literary scholar M. Keith Booker claims that the difficulty and technical complexity of Vargas Llosa’s early works, such as The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, are clearly elements of the modern novel.[30]Furthermore, these earlier novels all carry a certain seriousness of attitude—another important defining aspect of modernist art.[108] By contrast, his later novels such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and The Storyteller (El hablador) appear to follow a postmodernist mode of writing.[109] These novels have a much lighter, farcical, and comic tone, characteristics of postmodernism.[43] Comparing two of Vargas Llosa’s novels, The Green House and Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Booker discusses the contrast between modernism and postmodernism found in the writer’s works: while both novels explore the theme of prostitution as well as the workings of the Peruvian military, Booker points out that the former is gravely serious whereas the latter is ridiculously comic.[43]
Literary scholar M. Keith Booker argues that Vargas Llosa perfects the technique of interlacing dialogues in his novel The Green House.[43] By combining two conversations that occur at different times, he creates the illusion of a flashback. Vargas Llosa also sometimes uses this technique as a means of shifting location by weaving together two concurrent conversations happening in different places.[110] This technique is a staple of his repertoire, which he began using near the end of his first novel, The Time of the Hero.[111] However, he does not use interlacing dialogues in the same way in all of his novels. For example, in The Green House the technique is used in a serious fashion to achieve a sober tone and to focus on the interrelatedness of important events separated in time or space.[112] In contrast, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service employs this strategy for comic effects and uses simpler spatial shifts.[113] This device is similar to both Virginia Woolf‘s mixing of different characters’ soliloquies and Gustave Flaubert’s counterpoint technique in which he blends together conversation with other events, such as speeches.[110]
Literary influences
Vargas Llosa’s first literary influences were relatively obscure Peruvian writers such as Martín Adán, Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and César Moro.[114] As a young writer, he looked to these revolutionary novelists in search of new narrative structures and techniques in order to delineate a more contemporary, multifaceted experience of urban Peru. He was looking for a style different from the traditional descriptions of land and rural life made famous by Peru’s foremost novelist at the time, José María Arguedas.[115] Vargas Llosa wrote of Arguedas’s work that it was “an example of old-fashioned regionalism that had already exhausted its imaginary possibilities”.[114] Although he did not share Arguedas’s passion for indigenous reality, Vargas Llosa admired and respected the novelist for his contributions to Peruvian literature.[116] Indeed, he has published a book-length study on his work, La utopía arcaica (1996).
Rather than restrict himself to Peruvian literature, Vargas Llosa also looked abroad for literary inspiration. Two French figures, existentialistJean-Paul Sartre and novelist Gustave Flaubert, influenced both his technique and style.[117] Sartre’s influence is most prevalent in Vargas Llosa’s extensive use of conversation.[118] The epigraph of The Time of the Hero, his first novel, is also taken directly from Sartre’s work.[119]Flaubert’s artistic independence—his novels’ disregard of reality and morals—has always been admired by Vargas Llosa,[120] who wrote a book-length study of Flaubert’s aesthetics, The Perpetual Orgy.[121] In his analysis of Flaubert, Vargas Llosa questions the revolutionary power of literature in a political setting; this is in contrast to his earlier view that “literature is an act of rebellion”, thus marking a transition in Vargas Llosa’s aesthetic beliefs.[122] Other critics such as Sabine Köllmann argue that his belief in the transforming power of literature is one of the great continuities that characterize his fictional and non-fictional work, and link his early statement that ‘Literature is Fire’ with his Nobel Prize Speech ‘In Praise of Reading and Writing’.[123]
One of Vargas Llosa’s favourite novelists, and arguably the most influential on his writing career, is the American William Faulkner.[124] Vargas Llosa considers Faulkner “the writer who perfected the methods of the modern novel”.[125] Both writers’ styles include intricate changes in time and narration.[118][125] In The Time of the Hero, for example, aspects of Vargas Llosa’s plot, his main character’s development and his use of narrative time are influenced by his favourite Faulkner novel, Light in August.[126]
In addition to the studies of Arguedas and Flaubert, Vargas Llosa has written literary criticisms of other authors that he has admired, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean-Paul Sartre.[127] The main goals of his non-fiction works are to acknowledge the influence of these authors on his writing, and to recognize a connection between himself and the other writers;[127] critic Sara Castro-Klarén argues that he offers little systematic analysis of these authors’ literary techniques.[127] In The Perpetual Orgy, for example, he discusses the relationship between his own aesthetics and Flaubert’s, rather than focusing on Flaubert’s alone.[128]
Impact
Mario Vargas Llosa is considered a major Latin American writer, alongside other authors such as Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.[129] In his book The New Novel in Latin America (La Nueva Novela), Fuentes offers an in-depth literary criticism of the positive influence Vargas Llosa’s work has had on Latin American literature.[130] Indeed, for the literary critic Gerald Martin, writing in 1987, Vargas Llosa was “perhaps the most successful [. . . and] certainly the most controversial Latin American novelist of the past twenty-five years”.[131]
