- Order:
- Duration: 5:37
- Published: 21 Aug 2009
- Uploaded: 15 May 2011
- Author: MagnoliaTxCowboy
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Caption | Palin at the 2010 Time 100 Gala |
---|---|
Name | Sarah Palin |
Order1 | 9th |
Office1 | Governor of Alaska |
Term start1 | December 4, 2006 |
Term end1 | July 26, 2009 |
Lieutenant1 | Sean Parnell |
Predecessor1 | Frank Murkowski |
Successor1 | Sean Parnell |
Office2 | Chairperson of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission |
Term start2 | 2003 |
Term end2 | 2004 |
Governor2 | Frank Murkowski |
Predecessor2 | Camille Oechsli Taylor |
Birth place | Sandpoint, Idaho, U.S. |
Ethnicity | English, Irish and German |
Alma mater | University of Hawaii at HiloHawaii Pacific CollegeNorth Idaho CollegeMatanuska-Susitna College |
Spouse | Todd Palin (m. 1988) |
Children | Track (b. 1989)Bristol (b. 1990)Willow (b. 1994)Piper (b. 2001)Trig (b. 2008) she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party, as well as the first female vice-presidential nominee of the Republican Party. |
Title | Sarah Palin succession and navigation boxes |
State | collapsed |
List1 |
Category:1964 births Category:21st-century women writers Category:Alaska city councillors Category:Alaska Republicans Category:American broadcast news analysts Category:American broadcasters of Irish descent Category:American evangelicals Category:American fishers Category:American political pundits Category:American political writers Category:American politicians of Irish descent Category:American television sports announcers Category:American women mayors Category:American women state governors Category:American women writers Category:American writers of Irish descent Category:Beauty pageant contestants Category:Conservatism in the United States Category:Converts to evangelical Christianity from Roman Catholicism Category:Female United States vice-presidential candidates Category:Governors of Alaska Category:Living people Category:Mayors of Wasilla, Alaska Category:National Rifle Association members Category:Palin family Category:People from Sandpoint, Idaho Category:Republican Party (United States) vice presidential nominees Category:Tea Party movement Category:United States vice-presidential candidates, 2008 Category:University of Idaho alumni Category:Women in Alaska politics Category:Writers from Alaska Category:Writers from Idaho Category:Fox News Channel people
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Name | Merv Griffin |
---|---|
Birth name | Mervyn Edward Griffin, Jr. |
Birth date | July 06, 1925 |
Birth place | San Mateo, California, U.S. |
Death date | August 12, 2007 |
Death place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Death cause | Prostate cancer |
Resting place | Westwood Village Memorial Park, Los Angeles |
Resting place coordinates | |
Occupation | Actor, talk show host, entertainer, business magnate |
Years active | 1944–2007 |
Spouse | Julann Wright (1958–1976; divorced) |
Children | Tony Griffin (b. 1959) He began his career as a radio and big band singer who went on to appear in movies and on Broadway. During the 1960s, Griffin hosted his own talk show, The Merv Griffin Show, and created the game shows Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, Click, and Merv Griffin's Crosswords. He is considered an entertainment business magnate. |
Name | Griffin, Jr., Mervyn Edward|ALTERNATIVE NAMES= |
Short description | American singer and television game show producer |
Date of birth | July 6, 1925 |
Place of birth | San Mateo, California |
Date of death | August 12, 2007 |
Place of death | Los Angeles, California |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Name | Kenneth Anger |
---|---|
Caption | Kenneth Anger in August 2008. |
Birth name | Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer |
Birth date | February 03, 1927 |
Birth place | Santa Monica, California |
Occupation | filmmaker, actor, author |
Years active | 1941 – present |
Awards | Maya Deren Independent Film and Video Artists Award (1996) Spirit of Silver Lake Award (2000)Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award (2001)Independent/Experimental Film and Video Award (2002) |
Imdb id | 0001910 |
Anger has described filmmakers such as Auguste and Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès as influences, and has been cited as an important influence on later film directors like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and John Waters. He has also been described as having "a profound impact on the work of many other filmmakers and artists, as well as on music video as an emergent art form using dream sequence, dance, fantasy, and narrative."
