Today, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma have gone to the Teatre Joventut in Hospitalet to listen to one of the most beautiful voices and one of the best guitarists, Maria del Mar Bonet and Borja Penalba.
Previously, Claire and TheGrandma have read some interesting words written by Maria del Mar Bonet,some words that they want to share in this post:
Coincidentally, we met Borja in Sueca in 2013. He
accompanied me on guitar in a recital. I didn't know him and at the beginning
he was discovering a person with a beautiful voice, a very good guitarist, an
artist with a great creativity. From then on, we could see that our chemistry
on stage was growing and weaving a repertoire of songs that were loved and also
very well-received by an accomplice and enthusiastic audience.
For a couple of
years now, we've been commenting more and more, that we need to record this
show on a record.
At the beginning of 2020, he decided to give recitals at the
Teatre Micalet in Valencia. But as spring approached, the coronavirus appeared
in a brutal way, despite the ups and downs coming from the pandemic, with all
that means the uncertainty of being able to celebrate or not the recitals and
the consequences so negative that there would be if they closed again home,
territorial... finally we could have the dates to be able to sing in the Teatre Micalet of Valencia a few days in a row.
And little by little, too, the
idea of recording a live album in that theatre. This fact would have a very
important meaning for me, because I had sung a lot there. The first recital was
in 1970, and then I was also given an award in 2011.
And a bit beyond
that, I must say that since I started stepping on stage, from the Valencian
Country they have never stopped asking me to go and sing there. This country
that always makes me feel like I'm at home! So this record is deeply dedicated
to him.
I am very grateful to the Teatre Micalet for maintaining the proposal
to go and sing there despite these moments of such a serious epidemic that we
are going through. The Micalet has given us the opportunity, to us and to the
public that has come every day, to see that CULTURE IS SAFE.
I would like to
tell you about Antonio Sánchez, who has put on his percussion and especially
his magic accompanying the songs and recitals that are part of this repertoire.
He has been by my side on many recitals and records. He is an endearing and
indispensable companion, a great musician with an exquisite sensibility.
From
time to time, Yanire, Borja's companion, and Sam, his little girl, came to see
us at rehearsals, at the Micalet, in the studio… Then, joy and spring came with
their blue eyes. Thanks! Borja, Antonio
and I put a lot of madness and passion into this record. We hope you like it!
Maria del Mar Bonet (extracted from Maria del Mar Bonet amb Borja Penalba)
Jo parlo en la meva llengua, i com a tal exerceixo amb les meves cançons, amb la meva de ser, d'escriure, de promocionar-la, perquè és la meva.
I speak my language, and as such I exercise with my songs, with my being, of writing, of promoting it, because it is mine.
Today, The Grandma is still relaxing at home. She has decided to listen to some music, and she has chosen one of her favourite composers and conductors of film music, John Barry, who died on a day like today in 2011.
John Barry Prendergast (3 November 1933-30 January 2011) was an English composer and conductor of film music.
He composed the scores for eleven of the James Bond films between 1963 and 1987, and also arranged and performed the James Bond Theme to the first film in the series, 1962's Dr. No. He wrote the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning scores to the films Dances with Wolves and Out of Africa, as well as The Scarlet Letter, The Cotton Club, The Tamarind Seed, Mary, Queen of Scots, Game of Death, and the theme for the British television cult series The Persuaders!, in a career spanning over 50 years. In 1999, he was appointed with an OBE for services to music.
Born in York, Barry spent his early years working in cinemas owned by his father. During his national service with the British Army in Cyprus, Barry began performing as a musician after learning to play the trumpet. Upon completing his national service, he formed his own band in 1957, The John Barry Seven.
He later developed an interest in composing and arranging music, making his début for television in 1958. He came to the notice of the makers of the first James Bond film Dr. No, who were dissatisfied with a theme for James Bond given to them by Monty Norman. Noel Rogers the head of music at United Artists approached Barry. This started a successful association between Barry and Bond series that lasted for 25 years.