Most of Vargas Llosa’s narratives have been translated into multiple languages, marking his international critical success.[129] Vargas Llosa is also noted for his substantial contribution to journalism, an accomplishment characteristic of few other Latin American writers.[132] He is recognized among those who have most consciously promoted literature in general, and more specifically the novel itself, as avenues for meaningful commentary about life.[133] During his career, he has written more than a dozen novels and many other books and stories, and, for decades, he has been a voice for Latin American literature.[134] He has won numerous awards for his writing, from the 1959 Premio Leopoldo Alas and the 1962 Premio Biblioteca Breve to the 1993 Premio Planeta (for Death in the Andes) and the Jerusalem Prize in 1995.[135] The literary critic Harold Bloom has included his novel The War of the End of the World in his list of essential literary works in the Western Canon. An important distinction he has received is the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, considered the most important accolade in Spanish-language literature and awarded to authors whose “work has contributed to enrich, in a notable way, the literary patrimony of the Spanish language”.[136] In 2002, Vargas was the recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award. Vargas Llosa also received the 2005 Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute and was the 2008 recipient of the Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Award at Dickinson College.[137]
A number of Vargas Llosa’s works have been adapted for the screen, including The Time of the Hero and Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (both by the Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi) and The Feast of the Goat (by Vargas Llosa’s cousin, Luis Llosa).[138]Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was turned into the English-language film, Tune in Tomorrow. The Feast of the Goat has also been adapted as a theatrical play by Jorge Alí Triana, a Colombian playwright and director.[139]
2007 – El Pregón de Sevilla (as Introduction for LOS TOROS)
2009 – El viaje a la ficción: El mundo de Juan Carlos Onetti
2011 – Touchstones: Essays on Literature, Art, and Politics
2012 – La civilización del espectáculo
2012 – In Praise of Reading and Fiction: The Nobel Lecture
2014 – Mi trayectora intelectual (My Intellectual Journey)
2015 – Notes on the Death of Culture
Drama
1952 – La huida del inca
1981 – La señorita de Tacna
1983 – Kathie y el hipopótamo
1986 – La Chunga
1993 – El loco de los balcones
1996 – Ojos bonitos, cuadros feos
2007 – Odiseo y Penélope
2008 – Al pie del Támesis
2010 – Las mil y una noches
Vargas Llosa’s essays and journalism have been collected as Contra viento y marea, issued in three volumes (1983, 1986, and 1990). A selection has been edited by John King and translated and published asMaking Waves. 2003 – “The Language of Passion”
In the midst of the economic decline — following drought and the end of slavery — in the province of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil, the poor of the backlands are attracted by the charismatic figure and simple religious teachings of Antonio Conselheiro, the Counselor, who preaches that the end of the world is imminent and that the political chaos that surrounds the collapse of the Empire of Brazil and its replacement by a republic is the work of the devil.
Seizing a fazenda in an area blighted by economic decline at Canudos the Counselor’s followers build a large town and defeat repeated and ever larger military expeditions designed to remove them. As the state’s violence against them increases they too turn increasingly violent, even seizing the modern weapons deployed against them. In an epic final clash a whole army is sent to extirpate Canudos and instigates a terrible and brutal battle with the poor while politicians of the old order see their world destroyed in the conflagration.
Analysis
It is generally believed that Vargas Llosa’s three milestone novels are La Ciudad y Los Perros (The Time of the Hero), La Casa Verde (The Green House) and Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral), though many critics agree that The War of the End of the World should also be included among these three. The author is famously known for considering this his most accomplished novel — an opinion shared by the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, as well as the American critic Harold Bloom, who even includes the novel in what he calls the “Western canon.”
As he did later on with La Fiesta Del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), Vargas Llosa tackles a huge number of characters and stories caught during a time of strife, interweaving these in way that gives us a picture of what it was to live in those times.[citation needed]
Deep within the remote backlands of nineteenth-century Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation, no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian paradise–and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost.
In perhaps his most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa tells his own version of the real story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive, cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.
With few of the sly narrative flourishes that distinguish most of his fiction, Vargas Llosa now offers a vast historical novel tightly focused on an 1890s rebellion in the Bahia state of Brazil–by followers (called jagunÇos) of an apocalyptic religious figure, dubbed “The Counselor,” in the little town of Canudos. And though much of this novel is surprisingly drab and flat, the extraordinarily punishing, unremitting scenes of battle and carnage bring the book’s lesson home all too vividly: the madness that can horribly grow out of any small fanaticism and power-base. The Counselor’s followers in Canudos are both poor peasantry and societal dregs–bandits, circus geeks, failures, whores–but his manifest saintliness harmonizes them. When the republican-government officials of Brazil, however, learn that money is no longer being used at Canudos, they foolishly suspect that this is a monarchist plot that is merely using the people at Canudos as pawns; furthermore, this myopia–which utterly ignores the religious basis of the very Christian experiment there–is compounded by the hysterical influence of an important newspaper publisher. Inevitably, then, Canudos will be crushed–yet not without resistance: one, then two massive and bloody government assaults fail. Then a third succeeds–and since it occurs after The Counselor’s natural death, it leads to a terrible decision by the holdout jagunos to slaughter their own innocents, women and children and the aged, rather than allow them to face the depredations of the “Freemason” soldiers who are attacking so successfully. What is ultimately sacrificed, murdered, therefore, is the spiritual quality of Canudos; extremity turns it into ideology–and more death. But this powerful conclusion, unfortunately, is a very long time in coming; in its first hundreds of pages, the novel is often stiff, dull in dialogue, precisely detailed but with little aura of atmosphere and scene. In sum, then: an odd combination of cardboard and passionate horror–with grim, rich rewards for those readers willing to plow through the book’s early, stodgy chapters.