Kenneth, their third and final child, was born in 1927, but growing up he would fail to get along with either his parents or his siblings. His brother Bob later claimed that being the youngest child, Kenneth had been spoilt by his mother and grandmother, and as such had become somewhat "bratty". His grandmother, Bertha, was a big influence on the young Kenneth, and indeed helped to maintain the family financially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was she who first took Kenneth to the cinema, to see a double bill of The Singing Fool and Thunder Over Mexico and also encouraged his artistic interests. She herself later moved into a house in Hollywood with another woman, Miss Diggy, who equally encouraged Kenneth. He developed an early interest in film, and enjoyed reading the movie tie-in Big Little books. He would later relate that "I was a child prodigy who never got smarter." He retrospected his attendance at the Santa Monica Cotillon where child stars were encouraged to mix with ordinary children and through this met Shirley Temple, whom he danced with on one occasion.
It was in 1935, he would later claim, that he actually had the chance to appear in a Hollywood film – as the Changeling Prince in the 1935 Warner Bros. film A Midsummer Night's Dream by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, a film that certainly influenced him, particularly in his later production of Rabbit's Moon. Set photographs and studio production reports (on file in the Warner Bros. Collection, USC, and the Warner Bros. collection of studio key books at George Eastman House, Rochester NY) in fact contradict Anger's claims, stating that that the character was played by a girl named Sheila Brown. Reports have subsequently emerged that have been attributed to the actor Mickey Rooney, who played the character of Puck in the film, claiming that Sheila Brown was in fact Anger dressed up as a girl by his mother. Rooney supposedly had befriended Anglemyer on set, and Anger himself would later fondly remark of him in his book Hollywood Babylon II, describing him as "Puck Forever". Anger's unofficial biographer, Bill Landis, remarked in 1995 that the Changeling Prince was definitely "Anger as a child; visually, he's immediately recognisable".
In 1944, the Anglemyers moved to Hollywood to live with their grandmother, and Kenneth began attending Beverly Hills High School. It was here that he met Maxine Peterson, who had once been the stand-in for Shirley Temple, and he asked her, alongside another classmate and an old woman, to appear in his next film project, which he initially called Demigods but which was later retitled Escape Episode. Revolving partially around the occult, it was filmed in a "spooky old castle" in Hollywood and was subsequently screened at the Coronet Theater on North La Cienega, Los Angeles. Around this time Anger also began attending the screenings of silent films held at Clara Grossman's art gallery, through which he met a fellow filmmaker, Curtis Harrington, and together they formed Creative Film Associates, whose purpose it was to distribute underground films such as those of Maya Deren, John and James Whitney, as well as their own.
It was whilst at high school that he began to get interested in the occult, which he had first indirectly encountered through reading Frank L. Baum's Oz books as a child, with their accompanying Rosicrucian philosophies. Kenneth was very interested in the works of the French ceremonial magician Eliphas Levi, as well as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, although his favourite was the writings of the English occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley had founded a religion known as Thelema based upon a religious experience that he had in Egypt in 1904, in which he claimed a being known as Aiwass had contacted him and recited to him The Book of the Law. Kenneth subsequently became a great fan of Crowley's work and converted to Thelema.
One of the first people to buy a copy of Fireworks was the sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research. He and Anger struck up a friendship that would last until the doctor's death, during which time Anger aided Kinsey in his research. According to Anger's unofficial biographer Bill Landis, Kinsey became a "father figure" whom Anger "could both interact with and emulate." Meanwhile, in 1949 Anger began work on a film called Puce Women, which unlike Fireworks was filmed in colour. It starred Yvonne Marquis as a glamorous woman going about her daily life; Anger would later state that "Puce Women was my love affair with Hollywood... with all the great goddesses of the silent screen. They were to be filmed in their homes; I was, in effect, filming ghosts." A lack of funding meant that only one scene was ever produced, which was eventually released under the title Puce Moment. That same year, Anger directed The Love That Whirls, a film based upon Aztec human sacrifice but, because of the nudity that it contained, it was destroyed by technicians at the film lab, who deemed it to be obscene.