He received many awards for his work, including five Academy Awards; two for Born Free, and one each for The Lion in Winter for which he also won the first BAFTA Award for Best Film Music, Dances with Wolves and Out of Africa both of which also won him Grammy Awards. He also received ten Golden Globe Award nominations, winning once for Best Original Score for Out of Africa in 1986.
Barry completed his last film score, Enigma, in 2001 and recorded the successful album Eternal Echoes the same year. He then concentrated chiefly on live performances and co-wrote the music to the musical Brighton Rock in 2004 alongside Don Black.
In 2001, Barry became a Fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, and, in 2005, he was made a Fellow of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Barry was married four times and had four children. He moved to the United States in 1975 and lived there until his death in 2011.
Barry was born John Barry Prendergast, in York, England, and was the son of an English mother and an Irish father. His mother was a classical pianist. His father, John Xavier Jack Prendergast, from Cork, was a projectionist during the silent film era, who later owned a chain of cinemas across northern England. As a result of his father's work, Barry was raised in and around cinemas in northern England, and he later stated that this childhood background influenced his musical tastes and interests.
Barry was educated at St Peter's School, York, and also received composition lessons from Francis Jackson, Organist of York Minster.
Serving in the British Army, Barry spent his national service playing the trumpet, taking a correspondence course with jazz composer Bill Russo. Barry after national service worked as an arranger for the Jack Parnell and Ted Heath's Orchestra, forming his own band in 1957, the John Barry Seven. The John Barry Seven scored hit records on the EMI's Columbia label. These included Hit and Miss, the theme tune he composed for the BBC's Juke Box Jury programme, a cover of the Johnny Smith song Walk Don't Run, and a cover of the theme for the United Artists western The Magnificent Seven.
Barry also composed the music for another Faith film, Never Let Go (1960), orchestrated the score for Mix Me a Person (1962), and composed, arranged and conducted the score for The Amorous Prawn (1962).
In 1962, Barry transferred to Embr Records, where he produced and arranged albums.
These achievements caught the attention of the producers of a new film called Dr. No (1962) who were dissatisfied with a theme for James Bond given to them by Monty Norman. Barry was hired and the result was one of the most famous signature tunes in film history, the James Bond Theme. When the producers of the Bond series engaged Lionel Bart to score the next James Bond film From Russia with Love (1963), they discovered that Bart could neither read nor write music. Though Bart wrote a title song for the film, the producers remembered Barry's arrangement of the James Bond Theme and his composing and arranging for several films with Adam Faith. Lionel Bart also recommended Barry to producer Stanley Baker for his 1964 film Zulu. That same year Bart and Barry collaborated on the film Man in the Middle; and then, in 1965, Barry worked with director Bryan Forbes in scoring the World War II prison-camp drama King Rat.
This was the turning point for Barry, and he subsequently won five Academy Awards and four Grammy Awards, with scores for, among others, Born Free (1966), The Lion in Winter (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969) for which he did not receive an on-screen credit, and Somewhere in Time (1980).
Barry died of a heart attack on 30 January 2011 at his Oyster Bay home, aged 77.
A memorial concert took place on 20 June 2011 at the Royal Albert Hall in London where the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Shirley Bassey, Rumer, David Arnold, Wynne Evans and others performed Barry's music. Sir George Martin, Sir Michael Parkinson, Don Black, Timothy Dalton and others also contributed to the celebration of his life and work. The event was sponsored by the Royal College of Music through a grant by the Broccoli Foundation.
Today, The Grandma is still relaxing at home. She has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí. They have decided to read LouisRacine, the French poet of the Age of the Enlightenment, who died on a day like today in 1763 Jordi and The Grandma love poetry, and they have spent a good time reading it.
Louis Racine (6 November 1692-29 January 1763) was a French poet of the Age of the Enlightenment.
The second son and the seventh and last child of the celebrated tragic dramatist Jean Racine, he was interested in poetry from childhood but was dissuaded from trying to make it his career by the poet Boileau on the grounds that the gift never existed in two successive generations. However, in 1719 Racine became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions and published his first major poem, La Grâce, in 1722. But, because of the poem's Jansenist inspiration, Cardinal de Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, blocked the poet's admission to the Académie Française, and instead Racine was induced to accept the post of inspector-general of taxes at Marseille in Provence.