IF – Rudyard Kipling’s poem, recitation by Sir Michael Caine
“If” by Rudyard Kipling (read by Tom O’Bedlam)
IF by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father’s Advice to His Son
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”
VANITY FAIR, DOMINICK DUNNE –“GARDNER MCKAY’S BRILLIANTLY INTRICATE NOVEL,TOYER, IS FRIGHTENING, FASCINATING, AND WONDERFULLY WELL WRITTEN.
THERE WERE TIMES READING IT WHEN I HAD TO PUT IT DOWN TO COLLECT MYSELF BEFORE PICKING IT UP AGAIN.”
JIMMY BUFFETT – “THE MOST EFFECTIVE, EXCITING, BIZARRE TALE POSSIBLE. IN TOYER,MCKAY HAS GIVEN US AN ARRAY OF VICTIMS WHO FALL INTO THE VENUS FLYTRAP OF A VILLAIN AS CUNNING AS RICHARD III AND A MANIACAL AS HANNIBAL LECTER.”
JAMES CAMERON –“TOYER IS A NOVEL WHERE LOS ANGELES STARS AS ITSELF, THE CITY OF MASKS, WHERE RELATIONSHIPS PEEL THE ONION OF DARK REVELATION, AS TWO ADVERSARIES COUPLE IN A SEDUCTIVE DEATH-LOCK. GARDNER MCKAY HAS WOVEN A CHILLING AND DISTURBING DESCENT INTO THE CATACOMBS OF THE MIND.”
LEON BING –“WHOEVER PICKS UP GARDNER MCKAY’S NOVEL, TOYER, WILL KNOW, EARLY ON, THAT A MASTER HAS LAID HANDS ON THEM. THIS IS A BOOK OF SUCH SHEER, BRUTAL BRILLIANCE THAT THE READER OFTEN FEELS LIKE A PASSENGER TRAPPED ON A RUNAWAY TRAIN RACKETING ALONG A DOWNHILL TRACK.
MR. MCKAY IS A SUPERBLY ACCOMPLISHED WRITER; NOT SINCE HANNIBAL LECTER HAS THERE BEEN A LITERARY CHARACTER OF SUCH SILKEN AND ABSOLUTE MENACE AS TOYER.” –
THE NEW YORK TIMES – ”Connoisseurs – will appreciate the gorgeous imagery of McKay’s novel – the bizarre beauty of his writing.”
LOS ANGELES TIMES – “Anyone should make a beeline for McKay’s novel.”
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICAL – “FIRST RATE.”
HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN, JOHN BERGER – “Almost impossible to put down. Read it once for the story. Read it at least twice more for the writing.”
LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE – BOOK PICK OF THE MONTH –”Reminiscent of the best of classical L.A.noir – chilling.”
BOSTON GLOBE – “As bad as this title is as good as this book is. Slick, sensitive, brilliant.”
HONOLULU ADVERTISER, WANDA ADAMS –“ Insightful writing, unexpected plot, arresting asides, delicious evocations, and its unique take on a very much tried formula. [ I will ] read it again.”
HONOLULU WEEKLY, STUART COLEMAN – “ I couldn’t put it down.”
REDBOOK MAGAZINE – PICK OF THE MONTH
JANE MAGAZINE – “ * * * * * – Perfect.”
HONOLULU ADVERTISER – # 1 BEST SELLER
WILLIAM SPEAR (JUNEAU) – “A classy brain- clearing thriller.”
KATE JACKSON – “A stunning success. A wonderful book – brilliantly twisted.”
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER – “A true psychological thriller that will leave the reader mentally drained.”
Gardner McKay – Actor, Writer, Icon
Adventures in Paradise a Tribute to Gardner Mckay in photos
TOYER – Annabel & Andrew scene
“Toyer” by Gardner McKay
“Toyer” by Gardner McKay. Directed by Jon Gonzalez. Here’s a short play I directed. Starring Laya Hernandez and Zebastian Duchene.
Gardner McKay
Adventures in Paradise – Isle of Eden
An extract of the episode “Isle of Eden” of the “Adventures of Paradise” TV series, broadcasted on ABC TV in the USA on February 22nd 1960. Starring Gardner McKay, as Adam Troy, captain of the “Tiki, and as guest stars Yvonne De Carlo and Hugo Haas.
Sea Marks by Gardner McKay at The Irish Repertory Theatre
Adventures In Paradise Somewhere South of Suva part 2 Gardner Mckay 1960
Biography
George Cadogan Gardner McKay was born in Manhattan, New York City, his early years were spent in France, Connecticut and Kentucky. He attended Cornell University where he edited the humor magazine, wrote a film review column for the paper, was briefly president of his class and rowed on their crew.