In 1953, he travelled to Rome, Italy where he planned to make a film about the sixteenth century occultist Cardinal d'Este. To do so, he began filming at the garden of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, in which a lady in eighteenth century dress walked through the gardens, which featured many waterfalls (an allusion to the fact that d'Este allegedly sexually enjoyed urination), This was supposedly going to be only the first of four scenes, but the others were not made; the resulting one-scene film was entitled Eaux d'Artifice. As Anger's biographer Bill Landis remarked, "It's one of Anger's most tranquil works; his editing makes it soft, lush, and inviting. Eaux d'Artifice remains a secretive romp through a private garden, all for the masked figure's and the viewer-voyeur's pleasure."
In 1953, soon after the production of Eaux d'Artifice, Anger's mother died and he temporarily returned to the United States in order to take part in the distribution of her will. It was during this return that he began to once more immerse himself in the artistic scene of California, befriending the film maker Stan Brakhage, who had been inspired by Fireworks, and the two collaborated on producing a film, but it was confiscated at the film lab for obscenity and presumably destroyed. Around this time, two of Anger's friends, the couple Renate Druks and Paul Mathiesin held a party based upon the theme of 'Come As Your Madness'; Anger himself attended dressed in drag as the ancient Greek goddess Hekate. The party and its many costumes inspired Anger, who produced a painting of it, and asked several of those who attended to appear in a new film that he was creating – Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Inauguration, which was created in 1954, was a 38 minute surrealist work featuring many Crowleyan and Thelemite themes, with many of the various different characters personifying various pagan gods such as Isis, Osiris and Pan. One of the actresses in the film was Marjorie Cameron, the widow of Jack Parsons, the influential American Thelemite who had died a few years previously, whilst Anger himself played Hecate. He would subsequently exhibit the film at various European film festivals, winning the Prix du Ciné-Club Belge and the Prix de l'Age d'Or as well as screening it in the form of a projected triptych at Expo 58, the World Fair held in Brussels in 1958.
In 1955, Anger and his friend Alfred Kinsey travelled to the derelict Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily in order to film a short documentary entitled Thelema Abbey. The abbey itself had been used by Aleister Crowley for his commune during the 1920s, and Anger restored many of the erotic wallpaintings that were found there as well as performing certain Crowleyan rituals at the site. The documentary was made for the British television series Omnibus, who later lost it. The following year Kinsey died, and Anger decided to return to Paris, and was described at this time as being "extremely remote and lonely".
In desperate need of money, Anger wrote a book titled Hollywood Babylon in which he revealed much of the illicit gossip regarding celebrities that he had been told. This included claiming that Rudolph Valentino liked to play a sexually submissive role to dominant women, as well as describing the nature of the deaths of Peg Entwistle and Lupe Velez. The work was initially not published in the United States, instead the publisher was the French Jean Jacques Pauvert. A pirated (and incomplete) version was first published in the U.S. in 1965, with the official American version not being published until 1974. Now with some financial backing from the publication of Hollywood Babylon, his next film project was The Story of O; essentially a piece of erotica featuring a heterosexual couple engaged in sadomasochistic sexual activities, although it refrained from showing any explicit sexual images.
With Scorpio Rising finished and Anger now living in San Francisco, he went to the Ford Foundation, which had just started a program of giving out grants to filmmakers. He showed them his ideas for a new artistic short, entitled Kustom Kar Kommandos, which they approved of, and gave him a grant of $10,000. However, Anger spent much of the money on living expenses and making alterations to some of his earlier films, meaning that by the time he actually created Kustom Kar Kommandos, it was only one scene long. This homoerotic film involved various shots of a young man polishing a drag strip racing car, accompanied with a pink background and the song "Dream Lover" by The Paris Sisters. Soon after, Anger struck a deal that allowed Hollywood Babylon to be officially published in the United States for the first time, where it proved a success, selling two million copies during the 1960s, and around the same time Anger also translated Lo Duca's History of Eroticism into English for American publication.