For the next 24 years, although he continued to write poetry, Racine worked as a tax inspector in various provincial towns and cities, marrying in 1728. His most important poem, La Religion, in which he was careful to avoid further accusations of Jansenism, was published in 1742. He eventually retired from government service in 1746, aged 54, and returned to Paris where he devoted himself to his writing.
In November 1755, he lost his only son and his daughter-in-law when they were swept away by the tsunami from the Lisbon earthquake while on honeymoon at Cadiz in Spain. This tragedy, commemorated by the French poet Écouchard-Lebrun, is said to have broken Racine's spirit. He sold his large library, gave up writing, and devoted himself now to the practice of religion. It was around this time that Racine wrote his last published work, an essay on the famous feral child of 18th-century France Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc whom he had interviewed and written of in his philosophical poem L'Épître II sur l'homme (1747).
Louis Racine was characterized by Voltaire, the leading French intellectual of his day, as le bon versificateur Racine, fils du grand. His Oeuvres complètes were collected in six volumes and published in Paris in 1808. He was said by his contemporaries to have been a very personable, humble man who was sincerely pious and fluent in seven languages.
Today, The Grandma has started to reach some information to prepare a new course, and she has found other better information for another course. After this circumstance, The Grandma hasthought about serendipity, the word created by Horace Walpole on a day like today in 1754.
Serendipity is an unplanned fortunate discovery.
Serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of product invention and scientific discovery.
Serendipity is also seen as a potential design principle for online activities that would present a wide array of information and viewpoints, rather than just re-enforcing a user's opinion.
The first noted use of serendipity in the English language was by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754.
In a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about a lost painting of Bianca Cappello by Giorgio Vasari by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes, he told his correspondent, were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of. The name comes from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon), hence Sarandib by Arab traders. It is derived from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpaḥ (Siṃhalaḥ, Sri Lanka + dvīpaḥ, island).
The word has been exported into many other languages, with the general meaning of unexpected discovery or fortunate chance.
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (24 September 1717-2 March 1797), also known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician.
He had Strawberry Hill House built in Twickenham, south-west London, reviving the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors. His literary reputation rests on the first Gothic novel, The Casttle of Otranto (1764), and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. They have been published by Yale University Press in 48 volumes.
The youngest son of the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, he became the 4th and last Earl of Orford on his nephew's death in 1791. His barony of Walpole descended to his first cousin once removed of the same name but Baron Walpole of Wolterton. Horatio Walpole the younger was later created a new Earl of Orford.
Walpole was born in London, the youngest son of British Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and his wife Catherine. Like his father, he received early education in Bexley; in part under Edward Weston. He was also educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge.
Walpole's numerous letters are often used as a historical resource. In one, dating from 28 January 1754, he coined the word serendipity which he said was derived from a silly fairy tale he had read, The Three Princes of Serendip.
The oft-quoted epigram, This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel, is from a letter of Walpole's to Anne, Countess of Ossory, on 16 August 1776.
The original, fuller version appeared in a letter to Sir Horace Mann on 31 December 1769: I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel -a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.
Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to read a little aboutOperationRanger, the American nuclear test series that started at the NevadaTest Site on a day like today in 1951.
Operation Ranger was the fourth American nuclear test series. It was conducted in 1951 and was the first series to be carried out at the Nevada Test Site. All the bombs were dropped by B-50D bombers and exploded in the open air over Frenchman Flat (Area 5).
These tests centred on the practicality of developing a second generation of nuclear weapons using smaller amounts of valuable nuclear materials. They were planned under the name Operation Faust. The exact locations of the tests are unknown, as they were all air drops. However, the planned ground zero was set at 36°49'32''N 115°57'54''W for all except the Fox shot, which was 500 feet west and 300 feet south in order to minimize damage to the control point.
The Nevada National Security Site (N2S2 or NNSS), known as the NevadaTest Site (NTS) until August 23, 2010, is a United States Department of Energy (DoE) reservation located in southeastern Nye County, Nevada, about 105 km northwest of the city of Las Vegas.