At age fifteen, he published his first story. His novel Toyer won critical acclaim upon its release in 1998 and is currently in pre-production for a major motion film.
He has been awarded several prizes for his writing:- The Drama Critics Award for playwriting, The Sydney Carrington Prize. He won three National Endowment for the Arts grants for playwriting. Five of his play have been published by Samuel French Publishing Company, New York, Los Angeles, London: Sea Marks, Masters of the Sea, Toyer, Me, In Order of Appearance. His plays have been, and continue to be, produced in every state in the union and internationally.
Sea Marks won the National Regional Theatre Award in Canada. The Drama Critics Circle Award, best play of the year. And has been produced in NYC in six Off-Broadway productions; the Players Theatre (“Best Off- Broadway Play, Walter Kerr, New York Times) the Manhattan Theatre Club, and other theatres. It has been presented at the Eisenhower Theatre, The Kennedy Center in Washington D. C. The Edinburgh Festival and The Pitlochry Festival, Scotland. It has also been broadcast on B.B.C. Radio Theatre, London.
McKay’s play Toyer was first staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. – starring Kathleen Turner and Brad Davis, directed by, Tony Richardson. It has also been produced by Michael White in England – starring Rupert Graves, and later in London’s West End.
Other plays of his – in random order- of various lengths that have been produced are: – Untold Damage (PBS) Written and directed by Mr. McKay for PBS starring Richard Dreyfuss, Geraldine Fitzgerald, tracy Swope, Josh Bryant. It was cited as the best television production by the Television Theatre. Narcissa-Narcissus, Tapes, The Girl Next Door is Screaming, The Suit, The Visitor, Meeting, Silver Eyes, The Honeyman, Yeats/Millay, Becker, The People we Kill, Alligators Have no Choice.
He was Drama critic and Drama editor for the Los Angeles Herald Tribune. During the time he was with the Herald he invented a method of review called the “Triple Review” three brief reviews of the same play by three writers. The lone newspaper’s “Voice of the Critic” was hushed for these reviews and, instead, the review became an argument of the play’s worth on the forum of its pages.
He has taught playwriting at U.C.L.A at his Playwriting Roundtable. Later he taught playwriting and screenwriting at University of Southern California, Juneau Alaska, and the University of Hawaii.
During the ’70 and ‘80s he started a small professional group called the Playwrights’ Exchange. He personally constructed a 50-seat theatre off the kitchen of his L.A. house and every Tuesday playwrights gathered to see new work being read in whole or in fragments by professional actors. The theatre was named The Free Theatre, mainly because no money changed hands; emblematic of playwriting.
From 1995 – until his death in November 2001, Gardner wrote and recorded stories for his weekly radio show “Stories on the Wind” which aired each Sunday.
McKay has also been a sculptor ( several of his works are in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC and the Whitney Museum.) He has been a professional skipper, photographer, actor (Adventures in Paradise, Boots and Saddles), and has raised African lions.
George Cadogan Gardner McKay (June 10, 1932 – November 21, 2001) was an American actor, artist, and author.
Biography
Born in New York City, McKay was the great-grandson[1] of the shipbuilder Donald McKay. He attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York for two years,[2] where he majored in art. He became a Hollywood heartthrob in the 1950s and 1960s. He landed the lead role in Adventures in Paradise, based loosely on the writings of James Michener. His character, Adam Troy, is a Korean War veteran who purchased the two-masted 82-foot (25 m) schoonerTiki III, and sailed the South Pacific.
McKay was under contract to MGM when he was spotted by Dominick Dunne, then a television producer for Twentieth Century Fox, who was searching for an actor to star in his planned Adventures in Paradise. Dunne put his business card on the table and said, “If you’re interested in discussing a television series, call me.” McKay competed in screen tests with nine other candidates, and won it because of his good looks and ability to sail. An accomplished sailor, he had made eight Atlantic crossings by the age of seventeen. Although previously unknown to the public, McKay appeared on the July 6, 1959, cover of Life Magazine just two months before the series premiered.
McKay left Hollywood to pursue his interest in photography, sculpture, and writing. He turned down the opportunity to star opposite Marilyn Monroe in Something’s Got to Give, a film which was never completed. He exhibited his sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, besides holding individual exhibitions. His lifeboat rescue photographs of the Andrea Doria were published internationally. McKay wrote many plays and novels, and was a literary critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner between 1977 and 1982. He taught writing classes at the University of California at Los Angeles, University of Southern California, University of Alaska, and the University of Hawaii. In 2014 his play Sea Marks was produced Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
McKay’s awards included three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for playwriting, the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, and Sidney Carrington Prize. He was a winner in Canadian Regional Drama Festival, and runner-up in the Hemingway Short Story Contest.
Last years
McKay settled in Hawaii, where he died from prostate cancer in 2001, at the age of sixty-nine. He was survived by his wife, Madeleine Madigan, a painter, and two children.