In 1966, Anger moved into the ground floor of a large nineteenth century house in San Francisco known as the Russian Embassy. Around this time he began planning for a new film, which he planned to title Lucifer Rising and which would echo his Thelemite beliefs about the energing Aeon of Horus. He had the name of Lucifer tattooed upon his chest and began searching for a young man who could symbolically become Lucifer, "the Crowned and Conquering Child" of the new Aeon, for Lucifer Rising. He met various young men who could fit the position, inviting each to live with him at the Russian Embassy, although eventually he settled upon a man named Bobby Beausoleil. Beausoleil also formed a band, the Magic Powerhouse of Oz, in order to record the music for the film. Then, in 1967, Anger claimed that the footage which he had been filming for Lucifer Rising had been stolen, and he placed the blame upon Beausoleil, who would deny the claims, later telling Anger's unofficial biographer Bill Landis that "what had happened was that Kenneth had spent all the money that was invested in Lucifer Rising" and that he therefore invented the story to satisfy the film's creditors. Beausoleil and Anger fell out, with the former getting involved with Charles Manson and his cult, the Family, eventually carrying out Manson's bidding by torturing and murdering Gary Hinman.
Anger subsequently decided to publicly reinvent himself. In the October 26, 1967 issue of Village Voice he placed a full-page advert declaring "In Memoriam. Kenneth Anger. Filmmaker 1947–1967". He soon publicly reappeared, this time to claim that he had burned all of his early work. The following year he travelled to London where he first met J. Paul Getty, who would subsequently become Anger's patron, and where he also met and befriended Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, members of The Rolling Stones, as well as Richards' drug addicted girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. Anger then decided to use much of the footage created for Lucifer Rising in a new film of his, Invocation of My Demon Brother, which starred Beausoleil, LaVey, Jagger and Richards, as well as Anger himself, and the music for which had been composed by Jagger. It was released in 1969, and explored many of the Thelemic themes that Anger had originally intended for Lucifer Rising.
Meanwhile, Anger, who moved to an apartment in New York City, took the footage that he had filmed for Rabbit's Moon in the 1950s, finally releasing the film in 1972, and again in a shorter version in 1979. Around the same time he also added a new soundtrack to Puce Moment and re-released it. It was also around this time that the publisher Marvin Miller produced a low budget documentary film based on Hollywood Babylon without Anger's permission, greatly angering him and leading him to sue. He also created a short film entitled Senators in Bondage which was only available to private collectors and which has never been made publicly available, and had plans to make a film about Aleister Crowley entitled The Wickedest Man in the World, but this project never got off the ground. In 1980, he holidayed with his friend, the playwright Tennessee Williams.
It was in 1981, a decade after starting the project, that he finally finished and released the 30-minute long Lucifer Rising. Based upon the Thelemite concept that mankind had entered a new period known as the Aeon of Horus, Lucifer Rising was full of occult symbolism, starring Miriam Gibril as the Ancient Egyptian goddess Isis and Donald Cammell as her consort Osiris, as well as Marianne Faithfull as the Biblical figure of Lilith and Leslie Huggins as Lucifer himself. Anger once again appeared in the film, starring as the Magus, the same role that he played in Invocation to My Demon Brother. He had surrealistically combined the roles that these characters played with footage of volcanoes, various ancient Egyptian temples and a Crowleyan adept reading from the man's texts.
In 1986, he sold the video rights to his films, which finally appeared on VHS, allowing them to have greater publicity. The following year he attended the Avignon Film Festival in France where his work was being celebrated in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of Fireworks. Soon after this, a BBC documentary about Anger was made, directed by Nigel Finch for the Arena series, in which Anger himself was interviewed. In 1991, Anger moved to West Arenas Boulevard in Palm Springs, where the British Film Institute sent Rebecca Wood to assist him in writing an autobiography, which was never actually produced. Instead, in 1995, Bill Landis, who had been an associate of Anger's in the early 1980s, wrote an unofficial biography of him, which Anger himself condemned, describing Landis as "an avowed enemy".