Formerly known as the Nevada Proving Grounds, the site was established on January 11, 1951 for the testing of nuclear devices, covering approximately 3,500 km2 of desert and mountainous terrain.
Nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site began with a 1-kiloton-of-TNT bomb dropped on Frenchman Flat on January 27, 1951.
Over the subsequent four decades, over one thousand nuclear explosions were detonated at the NTS. Many of the iconic images of the nuclear era come from the NTS. NNSS is operated by Mission Support and Test Services, LLC.
During the 1950s, the mushroom clouds, from the 100 atmospheric tests, could be seen from almost 160 km away. The city of Las Vegas experienced noticeable seismic effects, and the mushroom clouds, which could be seen from the downtown hotels, became tourist attractions. St. George, Utah received the brunt of the fallout from above-ground nuclear testing in the Yucca Flats/Nevada Test Site.
Westerly winds routinely carried the fallout of these tests directly through St. George and southern Utah. Marked increases in cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, bone cancer, brain tumors, and gastrointestinal tract cancers, were reported from the mid-1950s through 1980. A further 921 nuclear tests were carried out underground.
From 1986 through 1994, two years after the United States put a hold on full-scale nuclear weapons testing, 536 anti-nuclear protests were held at the NevadaTest Site involving 37,488 participants and 15,740 arrests, according to government records.
The Nevada Test Site contains 28 areas, 1,100 buildings, 640 km of pavedroads, 300 miles of unpaved roads, 10 heliports, and two airstrips.
Currently, the Mission Support and Test Services (MSTS), the successor of the NSTech, is the civilian contractor for the test site's management and further oversees the overall operations of the test site.
The MSTS manages and operates the Nevada Test Site for the NationalNuclear Security Administration (NNSA) while The Security Protective Force (SPF) is responsible for providing the safeguards and security to the NNSS.
The Nevada Test Site was established as a 1,800 km2 area by President Harry S. Truman on December 18, 1950, within the Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range.
I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is my hometown. In Los Alamos is, for people who don't know, a nuclear lab that built the atomic bomb. The only reason the town exists is to make nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and that's still happening there.
Today, The Grandma is still relaxing at home. She has been watching TV Series, and she has chosen The X Files,one of her three top ones.
She has been watching some episodes, and she has enjoyed a lot with the first episode of the second season titled Little Green Men where Fox Mulder, one of the main characters of the series, talks about the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, a telescope that saw first light on a day like today in 1949. The Grandma has remembered when she visited Palomar Observatory, some years ago, with her closer friend Joseph de Ca'th Lon, who likes Astronomy a lot.
The Hale Telescope is a 5.1 m, f/3.3 reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California named after astronomer GeorgeEllery Hale.
With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, he orchestrated the planning, design, and construction of the observatory, but with the project ending up taking 20 years he did not live to see its commissioning.
The Hale was groundbreaking for its time, with double the diameter of the second-largest telescope, and pioneered many new technologies in telescope mount design and in the design and fabrication of its large aluminium coated honeycomb low thermal expansion Pyrex mirror. It was completed in 1949 and is still in active use.
The Hale Telescope represented the technological limit in building large optical telescopes for over 30 years.
It was the largest telescope in the world from its construction in 1949 until the Soviet BTA-6 was built in 1976, and the second largest until the construction of the Keck Observatory Keck 1 in Hawaii in 1993.
Hale supervised the building of the telescopes at the Mount Wilson Observatory with grants from the Carnegie Institution of Washington: the 1.5 m telescope in 1908 and the 2.5 m telescope in 1917. These telescopes were very successful, leading to the rapid advance in understanding of the scale of the Universe through the 1920s, and demonstrating to visionaries like Hale the need for even larger collectors.
The chief optical designer for Hale's previous telescope was George Willis Ritchey, who intended the new telescope to be of Ritchey–Chrétien design. Compared to the usual parabolic primary, this design would have provided sharper images over a larger usable field of view. However, Ritchey and Hale had a falling-out. With the project already late and over budget, Hale refused to adopt the new design, with its complex curvatures, and Ritchey left the project. The Mount Palomar HaleTelescope turned out to be the last world-leading telescope to have a parabolic primary mirror.