Six years ago, reports surfaced that Brian De Palma would next be directing the diabolical Gardner McKay novel and stage play Toyer, which follows a “serial lunatic.” The Toyer doesn’t murder or rape his beautiful female victims, he “toys” with them, torturing them psychologically, then puttting them into a medically induced coma. (Sort of like what De Palma did to audiences in Snake Eyes … We kid, Brian!)
Anyway, without a capital crime to prosecute, the police and D.A. can only charge the Toyer with “mayhem,” and as they’re overwhelmed with hundreds of uncleared murder cases, the Toyer case becomes a lower priority. So a female neurologist who treats Toyer’s victims teams up with a newspaper editor to draw him out and bring him to justice.
This time, we’re told, Toyer really is happening, but as an indie financed via producers Tarak Ben Ammar, (who most famously produced Franco Zefferilli’s La Traviata) and the L.A.-based Scott Steindorff. Steindorff has brought heavyweight literature like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera to the screen, and tells Vulture that the film will be shooting in Venice, Italy, late this fall and into the early winter.
That’s a switch from the Gardner version, which is set in L.A., but should be far creepier: De Palma plans to set the mayhem against Venice’s famous Carnevale di Venezia, for which elaborate masks disguising one’s identity are traditionally worn on the street from St. Stephen’s Day (the day after Christmas) until the start of the Venitian Carnival (two weeks before Ash Wednesday). Steindorff says shooting during the actual Carnival (during February and March) would be logistically impossible. They plan to re-create their own Carnival on location.
“It has all the elements of suspense that Brian does so well in films likeBlow Out and Carrie,” Steindorff says, adding, “And by that I mean, it’s really frickin’ scary: I read the script on a plane, and I was still terrified.”
‘Duck Dynasty’ Reversal Shows GLAAD Has an Expiration Date
A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine a network disregarding GLAAD’s recommendations
By Brandon Ambrosino
Phil v. The Gays. With which will we side? Or rather, against which will we side? This is the question that society demands we answer. Are we anti-Phil or anti-gay or anti-GLAAD or anti-A&E or anti- … ?
Perhaps no other word sums up the Duck Dynasty fiasco as aptly as the word “anti.”
Whenever I hear that someone is anti-this or that, I immediately think of the old quip about MADD – are there any mothers for drunk driving? – and ask myself if anyone is really in favor of the particular thing being protested. Since GLAAD has recently taken a hard-line stance against Phil Robertson’s “anti-gay” comments, I’ve been asking myself a similar question about defamation: Who among us is for it? Most of us are decidedly against defamation, although we choose not to publicly participate in institutional demonstrations to prove how against it we are. But, of course, GLAAD is an institution, and therefore their criticism reverberates at systemic levels.
Founded in 1985 in the wake of the AIDS crisis, GLAAD was formed to protest skewed coverage of LGBT issues and “to put pressure on media organizations to end homophobic reporting.” The original name was an acronym for “Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation,” and although the organization has recently rebranded itself by deciding that the letters G-L-A-A-D aren’t actually going to stand for anything any more, their reputation for protesting defamatory speech is well known both within and without the LGBT community.
It goes without saying that GLAAD has done a great deal of good for the LGBT community, and for that they deserve our applause and honor. As they noted in their announcement heralding their name change, their work continues to educate and influence the greater culture. Historically they’ve been a symbol of inclusion and tolerance, and they’ve worked tirelessly to infuse these values into our controlling media discourses. Frankly, though, I don’t think their hasty reaction to Phil Robertson displayed our LGBT community’s best values.
Before many of us even learned that Phil Robertson was interviewed by GQ, GLAAD had already convinced us that Phil’s words were vile and offensive, and called upon A&E “to re-examine their ties to someone with such public disdain for LGBT people and families.” (I still wonder how many of us – commentators included – have read the actual story in GQ.) A&E offered its own kneejerk response to GLAAD’s kneejerk response, and placed Phil on “indefinite” hiatus, which then prompted some Evangelicals to offer up their own kneejerk response which had something to do with the freedom of speech and now – did I hear this correctly? – Chick-fil-A. In the end, after carefully reviewing all of the responses, A&E issued a final response explaining their decision to lift Phil’s suspension, which resulted in yet another predictable response from GLAAD. I’m not sure how we do it, but we manage to craft responses to our opponents without ever having actual conversations with them.
It isn’t shocking that a conservative Christian duck-hunter from Louisiana has opinions that GLAAD deemed “anti-gay,” and it isn’t shocking that A&E immediately kowtowed to GLAAD at the first drop of the word “homophobic.” What is shocking, however, is that A&E lifted Phil’s hiatus in spite of the fact that they knew GLAAD wasn’t going to be happy about it. A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine a network disregarding GLAAD’s recommendations. A&E is certainly setting a precedent – which makes me wonder about where we are today with queer politics.
In the ’80s and ’90s, GLAAD was necessary, if only because top media outlets needed to be reminded that journalistic ethics applied to AIDS coverage, too. But in 2014, how necessary is GLAAD? I don’t mean to suggest that the organization isn’t doing some good for our world – as I’ve already noted, they are! But as America edges closer and closer to unqualified and full inclusion of LGBT persons, I wonder if an organization whose raison d’etre is to find and shame instances of discrimination isn’t just a bit archaic.