Anger makes an appearance in the 2008 feature documentary by Nik Sheehan about Brion Gysin and the Dreamachine entitled FLicKeR. In 2009 his work was featured in a retrospective exhibition at the MoMA PS1 in New York City, and the following year a similar exhibition took place in London.
Anger has finished writing Hollywood Babylon III, but has not yet published it, fearing severe legal repercussions if he did so. Of this he has stated that "The main reason I didn't bring it out was that I had a whole section on Tom Cruise and the Scientologists. I'm not a friend of the Scientologists."
One of the central recurring images found in Anger's work is the concept of flames and light; in Fireworks there are various examples of this, including a burning Christmas tree, and it subsequently appears in many of his other works as well. This relates to the concept of Lucifer, a deity whom Anger devoted one of his films to, and whose name is Latin for "light bearer".
In many of his films, heavy use is made of music, both classical and pop, to accompany the visual imagery. For instance, in Scorpio Rising he makes use of the 1950s pop songs "Torture" by Kris Jensen, "I Will Follow Him" by Little Peggy March and "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton, something that he believed was later copied by David Lynch in his 1986 movie Blue Velvet. He first used music to accompany visuals in the 1941 work Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat?, where he used tracks by the Mills Brothers. }}
Anger has always been an "extremely private individual", In such interviews, he refuses to disclose information on his name change from Anglemeyer to Anger, telling an interviewer who brought the topic up in 2004 that "You're being impertinent. It says Anger on my passport, that's all you need to know. I would stay away from that subject if I was you." He once joked that he was "somewhat to the right of the KKK" in his views about black people, opening him up to criticism for racism. He is a passionate supporter of the Tibetan independence movement.
Anger is a Thelemite and after many years joined the Thelemic organisation, the Ordo Templi Orientis. He viewed many of the men he associated with as living embodiments of Lucifer, a symbol of the Aeon of Horus in Thelemic philosophy, and had the name of Lucifer tattooed onto his chest, which he identifies as being his own. |- | 1941–42 || Tinsel Tree || 3 mins. || A silent black and white film that Anger personally hand tinted with gold-scarlet over the flames. It featured a Christmas tree being dressed in decorations, before being shown stripped and bare and set on fire. |- | 1942 || Prisoner of Mars || 11 mins. || A silent black and white film that mixes futuristic science fiction with the ancient Greek myth of the Minotaur. The plot revolves around a character, The Boy Elect from Earth, played by Anger himself, who is sent in a rocket to Mars where he finds himself in a labyrinth filled with the bones of other adolescents sent there in the past. |- | 1943 || The Nest || 20 mins. || A silent black and white film in which a brother (played by Bob Jones) and sister (Jo Whittaker) are examining mirrors when a third figure (Dare Harris), causes them to act violently against one another, before a magical rite takes place in which the sister's binding spell is destroyed by the brother. |- | 1944 || Demigods (Escape Episode) || 35 mins. || A silent black and white film based upon the ancient Greek myth of Andromeda, in which a girl (Marilyn Granas) is imprisoned within a seaside crumbling Neo-Gothic church guarded by a religious fanatic (Nora Watson), till she is saved by a boy representing Perseus (Bob Jones). |- | 1945 || Drastic Demise || 5 mins. || A silent black and white work filmed by Anger in Hollywood on V-J Day. Comprising of footage of a celebratory crowd, it ends with an image of a nuclear mushroom cloud. |- | 1949 || The Love That Whirls || Unknown || Influenced by James Frazer’s anthropological text The Golden Bough, it was set in the Aztec civilisation, and featured a youth who was chosen to be king for a year before being ritually sacrificed. The film was subsequently destroyed at the Eastman-Kodac developing plant, who objected to its theme and nudity. |- | 1953 || Eaux d'Artifice || 12 mins. || A short, monochromatic film appearing in dark blue, with only one moment of color - a woman opens a fan that glows in bright green. The woman appears in a gown stretching from