In 1928 Hale secured a grant of $6 million from the Rockefeller Foundation forthe construction of an observatory, including a reflecting telescope to be administered by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), of which Hale was a founding member.
In the early 1930s, Hale selected a site at 1,700 m on Palomar Mountain in San Diego County, California, as the best site, and less likely to be affected by the growing light pollution problem in urban centres like Los Angeles.
The Corning Glass Works was assigned the task of making a 5.1 m primary mirror. Construction of the observatory facilities and dome started in 1936, but because of interruptions caused by World War II, the telescope was not completed until 1948 when it was dedicated. Due to slight distortions of images, corrections were made to the telescope throughout 1949. It became available for research in 1950.
A functioning one tenth scale model of the telescope was also made at Corning.
The 510 cm telescope saw first light on January 26, 1949, at 10:06 pm PST under the direction of American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble,targeting NGC 2261, an object also known as Hubble's Variable Nebula. The photographs made then were published in the astronomical literature and in the May 7, 1949 issue of Collier's Magazine.
The telescope continues to be used every clear night for scientific research by astronomers from Caltech and their operating partners, Cornell University, the University of California, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is equipped with modern optical and infrared array imagers, spectrographs, and an adaptive optics system. It has also used lucky cam imaging, which in combination with adaptive optics pushed the mirror close to its theoretical resolution for certain types of viewing.
One of the Corning Labs' glass test blanks for the Hale was used for the C. Donald Shane telescope's 300 cm primary mirror. The collecting area of the mirror is about 20 square meters.
The first observation of the Hale telescope was of NGC 2261 on January 26, 1949.
Halley's Comet (1P) upcoming 1986 approach to the Sun was first detected by astronomers David C. Jewitt and G. Edward Danielson on 16 October 1982 using the Hale telescope equipped with a CCD camera.
Two moons of the planet Uranus were discovered in September 1997, bringing the planet's total known moons to 17 at that time. One was Caliban (S/1997 U 1), which was discovered on 6 September 1997 by Brett J. Gladman, Philip D. Nicholson, Joseph A. Burns, and John J. Kavelaars using the Hale telescope. The other Uranian moon discovered then is Sycorax (initial designation S/1997 U 2) and was also discovered using the Hale telescope.
In 1999, astronomers used a near-infrared camera and adaptive optics to take some of the best Earth-surface based images of planet Neptune up to that time. The images were sharp enough to identify clouds in the ice giant's atmosphere.
The Cornell Mid-Infrared Asteroid Spectroscopy (MIDAS) survey used the HaleTelescope with a spectrograph to study spectra from 29 asteroids. An example of a result from that study, is that the asteroid 3 Juno was determined to have an average radius of 135.7±11 km using the infrared data.
In 2009, using a coronagraph, the Hale Telescope was used to discover the star Alcor B, which is a companion to Alcor in the famous Big Dipper constellation.
In 2010, a new satellite of planet Jupiter was discovered with the HaleTelescope, called S/2010 J 1 and later named Jupiter LI.
In October 2017 the Hale Telescope was able to record the spectrum of the first recognized interstellar object, 1I/2017 U1 ʻOumuamua; while no specific mineral was identified it showed the visitor had a reddish surface colour.
Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to listen to some music, and she has chosen Jamesetta Hawkins, the American singer who was born on a day like today in 1938.
Etta was one of the greatest artists in her genre and her music is still a great gift for our hearts and our souls nowadays.
Jamesetta Hawkins (January 25, 1938-January 20, 2012), known professionally as Etta James, was an American singer who performed in various genres, including blues, R&B, soul, rock and roll, jazz and gospel.
Starting her career in 1954, she gained fame with hits such as The Wallflower, At Last, Tell Mama, Something's Got a Hold on Me, and I'd Rather Go Blind.
She faced a number of personal problems, including heroin addiction, severe physical abuse, and incarceration, before making a musical comeback in the late 1980s with the album Seven Year Itch.
James's powerful, deep, earthy voice bridged the gap between rhythm and blues and rock and roll. She won six Grammy Awards and 17 Blues Music Awards. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.
Hawkins was born on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, California, to Dorothy Hawkins, who was 14 at the time. Although her father has never been identified, James speculated that she was the daughter of pool player Rudolf Minnesota Fats Wanderone, whom she met briefly in 1987. Her mother was frequently absent from their flat in Watts, conducting relationships with various men, and James lived with a series of foster parents, most notably Sarge and Mama Lu. James referred to her mother as the Mystery Lady.
James received her first professional vocal training at the age of five from James Earle Hines, musical director of the Echoes of Eden choir at the St. Paul Baptist Church, in South-Central Los Angeles. Under his tutelage, she suffered physical abuse during her formative years, with her instructor often punching her in the chest while she sang to force her voice to come from her gut. As a consequence, she developed an unusually strong voice for a child her age.
Her debut album, At Last!, was
released in late 1960 and was noted for its varied selection of music,
from jazz standards to blues to doo-wop and rhythm and blues (R&B).
The album included the future classic I Just Want to Make Love to You
and A Sunday Kind of Love.
In early 1961, James released what was to
become her signature song, At Last, which reached number two on the
R&B chart and number 47 on the Billboard Hot 100. Though the record was not as successful as expected, her rendition has become the best-known version of the song. James followed that with Trust in Me, which also included string instruments.
Later that same year, James released a second studio album, The Second Time Around. The album took the same direction as her first, covering jazz and pop standards and with strings on many of the songs. It produced two hit singles, Fool That I Am and Don't Cry Baby.
Following this success, James became an in-demand concert performer though she never again reached the heyday of her early to mid-1960s success. Her records continued to chart in the R&B Top 40 in the early 1970s, with singles such as Losers Weepers (1970) and I Found a Love (1972).
James ventured into rock and funk with the release of her self-titled album in 1973, with production from the famed rock producer Gabriel Mekler, who had worked with Steppenwolf and Janis Joplin, who had admired James and had covered Tell Mama in concert. The album, known for its mixture of musical styles, was nominated for a Grammy Award.
The album did not produce any major hits; neither did the follow-up, Come a Little Closer, in 1974, though, like Etta James before it, the album was also critically acclaimed. James continued to record for Chess, now owned by All Platinum Records, releasing one more album in 1976, Etta Is Betta Than Evvah! Her 1978 album Deep in the Night, produced by Jerry Wexler for Warner Bros., incorporated more rock-based music in her repertoire.
That same year, James was the opening act for the Rolling Stones and performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Following this brief success, however, she left Chess Records and did not record for another ten years as she struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism.
James continued to perform on occasion in the early 1980s, including two guest appearances at Grateful Dead concerts in December 1982.
James signed with Private Music Records in 1993 and recorded a Billie Holiday tribute album, Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday. The album set a trend of incorporating more jazz elements in James's music.
In April 2009, at the age of 71, James made her final television appearance, performing At Last on the program Dancing with the Stars.
In May 2009, she received the Soul/Blues Female Artist of the Year award from the Blues Foundation, the ninth time she won the award.
She carried on touring but by 2010 had to cancel concert dates because of her gradually failing health, after it was revealed that she was suffering from dementia and leukaemia.
In November 2011, James released her final album, The Dreamer, which was critically acclaimed upon its release. She announced that this would be her final album.
She died on January 20, 2012, five days before her 74th birthday, at Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, California.
You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.
Today, The Grandma is still at home. The weather is sunny, and she has decided to take a sunbath and read a little about Nellie Bly, the American journalist, industrialist and inventor, who completed her round-the-world journey in 72 days on a day like today in 1890.
Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman,born Elizabeth Jane Cochran (May 5, 1864-January 27, 1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, industrialist, inventor, and charity worker who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, inemulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within.
She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.
Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born May 5, 1864, in Cochran's Mills, now part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Michael Cochran, born about 1810, started out as a labourer and mill worker before buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse.
As a young girl, Elizabeth often was called Pinky because she so frequently wore that colour. As she became a teenager, she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to Cochrane.
In
1879, she enrolled in Indiana Normal School, now Indiana University of
Pennsylvania, for one term but was forced to drop out due to lack of
funds.
In
1880, Cochrane's mother moved her family to Pittsburgh. A newspaper
column entitled What Girls Are Good For in the Pittsburgh Dispatch
that reported that girls were principally for birthing children and
keeping house prompted Elizabeth to write a response under the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl.
The editor, George Madden, was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself. When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl.
Her first article for the Dispatch, entitled The Girl Puzzle, was about how divorce affected women. In it, she argued for reform of divorce laws. Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job. It was customary for women who were newspaper writers at that time to use pen names. The editor chose Nellie Bly, after the African-American title character in the popular song Nelly Bly by Stephen Foster. Cochrane originally intended that her pseudonym be Nelly Bly, but her editor wrote Nellie by mistake, and the error stuck.
As a writer, Nellie Bly focused her early work for the Pittsburgh Dispatch on the
lives of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on
womenfactory workers. However, the newspaper soon received complaints
from factory owners about her writing, and she was reassigned to women's
pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for
women journalists, and she became dissatisfied. Still only 21, she was
determined to do something no girl has done before.
She then travelled to Mexico to
serve as a foreign correspondent, spending nearly half a year reporting
on the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches later
were published in book form as Six Months in Mexico.
In one report, she protested the
imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican
government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican
authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest,
prompting her to flee the country. Safely home, she accused Díaz of
being a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling
the press.
Burdened again with theatre and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper the New York World and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.
In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) into fact for the first time.
A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 40,070-kilometre journey. She took with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money, £200 in English banknotes and gold, as well as some American currency, in a bag tied around her neck.
The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world, starting on the same day as Bly took off.
Bly, however, did not learn of Bisland's journey until reaching Hong Kong. She dismissed the cheap competition. I would not race, she said. If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern.
To sustain interest in the story,
the World organized a Nellie Bly Guessing Match in which readers were
asked to estimate Bly's arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize
consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending
money for the trip.
During her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, although longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and thus were often delayed by several weeks.
As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship RMS Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. However, after World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 pm.
Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe, travelling alone for almost the entire journey. Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. She also had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothnia) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria).
Bly's journey was a world record,
although it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train,
whose first circumnavigation in 1870 possibly had been the inspiration
for Verne's novel.
In 1895, Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73 when they married. Due to her husband's failing health, she left journalism and succeeded her husband as head of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers.
In 1904, Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. There have been claims that Bly invented the barrel. The inventor was registered as Henry Wehrhahn.
Back in reporting, she wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I. Bly was the first woman and one of the first foreigners to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria. She was arrested when she was mistaken for a British spy.
Bly covered the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913. Under the headline Suffragists Are Men's Superiors, her parade story predicted that it would be 1920 before women in the United States would be given the right to vote.
On January 27, 1922, Bly died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital, New York City, aged 57. She was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.
Today, The Grandma is still relaxing at home. She has decided to watch some films, and she has chosen The Blues Brothers, a 1980 American musical comedy film directed by John Landis and starred by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.
Belushi was born on a day like today in 1949 and The Grandma wants to pay homage to him talking about his career and his life.
John Adam Belushi (January 24, 1949-March 5, 1982) was an American actor, comedian and singer, and one of the seven original cast members of the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL).
Throughout his career, Belushi had a close personal and artistic partnership with his fellow SNL star DanAykroyd, whom he met while they were both working at Chicago's The Second City comedy club.
Born in Chicago to Albanian American parents, Belushi started his own successful comedy troupe with Tino Insana and Steve Beshekas, called The West Compass Trio. After being discovered by Bernard Sahlins, he performed with The Second City and met Aykroyd, Brian Doyle-Murray and Harold Ramis.
In 1975, Belushi was recommended to SNL creator and showrunner Lorne Michaels by Chevy Chase and Michael O'Donoghue, who accepted Belushi as a new cast member of the show after an audition. He developed a series of characters on the show that reached high success, including his performances as Henry Kissinger and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Belushi's Albanian ancestry lent itself to his classic Olympia Restaurant sketch in which he sold nothing but cheeseburgers, cheeps [potato chips] and Pepsi.
After his breakout film role as John Blutarsky in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), Belushi later appeared in films such as 1941, The Blues Brothers, and Neighbors. He also pursued interests in music, creating with Aykroyd, Lou Marini, Tom Malone, Steve Cropper, Donald Duck Dunn, Paul Shaffer, and The Blues Brothers, from which the film received its name.
In his personal life, Belushi struggled with heavy drug use that threatened his comedy career; he was dismissed and rehired at SNL on several occasions due to his behaviour.
In 1982, Belushi died from combined drug intoxication possibly caused by Cathy Smith, who injected him with a mixture of heroin and cocaine known as a speedball. He was posthumously honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004.
John Adam Belushi was born to Agnes Demetri Belushi and Adam Anastos Belushi in Humboldt Park, a neighbourhood on the West Side of Chicago.
Belushi's mother, Agnes Demetri, a pharmacy worker, was born in Ohio to Albanian immigrants; his father, Adam Anastos Belushi, was an Albanian immigrant from Qytezë, who owned the Fair Oaks restaurant, on North Avenue in Chicago, later a restaurant in Wheaton.
Belushi started his own comedy troupe in Chicago, the West Compass Trio, named after the improvisational cabaret revue Compass Players active from 1955 to 1958 in Chicago, with Tino Insana and Steve Beshekas. Their success piqued the interest of Bernard Sahlins, the founder of The Second City improvised comedy enterprise, who went to see them performing in 1971 and asked Belushi to join the cast. At Second City, he met and began working with Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty and Brian Doyle-Murray.
In 1975, Chase and writer Michael O'Donoghue recommended Belushi to Lorne Michaels as a potential member for a television show Michaels was about to produce called NBC's Saturday Night, later Saturday Night Live (SNL). Michaels was initially undecided, as he was not sure if Belushi's physical humour would fit with what he was envisioning, but he changed his mind after giving Belushi an audition.
Over his four-year tenure at SNL, Belushi developed a series of successful characters, including the belligerent Samurai Futaba, Henry Kissinger, Ludwig van Beethoven, the Greek owner (Pete Dionisopoulos) of the Olympia Café, Captain James T. Kirk, and a contributor of furious opinion pieces on Weekend Update, during which he coined his catchphrase, But N-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O!
With Aykroyd, Belushi created Jake and Elwood, The Blues Brothers. Originally intended to warm up the crowd before the show, The Blues Brothers were eventually featured as musical guests.
Belushi also reprised his Lemmings imitation of Joe Cocker. Cocker himself joined Belushi in 1976 to sing Feelin' Alright? together.
Like many of his fellow SNL cast members, Belushi began experimenting heavily with drugs and attended concerts with many of the popular artists of the era including Fleetwood Mac, Meatloaf, KISS, The Dead Boys, Warren Zevon, The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers. On Later with Bob Costas in 1990, Lorne Michaels would remember him as loyal to the writers and a team player, but he was fired and immediately re-hired by Michaels a number of times.
In Rolling Stone's February 2015 appraisal of all 141 SNL cast members to that time, Belushi received the top ranking. Belushi was the 'live' in Saturday Night Live, they wrote, the one who made the show happen on the edge... Nobody embodied the highs and lows of SNL like Belushi.
In 1978, Belushi performed in the films Old Boyfriends, Goin' South, and National Lampoon's Animal House.
In 1979, Belushi left SNL with Aykroyd to film Blues Brothers which conflicted with the shooting schedule of SNL. Lorne Michaels decided to leave at the end of his contract and the network's pressure to use recurring characters were also factors in their decision. They made two films together after leaving, Neighbor, and most notably The Blues Brothers.
Belushi died from combined drug intoxication possibly caused by Cathy Smith, who injected him with a mixture of heroin and cocaine known as a speedball.