If our goal is to progress beyond defamation against LGBT persons, then that means GLAAD has a sell-by date. To put it in a different, albeit cheekier way: Defamation is good for GLAAD’s business. To bankrupt our society of LGBT defamation would certainly put GLAAD out of work. It’s hard for me to imagine I’m the only one who’s wondered about this. In fact, GLAAD’s recent name-change only confirms that their leadership has been reexamining and revising their purposes moving forward. Again, I’m not suggesting our world doesn’t need GLAAD: There certainly is a place for them. But A&E’s latest reversal should make us question what exactly that place is. http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/28/duck-dynasty-reversal-shows-glaad-has-an-expiration-date/
Related Posts On Pronk Palisades
God Is Behind Going Duck Crazy — Duck Dynasty Phil Robertson Suspended From Show For Expressing Views On Gays — Will Not Inherit The Kingdom of God — I’m With Phil — Photos & Videos
Segment 0: God Is Behind Going Duck Crazy — Duck Dynasty Phil Robertson Suspended From Show For Expressing Views On Gays — Will Not Inherit The Kingdom of God — I’m With Phil — Photos & Videos
I am Second® – The Robertsons
Duck Dynasty : Phil’s Way of Life
Duck Dynasty: Unknown Facts About The Robertsons
The Best of Uncle Si
Duck Dynasty : Si Struck
Duck Dynasty: Si’s New Toy
Duck Dynasty: Si’s Dating Tips
Duck Dynasty : Hey
Uncle Si Robertson “ICY STARE” HILARIOUS DUCK DYNASTY ( 720P HD )
Duck Commanders Phil and Willie Robertson Interview – CONAN on TBS
The Robertson’s of Duck Dynasty Talk About How Their Faith in Jesus Turned Around Their Lives!!
Duck Commander Phil Robertson Talks About Why This Country Needs More Jesus
Duck Commander Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty spoke to the congregation of Saddleback church in July on why people need Jesus and why the founders would agree — and I gotta say it was awesome. I watched it last night and knew I had to post it for you guys. Duck Commander’s message is really simple, that people need to love God and love each other and he delivers it beautifully. He really is a fantastic preacher.
‘Duck Dynasty’ Star Makes Shocking ‘Gay is Sin’ Comment
Duck Dynasty dared to mention Jesus
‘Duck Dynasty’ star slammed over anti-gay rant
By Andrea Morabito
Phil Robertson, patriarch of the “Duck Dynasty” clan, is being slammed for controversial comments he made about homosexuality in an interview in the January issue of GQ.
“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me,” Robertson told the magazine. “I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
When the reporter asked Robertson what he found sinful, he said “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.”
The self-proclaimed Bible-thumper then went on to paraphrase Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
On Wednesday, GLAAD called Robertson’s statements “vile” and “littered with outdated stereotypes.”
“Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe,” said GLAAD spokesperson Wilson Cruz. “He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans — and Americans — who support legal recognition for loving and committed gay and lesbian couples.
“Phil’s decision to push vile and extreme stereotypes is a stain on A&E and his sponsors who now need to reexamine their ties to someone with such public disdain for LGBT people and families.”
An A&E spokesman had no comment, but Robertson released his own statement responding to the controversy.
“I myself am a product of the 60s; I centered my life around sex, drugs and rock and roll until I hit rock bottom and accepted Jesus as my Savior,” he said. “My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the Bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together.
“However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other.”
“Duck Dynasty” has been a ratings phenomenon for A&E, drawing 11.8 million viewers to its fourth season premiere last August, the most-watched nonfiction series telecast in cable history.
Jim Croce – Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels)
Jim Croce – Bad Bad Leroy Brown (Midnight Special – 1973)
Jim Croce – Lovers Cross – BBC
Jim Croce -These Dreams
Jim Croce – Bad Bad Leroy Brown (Live) [remastered 16:9]
Jim Croce – New York’s Not My Home
Jim Croce – The Hard Way Everytime
Jim Croce – Recently
Jim Croce 1973 Final Show Louisiana
OPERATOR PERFORMED BY JIM CROCE ON THE DICK CAVETT SHOW
Jim Croce on “The Helen Reddy Show” U.S. TV 1974 (2 songs)
Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits by Jim Croce ( Full Album )
Background Articles and Videos
An Afternoon With Ingrid Croce
Nyberg: A.J. Croce speaks about dad’s music
Jim Croce
James Joseph “Jim” Croce (/ˈkroʊtʃi/; January 10, 1943 – September 20, 1973) was an American singer-songwriter. Between 1966 and 1973, Croce released five studio albums and 11 singles. His singles “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Time in a Bottle” were both number one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.