neck to toe, wearing dark glasses and a feathered headdress. Water flows throughout, from fountains, and suggestively through the mouths and over the faces of statuary. Fluids pulse perhaps orgasmicly in arching streams, reminiscent of sexual climax. In the end the woman steps from a door seemingly from the side of a fountain, and is herself transformed into water. The film is set to the music of Vivaldi's Winter Movement from the Four Seasons. |- | 1953 || Le Jeune Homme et la Mort || Unknown || Based upon the ballet by Jean Cocteau, this silent black and white film starred Jean Babilee as a young man and Nathalie Philipart as Death. It was a 16mm pilot designed to be used to raise funds to produce a 35mm technicolour version, but the funding for this never materialised. |- | 1954 || Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome || 38 mins. || |- | 1955 || Thelema Abbey || 10 mins. || A short, black and white documentary on Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, which examined many of the exotic frescoes, a study in which Anger was assisted by sexologist Alfred Kinsey. |- | 1963 || Scorpio Rising || 29 mins. || |- | 1965 || Kustom Kar Kommandos || 3 mins. || In color, set to the tones of "Dream Lover" by The Paris Sisters, several handsome young men stand admiringly over the chasis of a suped up hotrod. A young man slowly works the chamois over the chrome and paint of the machine. The young man now smartly dressed in matching pastel blue gets behind the wheel and begins to work the controls. Finally the engine revs and the car rolls away. |- | 1969 || Invocation of My Demon Brother || 12 mins. || |- | 1970–1980 || Lucifer Rising || 29 mins. || |- | 1976 || Senators in Bondage || || Lost film. |- | 1977 || Matelots en Menottes || || Lost film. |- | 1979 || Denunciation of Stan Brakhage || 7 mins. || Lost film. |- | 2000 || Don't Smoke That Cigarette! || || |- | 2002 || The Man We Want to Hang || 12 mins. || |- | 2004 || Anger Sees Red || 4 mins. || Comprises footage of a muscled man, who identifies himself only as "Red", walking through a park and sunbathing, at which he is seen by Anger himself, who is also in the park, before subsequently returning home. |- | 2004 || Patriotic Penis || || |- | 2005 || Mouse Heaven || 11 mins. || A montage of Mickey Mouse memorabilia from the 1920s and 30s, accompanied by contemporary jazz music. |- | 2007 || Elliott's Suicide || 15 mins. || |- | 2007 || I'll Be Watching You || 5 mins. || |- | 2007 || My Surfing Lucifer || 4 mins. || Color with no sound. "A Tribute to my Surfing Pal Adolph Bunker Spreckels III" "BUNKY". A young man with a while mercedes, the rolling waves breaking on the beach, the surfers riding them in. The film ends with a closeup of the skinned elbow of the surfer, presumably abraded during a wipeout. |- | 2008 || Death || 42 secs. || |- | 2008 || Foreplay || 7 mins. || |- | 2008 || Ich Will! || 35 mins. || |- | 2008 || Uniform Attraction || 21 mins. || |- | 2010 || Missoni || 2 mins. 32 secs. || |}
Category:1927 births Category:Living people Category:American actors Category:American actors of German descent Category:American child actors Category:American experimental filmmakers Category:Surrealist filmmakers Category:American film directors Category:American neopagans Category:American non-fiction writers Category:American people of English descent Category:American Thelemites Category:Censorship in the arts Category:Gay actors Category:Gay artists Category:Gay writers Category:LGBT directors Category:LGBT people from the United States Category:LGBT screenwriters Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:Ordo Templi Orientis Category:People from Santa Monica, California Category:Thelema
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
As for his birthdate, Helio Orovio, in the original Cuban edition of 1981, left Portabales out entirely. In the usual Soviet-style way, any opponents of the revolution get 'painted out' of history; but Portabales had left Cuba years before the Castro revolution, and most such people still retained their place in official Cuban history. Portabales had even recorded an album for Gema in Cuba in 1960, after the revolution but before Egrem took over all recording rights in Cuba. The later English translation reinstated such 'enemies of the state' as Celia Cruz (who was a determined opponent of the regime) and Portabales, giving 6 April 1914 as his date of birth. Cristobal Díaz Ayala gives 6 April 1911.
The date and place of his death also vary in sources. Orovio's English edition says 1961. This is definitely incorrect, because there are at least three recording session whose dates are later in the 1960s: in 1962/3 in Miami; in 1967/8 in New York, issued on Gema 3070 Viva Portabales; and, above all, in October 1970 in Puerto Rico, just a few days before his death (issued Gema 3086 Sones cubanos: Guillermo Portabales con Los Guaracheros de Oriente). This simple refutation throws doubt upon Orovio's other data, and has led to a general acceptance of Cristobal Díaz's version of 25 October 1970.
As for location, Orovio says Isla Verde, Cuba and Díaz says San Juan, Puerto Rico. It is almost unbelievable that the two versions should be so different, and again, it seems right to prefer Díaz, especially as the best-known Isla Verde is in Puerto Rico. Both agree that he died in a traffic accident; he was apparently hit by a car when leaving a gig at the Las Palmas restaurant.
In the beginning, Portabales sang a variety of styles — canción, tango, bolero, son — until he discovered that his listeners enjoyed the guajira the most. He thereby refined the style and developed his signature salon guajira style in which he depicted in bucolic terms the life of the Cuban guajiro (the rural campesino). In typical trovadore fashion, Portabales sang and played guitar, sometimes accompanied by a small group. His guajiras have a gentle, lilting rhythm, sometimes mixing with elements of the son or the bolero.
Portabales continued to perform and perfect the guajira until he went to Puerto Rico in 1937. There he became enamoured of the neighboring island and stayed there for two years, singing in theaters, clubs and on the radio. In 1939, he married Puerto Rican Arah Mina López, a journalist who joined him as he returned to Cuba in 1939. Over the years they toured together in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, New York, and Tampa.
After returning to Havana, Portabales performed on stage and radio with the Trio Matamoros. He also made a successful tour of United States and took an extended stay in Barranquilla, Colombia. In 1953, Portabales finally settled for good in Puerto Rico, where he continued to record and perform, with occasional tours of the continent. During the 1960s, he expressed his opposition to the Cuban Revolution in several discreetly poetic compositions.
His voice, and particularly his guitar technique, improved greatly with experience. This is quite clear from the recordings in his fifties, represented by World Circuit WCD 023 Guillermo Portabales, El Carretero. This includes examples from his three recording sessions in the 1960s
For the quality of his voice, its purity and its subtle evocation of emotion, and the exceptionally high calibre of his guitar technique – which is certainly worth attention by young musicians – Portabales must be rated as a performer of the highest calibre even given the unusually high standards of Cuban popular music.
His style is on the Spanish side of criole in contrast to many other Cuban trova performers in the 20th century: his music is clearly in the tradition of the old Spanish-descent countryside people, the guajiros. His repertoire was originally wide, but he came to specialize in guajira-sons and laments, together with some guaracha-sons. With his smooth style, he was known as the creator of la guajira de salón. As a composer he was perhaps not so important as his rootsier compatriot, Ñico Saquito, but what he did compose was of high quality, and still is popular.
Four of his noteworthy compositions: El carretero; Nostalgia guajira; Cumbiamba; Cuando salí de Cuba.
Category:1911 births Category:1970 deaths Category:Cuban guitarists Category:Cuban songwriters Category:Guajira musicians Category:Cuban male singers Category:World Circuit artists
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Name | Gloria Gaynor |
---|---|
Background | solo_singer |
Birth name | Gloria Fowles |
Born | September 07, 1949Newark, New Jersey |
Genre | Dance-pop, disco, R&B; |
Occupation | Singer-songwriter, actress |
Years active | 1965–present |
Instrument | Vocals |
Label | MGM (1965–76)Polydor (1976–83)Chrysalis (1984–85)Stylus (1986–88)Hot Productions (1996–97)Logic (2000–04)Radikal (2005–Present) |
Associated acts | Soul Satisfiers, Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross |
Url | www.gloriagaynor.com |
Her first real success came in 1975 with the release of her album Never Can Say Goodbye, which established her as a disco artist. The first side of this album consisted of three disco songs ("Honey Bee", "Never Can Say Goodbye" and "Reach Out, I'll Be There"), with no breaks in between the songs. This 19-minute dance marathon proved to be enormously popular, especially at dance clubs. All three songs were released as singles via radio edits, and all of them became hits. The album was instrumental in introducing disco music to the public, "Never Can Say Goodbye" becoming the first song to top Billboard magazine's dance chart. Capitalizing on the success of her first album, Gloria Gaynor quickly released her second album, Experience Gloria Gaynor, later that same year. While this album was also successful, it was not quite as popular as her previous album in the mainstream.