Croce did not take music seriously until he studied at Villanova, where he formed bands and performed at fraternity parties, coffee houses, and universities around Philadelphia, playing “anything that the people wanted to hear: blues, rock, a cappella, railroad music… anything.” Croce’s band was chosen for a foreign exchange tour of Africa, Middle East, and Yugoslavia. He later said, “we just ate what the people ate, lived in the woods, and played our songs. Of course they didn’t speak English over there but if you mean what you’re singing, people understand.” Croce met his future wife Ingrid Jacobson at a hootenanny at Philadelphia Convention Hall, where he was judging a contest.
Croce released his first album, Facets, in 1966, with 500 copies pressed. The album had been financed with a $500 wedding gift from Croce’s parents, who set a condition that the money must be spent to make an album. They hoped that he would give up music after the album failed, and use his college education to pursue a “respectable” profession.[9] However, the album proved a success, with every copy sold.
1960s
From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Croce performed with his wife as a duo. At first, their performances included songs by artists such as Ian and Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, and Woody Guthrie, but in time they began writing their own music. During this time, Croce got his first long-term gig at a rural bar and steak house in Lima, Pennsylvania, called The Riddle Paddock. His set list covered several genres, including blues, country, rock and roll, and folk.
Croce married his wife Ingrid in 1966, and converted to Judaism, as his wife was Jewish, though he became non-practicing and was generally anti-organized religion. He and Ingrid were married in a traditional Jewish ceremony.[10] He enlisted in the Army National Guard that same year to avoid being drafted and deployed to Vietnam, and served on active duty for four months, leaving for duty a week after his honeymoon.[11] Croce, who was not good with authority, had to go through basic training twice.[12] He said he would be prepared if “there’s ever a war where we have to defend ourselves with mops”.
In 1968, the Croces were encouraged by record producer Tommy West to move to New York City. The couple spent time in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx and recorded their first album with Capitol Records. During the next two years, they drove more than 300,000 miles,[13] playing small clubs and concerts on the college concert circuit promoting their album Jim & Ingrid Croce.
Becoming disillusioned by the music business and New York City, they sold all but one guitar to pay the rent and returned to the Pennsylvania countryside, settling in an old farm in Lyndell, where Croce got a job driving trucks and doing construction work to pay the bills while continuing to write songs, often about the characters he would meet at the local bars and truck stops and his experiences at work; these provided the material for such songs as “Big Wheels” and “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues“.
1970s
The couple returned to Philadelphia and Croce decided to be “serious” about becoming a productive member of society. “I’d worked construction crews, and I’d been a welder while I was in college. But I’d rather do other things than get burned,” he later said. His determination to be “serious” led to a job at a Philadelphia R&B AM radio station, WHAT, where he translated commercials into “soul”. “I’d sell airtime to Bronco’s Poolroom and then write the spot: “You wanna be cool, and you wanna shoot pool… dig it.”
In 1970, Croce met the classically trained pianist-guitarist and singer-songwriter Maury Muehleisen from Trenton, New Jersey through producer Joe Salviuolo. Salviuolo had been friends with Croce when they attended Villanova University together, and Salviuolo later discovered Muehleisen when he was teaching at Glassboro State College in New Jersey. Salviuolo brought the Croce and Muehleisen duo together at the production office of Tommy West and Terry Cashman in New York City. Initially, Croce backed Muehleisen on guitar at his gigs but in time their roles reversed, with Muehleisen adding lead guitar to Croce’s music.
As his career picked up, Croce began touring the United States with Muehleisen, performing live, including in large coffee houses, on college campuses, and at folk festivals. However, Croce’s financial situation was still dire. The record company had fronted him the money to record the album, and much of the money the album earned went back to pay the advance. In February 1973, Croce and Muehleisen traveled to Europe to promote the album, visiting London, Paris, and Amsterdam, and getting positive reviews. Croce also began appearing on television, including onDon Kirshner’s Rock Concert and The Midnight Special, which he co-hosted. In July 1973, Croce and Muehleisen again visited London and performed on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Croce finished recording the album I Got a Name one week before his death. During his tours, Croce grew increasingly homesick, and decided to take a break from music and settle down with his wife and infant son after his Life and Times tour was completed.[14][15] In a letter to his wife which arrived after his death, Croce stated his intention to quit music and stick to writing short stories and movie scripts as a career, and withdraw from public life.[16][17]
Death
On Thursday, September 20, 1973, during Croce’s Life and Times tour and the day before his ABC single “I Got a Name” was released, Croce, Muehleisen, and four others were killed when the chartered Beechcraft E18S he was traveling in crashed while taking off from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Others who died in the crash were charter pilot Robert N. Elliott, comedian George Stevens, manager and booking agent Kenneth D. Cortose, and road manager Dennis Rast.[18][19] Croce had just completed a concert at Northwestern State University‘s Prather Coliseum in Natchitoches and was flying to Sherman, Texas, for a concert at Austin College. The plane crashed an hour after the end of the concert.