Some of her lesser-known singles, due to lack of recurrent airplay — including "Honey Bee" (1974), "Casanova Brown" (1975), and "Let's Make A Deal" (1976) — became hits in the clubs and reached the Top 5 on Billboard's disco charts. After her 1976 album, I've Got You, Gaynor shifted from her hit production team, to work with other productions. While it seemed like a good move, her subsequent producers did not seem to match Gaynor's vocal approach and style as well.
In late 1979, she released the album I Have a Right which contained her next disco hit, "Let Me Know (I Have a Right)", which featured Doc Severinsen of The Tonight Show fame, on trumpet solo. Gaynor also recorded a disco song called "Love Is Just a Heartbeat Away" in 1979 for the vampire movie which featured a number of disco songs.
Gaynor would achieve her final success in the '80s with the release of her album I Am Gloria Gaynor in 1984. This was mainly due to the song "I Am What I Am", which became a hit at dance clubs, and then on the Club Play chart in late 1983/early 1984. "I Am What I Am" made Gaynor a gay icon. However, her career went into sharp decline following this hit. She mainly made her living outside of the US where there was never any disco backlash. Her 1986 album, The Power of Gloria Gaynor, which was almost entirely composed of cover versions of other songs that were popular at the time. The album was ignored, becoming a commercial failure.
During the late 1990s, she dabbled in acting for a while, guest starring on The Wayans Bros, That '70s Show, and Ally McBeal before doing a limited engagement performance in Broadway's Smokey Joe's Cafe.
In 2001 she sung "I Will Survive" in the 30th Anniversary Concert for Michael Jackson.
She returned to the recording studio in 2002, releasing her first album in over 15 years, entitled, I Wish You Love. The two singles released from the album, "Just Keep Thinking About You" and "I Never Knew", both topped Billboard
After almost 30 years of its release, Gaynor continues to ride the success of "I Will Survive", touring the country and the world over and performing her signature song on dozens of TV shows. A few successful remixes of the song during the 1990s and 2000s along with new versions of the song by Lonnie Gordon, Diana Ross, Chantay Savage, rock group Cake and others as well as constant recurrent airplay on nearly all Soft AC and Rhythmic format radio stations have helped to keep the song in the mainstream.
On September 19, 2005, Gaynor was honored twice when she and her music were inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame. She was inducted in the Artist Inductees category along with fellow disco legends Chic and the late Sylvester. Her classic anthem "I Will Survive" was inducted under the Records Inductees category.
In 2004, Gaynor re-released her 1997 album The Answer (also released under the title What a Life) as a follow up to her successful album I Wish You Love. The album includes her popular club hit "Oh, What a Life".
In January 2008, The American Diabetes Association named Gaynor the Honorary Spokesperson of the 2008 NYC Step Out To Fight Diabetes Walk.
In 2009, she appeared on The John Kerwin Show, The Wendy Williams Show, and The View to promote the 30th anniversary of "I Will Survive".
In 2010, she appeared on Last Comic Standing and The Tonight Show.
In December 5, 2010 Gloria went to Ecuador and sang her biggest hits in Teleton Ecuador.
Category:1949 births Category:African American musicians Category:African American singers Category:American pop singers Category:American dance musicians Category:American house musicians Category:American rhythm and blues musicians Category:American rhythm and blues singers Category:American soul musicians Category:American soul singers Category:American female singers Category:African American actors Category:American disco musicians Category:Hi-NRG musicians Category:Living people Category:People from Newark, New Jersey Category:Musicians from New Jersey Category:Grammy Award winners
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.