An investigation showed that the plane crashed on take off after clipping a pecan tree at the end of the runway. The plane failed to gain enough altitude to clear the tree and did not maneuver to avoid it, even though it was the only tree for hundreds of yards. It was reported as dark, but with clear sky, calm winds, and over five miles of visibility with haze. The report from the NTSB[20] listed the probable cause as the pilot’s failure to see and avoid obstructions due to pilot physical impairment and fog obstructing vision. The 57-year-old charter pilot suffered from severe coronary artery disease and had run three miles to the airport from a motel. He had an ATP Certificate, 14,290 hours total flight time and 2,190 hours in the Beech 18 type.[20] A later investigation placed sole blame for the accident on pilot error due to his downwind takeoff into a “black hole”.[21]
The album I Got a Name was released on December 1, 1973.[23] The posthumous release included three hits: “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues“, “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song“, and the title song, which had been used as the theme to the film The Last American Hero which was released two months prior to his death. The album reached No. 2 and “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song” reached No. 9 on the singles chart.
The song “Time in a Bottle” had been featured over the opening and closing credits and during a scene in which Desi Arnaz Jr. is opening the You Don’t Mess Around With Jim album in the ABCmade-for-television movieShe Lives!, which aired on September 12, 1973.[24] That appearance had generated significant interest in Croce and his music in the week just prior to the plane crash. That, combined with the news of the death of the singer, sparked a renewed interest in Croce’s previous albums. Consequently, three months later, “Time in a Bottle”, originally released on Croce’s first album the year before, hit number one on December 29, 1973, the third posthumous chart-topping song of the rock era following Otis Redding‘s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and Janis Joplin‘s recording of “Me and Bobby McGee“.
The Croces’ son Adrian James (born September 28, 1971) is a singer-songwriter, musician, and pianist, and he owns and operates his own record label, Seedling Records.[26]
From 1985 to 2013 Ingrid Croce owned and managed Croce’s Restaurant & Jazz Bar—a project she and Croce had jokingly discussed a decade earlier—in the historic Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego.[27] On July 3, 2012, she published a memoir about her husband, entitled I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story.[28]
The Results Are In: Cruz and Clinton Win Most Delegates In A Very Close Race — Videos
Posted on February 13, 2016. Filed under: American History, Art, Articles, Blogroll, Business, Communications, Corruption, Culture, Economics, Elections, Employment, Entertainment, Federal Government Budget, Fiscal Policy, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Friends, history, Illegal, Immigration, IRS, Law, Legal, liberty, Life, Links, media, Music, Music, Newspapers, People, Philosophy, Photos, Politics, Presidential Candidates, Radio, Radio, Rants, Raves, Regulations, Religion, Religious, Speech, Strategy, Talk Radio, Tax Policy, Taxation, Taxes, Television, Terrorism, Unemployment, Video, Wealth, Welfare, Wisdom, Work, Writing | Tags: 2016 Iowa caucus election, 3 February 2016, 42% Of Millennials Favor Socialism Over Capitalism, America, Angelina Jordan, articles, Audio, Bernie Sanders, Breaking News, Broadcasting, capitalism, Cartoons, Charity, Citizenship, Clarity, Classical Liberalism, Collectivism, Commentary, Commitment, Communicate, Communication, Concise, Convincing, Courage, Culture, Current Affairs, Current Events, Delegate Count, Democratic Party, Dinah Washington, Donald J. Trump is Second, Donald Trump was pro amnesty, economic growth, economic policy, Economics, Education, Evil, Experience, Faith, Family, First, fiscal policy, free enterprise, freedom, freedom of speech, Friends, G. Edward Griffin, Give It A Listen, God, Good, Goodwill, Growth, Hillary Clinton, Hope, Individualism, Individualism vs Collectivism, Iowa Results, Knowledge, liberty, Life, Love, Lovers of Liberty, Marco Rubio Third, Milton Friedman - Socialism is Force, monetary policy, MPEG3, Music, News, Opinions, Peace, Photos, Podcasts, Political Philosophy, Politics, prosperity, Radio, Raymond Thomas Pronk, Representative Republic, Republic, Republican Party, Resources, Respect, rule of law, Rule of Men, Show Notes, song, Talk Radio, Ted Cruz Wins in Iowa, The Collectivist Conspiracy, The Pronk Pops Show, The Pronk Pops Show 616, Trump's Touchback amnesty, Truth, Two Party Tyranny, Tyranny, U.S. Constitution, United States of America, Videos, Virtue, Voter Count, War, What Difference A Day Makes, Wisdom |
The Pronk Pops Show Podcasts
Pronk Pops Show 616: February 3, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 615: February 1, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 614: January 29, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 613: January 28, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 612: January 27, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 611: January 26, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 610: January 25, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 609: January 22, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 608: January 21, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 607: January 20, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 606: January 19, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 605: January 15, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 604: January 14, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 603: January 13, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 602: January 12, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 601: January 11, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 600: January 8, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 599: January 6, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 598: January 5, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 597: December 21, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 596: December 18, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 595: December 17, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 594: December 16, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 593: December 15, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 592: December 14, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 591: December 11, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 590: December 10, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 589: December 9, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 588: December 7, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 587: December 4, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 586: December 3, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 585: December 2, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 584: December 1, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 583: November 30, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 582: November 25, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 581: November 24, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 580: November 23, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 579: November 20, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 578: November 19, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 577: November 18, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 576: November 17, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 575: November 16, 2015 (more…)
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )