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John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967), Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678, Venice–July 28 (or 27), 1741, Vienna), nicknamed Il Prete Rosso ("The Red Priest"), Tupac Amaru Shakur (June 16, 1971 – September 13, 1996), Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), born Eleanor Harris and later called Lady Day , The Who are an English rock band who first came to prominence in the 1960s and grew in stature to be considered one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands of all time , Charles "Bird" Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Early in his career Parker was dubbed "Yardbird" (there are many contradictory stories of its origin). It was later shortened to "Bird" and remained Parker's nickname for the rest of his life and inspiration for the titles of his works, such as "Yardbird Suite" and "Bird Feathers". The New York City nightclub Birdland was named after him, as were the George Shearing song "Lullaby of Birdland" and the Weather Report's composition "Birdland." A persistent myth, repeated by many reputable sources, including the Encyclopedia Britannica, is that Christopher was Parker's second Christian name., Roberto Roena (born on January 16, 1940 in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico was one of the original members of a Puerto Rican salsa music orchestra called El Gran Combo. The group's name had been derived from the name of an existing band named "El Combo" in which many of the original band members had been involved in. Roena, aside from being a percussionist, was a dancer and baseball player. In 1969, he went on to form one of the best Latin salsa bands in Puerto Rico called Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound that recorded such hits, as Y Tu Loco Loco, Traicion, Que Se Sepa and Herencia Rumbero. Also, Roena has been a long-time member of the Fania All Stars, a salsa group that has enjoyed worldwide success since the 1970s. He recorded his signature song, "Coro Miyare", with the group; live performances of the song featured Roena playing the bongos and dancing with his uncle, legendary salsa dancer AnÃbal Vázquez, in a choreographed section that almost always received standing ovations from the audience. Mr. Roena took a giant step in the fusion of salsa in the 1970's by joining forces with African superstar Manu Dibango of "Soul Makossa" fame., Led Zeppelin were an English rock band, and are one of the most successful groups in popular music history. Led Zeppelin consisted of four men: Jimmy Page (guitar), Robert Plant (lead vocals, harmonica), John Bonham (drums), and John Paul Jones (bass guitar, keyboards and mandolin)., Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones (born September 14, 1973), known simply as Nas, is a prominent African-American rapper., Fiona Apple Maggart (born September 13, 1977) is a Grammy award winning American singer-songwriter. She is best known as Fiona Apple., Ludwig van Beethoven (pronounced ['be?.to.v?n]) (baptised December 17, 1770[1] – March 26, 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of music, and was the predominant figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music. His reputation and genius have inspired—and in many cases intimidated—ensuing generations of composers, musicians, and audiences., Earl Simmons (born on December 18, 1970), better known by his stage name DMX, is an American rapper and actor, who became popular during the late-1990s into the 2000s., Héctor Lavoe (born Héctor Juan Pérez MartÃnez, September 30, 1946 in Ponce, Puerto Rico - d. June 29, 1993 in New York City) was a Puerto Rican salsa singer.He performed at some of the most prestigious concert halls featuring Salsa, as well as Jazz events like the Newport Jazz Festival. His recordings have also garnered him many awards and gold albums. His success is attributed to his musical expression of his unique jibaro salsa flavor and his love of Puerto Rico., Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart; January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791) was a prolific and highly influential composer of Classical music, widely considered as one of the greatest composers in the history of that genre. His enormous output of more than six hundred compositions includes works that are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Mozart is among the most enduringly popular of European composers, and many of his works are part of the standard concert repertoire.
Unforgiven (1992) Directed by Clint Eastwood, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Directed by John Ford, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) Directed by Terry Gilliam, Seven Samurai (1954) Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964) Directed by Jacques Demy, Modern Times (1936) Directed by Charles Spencer Chaplin "Charlie"., Aniki {Brother} (2000) Directed by Takeshi Kitano, King of Hearts (1967) Directed by Phillipe de Broca, Snatch (2000) Directed by Guy Ritchie, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966) Directed by Sergio Leone & many others...
, , , , , , , , , William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years that was revised and expanded a number of times. It was never published during his lifetime, and was only given the title after his death. Up until this time it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.,William Butler Yeats (IPA: /je?ts/) (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and public figure, brother of the artist Jack Butler Yeats and son of John Butler Yeats. Yeats, though born to an Anglo-Saxon Protestant mother and father, was perhaps the primary driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre[1]. Yeats also served as an Irish Senator. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30 1885 - November 1 1972) was a poet and critic who, along with T. S. Eliot, was one of the major figures of the modernist movement in early 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. The critic Hugh Kenner said on meeting Pound: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism."Early life and contemporariesPound was born in Hailey, Idaho, United States to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. He studied for two years at the University of Pennsylvania and later received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1905. During studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he was engaged for a time. H.D. also became involved with a woman named Frances Gregg around this time. Shortly afterwards, H.D. and Gregg, along with Gregg's mother, went to Europe. Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal. In 1908 he traveled to Europe, settling in London after spending several months in Venice.The London RevolutionThe cover of the 1915 wartime number of the Vorticist magazine BLAST Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and other 19th century poets and medieval Romance literature, as well as much neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy. When he moved to London, under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme, he began to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms in an attempt to remake himself as a poet. He believed W. B. Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England, eventually being employed as the Irish poet's secretary. He was also interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. During the war, Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, studying Japanese, especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan, whose work on Chinese characters Pound developed into what he called the Ideogrammic Method. In 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist, and the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, a novelist and former lover of W.B. Yeats. In the years before the First World War, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of Imagism, and contributed the name to the movement known as Vorticism, which was led by Wyndham Lewis. These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, can be seen as central events in the birth of English-language modernism. Pound also edited his friend Eliot's The Waste Land, the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention. In 1915, Pound published Cathay, a small volume of poems that Pound described as “For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku [Li Po], from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga." The volume includes works such as The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter and A Ballad of the Mulberry Road. Unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, who tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound offered readers free verse translations celebrated for their ease of diction and conversationality. Many critics consider the poems in Cathay to be the most successful realization of Pound's Imagist poetics. Whether or not the poems are valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy. Neither Pound nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been criticized for omitting or adding sections to his poems which have no basis in the original texts. Many critics argue, however, that the fidelity of Cathay to the original Chinese is beside the point. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter entitled "The Invention of China," contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a book about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West. The war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization and he abandoned London soon after, but not before he published Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). If these poems together form a farewell to Pound's London career, The Cantos, which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward.ParisIn 1920, Pound moved to Paris where he moved among a circle of artists, musicians and writers who were revolutionising the whole world of modern art. He was friends with notable figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Leger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He continued working on The Cantos, writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence" which introduced one of the major personas of the poem. The poem increasingly reflected his preoccupations with politics and economics. During this time, he also wrote critical prose, translations and composed two complete operas (with help from George Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy ménage à trois which was to last until the end of the poet's life.ItalyEzra Pound's annotations on his copy of James Legge's translation of the Book of Poetry (Shih Ching), in the Sacred Books of the East. On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925. In Italy he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came to see Pound, arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin was also inspired at this time to start the publishing company New Directions which would become a vehicle for many new authors. At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in Rapallo where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed. In particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th century revival of interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his death. In Italy Pound became an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, and anti-Semitic sentiments begin to appear in his writings. He made his first trip back home for many years in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, and considered moving back permanently, but in the end he chose to return to Italy. Aside from his political sympathy with the Mussolini regime, Pound had personal reasons for staying. His elderly parents had retired to Italy to be with him, and were in poor health and would have difficulty making the trip back to America even under peacetime conditions. He also had an Italian-born daughter by his mistress Olga Rudge: Mary (or Maria) Rudge was a young woman in her late teens who had lived in Italy her whole life and who might have had difficulty relocating to America (even though she had American as well as Italian citizenship.) Pound remained in Italy after the outbreak of the Second World War, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941. He became a leading Axis propagandist. He also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing, and he wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a series of talks on cultural matters. Inevitably, he touched on political matters, and his opposition to the war and his anti-Semitism were apparent on occasions. A transcript from one of his broadcasts reads: "The big Jew is so bound up with this Leihkapital that no one is able to unscramble that omelet. It would be better for you to retire to Darbyshire and defy New Jerusalem, better for you to retire to Gloucester and find one spot that is England than to go on fighting for Jewry and ignoring the process....You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew....And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into" (March 15, 1942).It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard his radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters were weak and unreliable. It is clear, however, that his writings for Italian newspapers (as well as a number of books and pamphlets) did have some influence in Italy. In July 1943, the southern half of Italy was overrun by Allied forces. At the Allies' behest, King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Mussolini as premier of the Kingdom of Italy. Mussolini escaped to the north, where he declared himself the President of the new Salo Republic. Pound played a significant role in cultural and propaganda activities in the new republic, which lasted till the spring of 1945. On May 2, 1945, he was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." The next day, he turned himself in to U.S. forces. He was incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa, spending twenty-five days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He also drafted the Pisan Cantos in the camp. This section of the work in progress marks a shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and Europe's ruin and on his place in the natural world. The Pisan Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948.St. ElizabethsAfter the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the time when the Kingdom of Italy was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Saló Republic (evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States). He was found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958. His insanity plea is still a matter of some controversy, since in retrospect his activities and his writings during the war years do not appear to be those of a clinically insane person. The insanity plea was part of a plea bargain designed to save his life, since treason is potentially a capital offense. As it turned out, there were a number of other American Axis collaborators who stood trial after the war without being sentenced to death. Pound's controversial insanity plea is mirrored by the fate of Norwegian author and collaborator Knut Hamsun, who was similarly dubbed insane by embarrassed authorities despite evidence (in the form of subsequent published material) to the contrary. Following his release, Pound was asked his opinions on his home country. He famously quipped: "America is a lunatic asylum." Subsequently he returned to Italy, where he remained until his death in 1972. Pound was conceited and flamboyant, not to say obsessive, which in psychiatric terms became "grandiosity of ideas and beliefs." By contrast, E. Fuller Torrey believed that Pound was coddled by Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the hospital, where he wrote three books, received visits from literary celebrities and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife and several mistresses. However, the reliability of Torrey’s allegations has been questioned. Other scholars have presented Overholser as behaving solely in a humane way to his famous patient, without allowing him special privileges. At St. Elizabeths, Pound was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on The Cantos as well as translating the Confucian classics. One of Pound's most frequent visitors was the then-chairman of the States' Rights Democratic Party, with whom Pound used to discuss strategy and tactics on how best to rally public support for the preservation of racial segregation in the American South.ound was also befriended there by Hugh Kenner, whose The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was highly influential in causing a re-assessment of Pound's poetry. Other scholars began to edit the Pound Newsletter, which eventually led to the publication of the first guide to The Cantos, Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1957). Pound was most happy in his relations with fellow-poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, who recorded her response to Pound’s tragic situation in the poem "Visits to St. Elizabeths," and Robert Lowell, who visited and corresponded extensively with Pound. Another visitor who is believed to have inspired the love-poetry in Cantos XC-XCV was the artist Sheri Martinelli. Both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukosfsky were among Pound's visitors, as was Guy Davenport, who subsequently wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as Cities on Hills in 1983). Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. He was still considered incurably insane, but not dangerous to others.Return to Italy and DeathOn his release, Pound returned to Italy where he continued writing, but his old certainties had deserted him. Although he continued working on The Cantos, he seemed to view them as an artistic failure. Allen Ginsberg, in an interview with Michael Reck, stated that Pound seemed to regret many of his past actions, and that he regretted that his work was tainted with "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism" , although contemporaneous letters published in recent years indicate that he was still unrepentantly anti-Semitic. Pound died in Venice in 1972.Musical Quality of Pound's PoetryPound's The Cantos, one of the 20th century's most important literary works, is a poem that contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs --though it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz el sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia." In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from ten different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and Francois Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music. In 1919, when he was 34, Pound began charting his path as a novice composer, writing privately that he intended a revolt against the impressionistic music of Debussy. An autodidact, Pound described his working method as "improving a system by refraining from obedience to all its present 'laws'..." With only a few formal lessons in music composition, Pound produced a small body of work, including a setting of Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno," for violin. His most important output is the pair of operas: Le Testament, a setting of Francois Villon's long poem of that name, written in 1461; and Cavalcanti, a setting of 11 poems by Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250-1300). Pound began composing the Villon with the help of Agnes Bedford, London pianist and vocal coach. Though the work is notated in Bedford's hand, Pound scholar Robert Hughes has been able to determine that Pound was artistically responsible for the work's overall dramatic and acoustic design. During the fecund Paris years of 1921-1924, Pound formed close friendships with the American pianist and composer George Antheil, and Antheil's touring partner, the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Pound championed Antheil's music and asked his help in devising a system of micro-rhythms that would more accurately render the vitalistic speech rhythms of Villon's Old French for Le Testament. The resulting collaboration of 1923 used irregular meters that were considerably more elaborate than Stravinsky's benchmarks of the period, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) and L'Histoire du Soldat (1918). For example, "Heaulmiere," one of the opera's key arias, at a tempo of quarter note = M.M. 88, moves from 2/8 to 25/32 to 3/8 to 2/4 meter (bars 25-28), creating for the performers ferocious difficulties in hearing the current bar of music and anticipating the upcoming bar. Rudge performed in the 1924 and 1926 Paris preview concerts of Le Testament, but insisted to Pound that the meter was impractical. In Le Testament there is no predictability of manner; no comfort zone for singer or listener; no rests or breath marks. Though Pound stays within the hexatonic scale to evoke the feel of troubadour melodies, modern invention runs throughout, from the stream of unrelenting dissonance in the mother's prayer to the grand shape of the work's aesthetic arc over a period of almost an hour. The rhythm carries the emotion. The music admits the corporeal rhythms (the score calls for human bones to be used in the percussion part); scratches, hiccoughs, and counter-rhythms lurch against each other--an offense to courtly etiquette. With "melody against ground tone and forced against another melody," as Pound puts it, the work spawns a polyphony in polyrhythms that ignores traditional laws of harmony. It was a test of Pound's ideal of an "absolute" and "uncounterfeitable" rhythm conducted in the laboratory of someone obsessed with the relationship between words and music. After hearing a concert performance of Le Testament in 1926, Virgil Thomson praised Pound's accomplishment. "The music was not quite a musician's music," he wrote, "though it may well be the finest poet's music since Thomas Campion. . . . Its sound has remained in my memory." Robert Hughes has remarked that where Le Testament explores a Webernesque pointillistic orchestration and derives its vitality from complex rhythms, Cavalcanti (1931) thrives on extensions of melody. Based on the lyric love poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, the opera's numbers are characterized by a challenging bel canto, into which Pound incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to Verdi and a musical motive that gestures to Stravinsky's neo-classicism. By this time the relationship with Antheil had considerably cooled, and Pound, in his gradual acquisition of technical self-sufficiency, was free to emulate certain aspects of Stravinsky. Cavalcanti demands attention to its varying cadences, to a recurring leitmotif, and to a symbolic use of octaves. The play of octaves creates a surrealist straining against the limits of established compositional laws, of history and fate, of physiology, of reason, and especially against the limits of a love born of desire. The audience is asked to strain to hear a political cipher hidden within the music. Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME," distinguishes his 20th century medievalism from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern music, which sought pure abstraction. Antheil's system of time organization is inherently biased for complex, asymmetric, and fast tempi; it thrives on innovation and surprise. Pound's more open system allows for any sequence of pitches; it can accommodate older styles of music with their symmetry, repetition, and more uniform tempi, as well as newer methods, such as the asymmetrical micro-metrical divisions of rhythm created for Le Testament. Pound's iconoclastic music can be compared to that of his contemporary, Charles Ives. Both subjected melody to sophisticated techniques of juxtaposition and layering, Pound shaping melody with literary textures and Ives with harmonic and contrapuntal textures. Each experimented with the combination of different genres placed into a single complex work. Ives selected from among hymns, folk tunes, ballads and minstrelsy, as well as instrumental pieces. Pound selected from a vocal gamut of plainchant, homophony, troubadour melodies, bel canto and nineteenth century opera clichés, as well as 20th-century polyrhythms and cabaret style singing. Pound's music theories are reactionary and revolutionary, irascible and philosophic. His reach passes through the physical science of sound to offer many epiphanies. [edit]ImportanceBecause of his political views, especially his support of Mussolini and his anti-Semitism, Pound attracted much criticism throughout the second half of the twentieth century. As historical revisionist models of criticism wane, however, it seems as though Pound scholars are becoming interested in his words and not his views. It is almost impossible to ignore the vital role he played in the modernist revolution in 20th century literature in English. Pound's perceived importance has varied over the years. The location of Pound -- as opposed to other writers such as T.S. Eliot -- at the center of the Anglo-American Modernist tradition was famously asserted by the critic Hugh Kenner, most fully in his account of the Modernist movement titled The Pound Era. The critic Marjorie Perloff has also insisted upon the centrality of Pound to numerous traditions of "experimental" poetry in the 20th century. As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions. His Imagist poems influenced, among others, the Objectivists. The Cantos and many of Pound's shorter poems were a touchstone for Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets; Ginsberg made an intense study of Pound's use of parataxis which had a major influence on his poetry. Almost every 'experimental' poet in English since the early 20th century has been considered by some to be in his debt. As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped the careers of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Charles Olson and other modernist writers too numerous to mention as well as neglected earlier writers like Walter Savage Landor and Gavin Douglas. Immediately before the first world war Pound became interested in art when he was associated with the Vorticists (Pound coined the word). Pound did much to publicize the movement and was instrumental in bringing it to the attention of the wider public (he was particularly important in the artistic careers of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis). As translator, although his mastery of languages is open to question, Pound did much to introduce Provençal and Chinese poetry to English speaking audiences. For example, insofar as major poets such as Cavalcanti and Du Fu, are known to the English speaking world, it is mainly because of Pound. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the West to classical Japanese poetry and drama (e.g. the Noh). He also translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education and knowledge of anglo-saxon was in decline. In the early 1920s in Paris, Pound became interested in music, and was probably the first serious writer in the 20th century to praise the work of the long-neglected Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi and to promote early music generally. He also helped the early career of George Antheil, and collaborated with him on various projects. The secret to Pound's seemingly bizarre theories and political commitments perhaps lie in his occult and mystical interests, which biographers have only recently begun to document· 'The Birth of Modernism' by Leon Surette is perhaps the best introduction to this aspect of Pound's thought.,Federico GarcÃa Lorca (June 5, 1898 – August 19, 1936) was a Spanish poet and dramatist, also remembered as a painter, pianist, and composer. An emblematic member of the Generation of '27, he was killed by Nationalist partisans at the age of 38 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.LifeBorn into a family of minor, but wealthy, landowners in the village of Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, GarcÃa Lorca was a precocious child, although he did not excel at school. In 1909, his father moved the family to the city of Granada, Andalusia where in time he became deeply involved in local artistic circles. His first collection of prose pieces, Impresiones y paisajes, was published in 1918 to local acclaim but little commercial success. Associations made at Granada's Arts Club were to stand him in good stead when he moved in 1919 to the famous Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid. At university he would befriend Luis Buñuel and Salvador DalÃ, amongst many others who were or would become influential artists in Spain. Here he met Gregorio MartÃnez Sierra, the Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava, at whose invitation he wrote and staged his first play, El maleficio de la mariposa, in 1919-20. A verse play dramatising the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, with a supporting cast of other insects, it was laughed off stage by an unappreciative public after only four performances and soured GarcÃa Lorca's attitude to the theatre-going public for the rest of his career; he would later claim that 1927's Mariana Pineda was his first play. Over the next few years GarcÃa Lorca became increasingly involved in his art and Spain's avant-garde. He published three further collections of poems including Canciones (Songs) and Romancero Gitano (1928, translated as 'Gypsy Ballads', 1953), his best known book of poetry. His second play Mariana Pineda, with stage settings by DalÃ, opened to great acclaim in Barcelona in 1927. However, towards the end of the 1920s, GarcÃa Lorca fell victim to increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over the increasingly unsuccessful concealment of his homosexuality from friends and family. In this he was deeply affected by the success of his Romancero gitano, which increased—through the celebrity it brought him—the painful dichotomy of his life: he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured self, which he could only acknowledge in private. Growing estrangement between GarcÃa Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when the two Surrealists Dalà and Buñuel collaborated on the film Un chien andalou ("An Andalusian Dog", 1929), which GarcÃa Lorca interpreted, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack on him. At the same time, his intensely passionate but fatally one-sided affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén was collapsing as the latter became involved with his future wife. Aware of these problems (though not perhaps of their causes), GarcÃa Lorca's family arranged for him to take a lengthy tour of the United States in 1929-30. GarcÃa Lorca's stay in America, particularly New York, where he studied briefly at Columbia University School of General Studies, was his first adult experience of a democratic society, albeit one he considered to be dominated by rampant commercialism and the social oppression of minority groups, and it acted as a catalyst for some of his most daring work. His collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York explores his alienation and isolation through some graphically experimental poetic techniques, and the two plays Asà que pasen cinco años and El público were far ahead of their time—indeed, El público was not published until the late 1970s and has never been published in its entirety.His return to Spain in 1930 coincided with the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the re-establishment of the Spanish Republic. In 1931, GarcÃa Lorca was appointed as director of a university student theatre company, Teatro Universitario la Barraca ("The Shack"). This was funded by the Second Republic's Ministry of Education, and it was charged with touring Spain's remotest rural areas in order to introduce audiences to radically modern interpretations of classic Spanish theatre. As well as directing, Lorca also acted. While touring with La Barraca, GarcÃa Lorca wrote his best-known plays, the 'rural trilogy' of Bodas de sangre ("Blood Wedding"), Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba. He distilled his theories on artistic creation and performance in a famous lecture entitled "Play and Theory of the Duende", first given in Buenos Aires and Havana in 1933, in which he argued that great art depends upon a vivid awareness of death, connection with a nation's soil, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason. La Barraca was the first to produce Lorca's 'rural trilogy' plays. The group's subsidy was cut in half by the new government in 1934, and la Barraca's last performance was in April 1936.When war broke out in 1936, GarcÃa Lorca left Madrid for Granada, even though he was aware that he was almost certainly heading toward his death in a city reputed to have the most conservative oligarchy in AndalucÃa. GarcÃa Lorca and his brother-in-law, who was also the socialist mayor of Granada, were soon arrested. He was executed, shot by Falange militia on August 19, 1936 and thrown into an unmarked grave in or around between VÃznar and Alfacar, near Granada. There is a large controversy about the motives (personal non-political motives are also suggested) and details of his death. The dossier compiled at Franco's request has yet to surface. The Franco regime placed a general ban on his work, which was not rescinded until 1953 when a (heavily censored) Obras completas was released. That Obras did not include his late Sonnets of Dark Love, written in November 1935 and performed only for close friends — these were lost until 1983/4 when they were finally published. It was only after Franco's death in 1975 that GarcÃa Lorca's life and death could be openly discussed in Spain. In 1968, Joan Baez sang translated renditions of Lorca's poems, "Gacela Of The Dark Death" and "Casida of the Lament" on her spoken-word poetry album, Baptism. In 1986, Leonard Cohen's English translation of the poem "Pequeño vals vienés" by GarcÃa Lorca reached #1 in the Spanish single charts (as "Take This Waltz", music by Cohen). Today, GarcÃa Lorca is honored by a statue prominently located in Madrid's Plaza de Santa Ana. Political philosopher David Crocker reports that "the statue, at least, is still an emblem of the contested past: each day, the Left puts a red kerchief on the neck of the statue, and someone from the Right comes later to take it off."
Mis Padres Sonia Angelica Cruz-De Clet & Gregorio Kuilan-Aguayo (born 12/24/1924 - died 08/30/1995) & all of my ancestors including my maternal grandmother Altagracia Cruz-DeClet's 1st cousin Oscar Collazo (January 20, 1914 – February 21, 1994) born in Florida, Puerto Rico, was one of two Puerto Ricans who attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos (September 12, 1891 – April 21, 1965) born in TenerÃas Village in Ponce, Puerto Rico was the son of Alejandro Albizu and Juana Campos. He was also the nephew of Juan Morel Campos, one of Puerto Rico's greatest composers of danzas. Albizu was the leader and president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and avid advocate of Puerto Rican independence from the United States by what ever means necessary. Albizu felt that Puerto Rico deserved the same right as the United States and other countries had to fight for independence. Known as an energtic orator he is known also as El Maestro ("The Teacher")., EducationIn 1912, Pedro was awarded a scholarship to study Engineering, specializing in Chemistry at the University of Vermont. In 1913 he continued his studies at Harvard University.At the outbreak of World War I, Pedro volunteered in the United States Infantry. Albizu was trained by the French Military mission and served under General Frank McIntyre where he was assigned to an African-American unit and was discharged as a First Lieutenant. During this time he was exposed to the racism of the day which left a mark in his beliefs towards the relationship of Puerto Ricans and the United States. In 1919, Albizu returned to Harvard University and was elected president of Harvard's Cosmopolitan Club. He met with foreign students and lecturers, like Subhas Chandra Bose (Indian Nationalist leader with Gandhi) and the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore. He became interested in the cause of Indian independence and helped to establish several centers in Boston for Irish independence. He met Eamon de Valera and later became a consultant in the drafting of the constitution of the Irish Free State. He graduated from Harvard University obtaining a Law degree as well as degrees in Literature, Philosophy, Chemical Engineering and Military Science. He was fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Latin and Greek. At the time he received job offers as Hispanic representative for a Protestant church, as a legal aide to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in the U.S. State Department's diplomatic corps in Mexico, yet Albizu opted to return to Puerto Rico .Nationalist CampaignIn 1919, José Coll y CuchÃ, a member of the Union Party, felt that the party wasn't doing enough for the cause of Puerto Rico and he and some followers departed from the party and formed the Nationalist Association of Puerto Rico in San Juan. During that time there were two other organizations that were pro-independence, they were the Nationalist Youth and the Independence Association. On September 17, 1922, the three political oraganizations joined forces and formed the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. José Coll y Cuchà was elected president of the party. In 1922, Albizu married Dr. Laura Meneses, a Peruvian whom he had met at Harvard University. Two years later in 1924 he joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and was elected vice president. In 1927, Albizu traveled to Santo Domingo, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, seeking solidarity for the Puerto Rican Independence movement. In 1930, there were some disagreements between Coll y Cuchà and Albizu as to how the party should be run. As a result Coll y Cuchà abandoned the party and some of his followers returned to the Union Party. On May 11, 1930, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos was elected president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and formed the first Women's Nationalist Committee, in the island municipality of Vieques, Puerto Rico. In 1932, Albizu publishes a manuscript in which he exposes Doctor Cornelius P. Rhoades. In the manuscript Doctor Rhoades admits to killing Puerto Rican patients and injecting many with cancer cells as part of a medical experimentation conducted in San Juan's Presbyterian Hospital for the Rockefeller Institute. This letter revealed the racist vision that some Americans harbored toward people of color. The Nationalist Party obtained poor results in the 1932 election, but continued with their campaign to teach and unite the people behind a free Puerto Rico. At the same time, continued repression from the United States against Puerto Rican independence was now met with armed resistance. In 1934, Albizu represented sugar cane workers as a lawyer against the U.S. sugar and utilities monopolies. In 1935, four Nationalists were killed by the police under the command of Colonel E. Francis Riggs, the incident became known as the RÃo Piedras Massacre. The following year in 1936, nationalists Hiram Rosado and Elias Beauchamp assassinated Colonel Riggs. They were arrested, and summarily executed without a trial at the police headquarters in San Juan. Pedro Albizu Campos proclaimed them heroes. San Juan Federal Court ordered the arrest of Pedro Albizu Campos and several other Nationalists for "seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government in Puerto Rico." A jury of seven Puerto Rican and five Americans voted 7 to 5 not guilty. Judge Cooper called for a new jury, this time with ten Americans and two Puerto Ricans and a guilty verdict was achieved. In 1937, a group of lawyers, including a young Gilberto Concepción de Gracia tried in vain to defend the Nationalists but, the Boston court of appeals, which holds jurisdiction over federal matters in Puerto Rico, upheld the verdict. Pedro Albizu Campos along with other Nationalist leaders were sent to the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. On March 21, a protest march was held in Ponce in which police opened fire on the crowd. Twenty-one unarmed marchers and bystanders as well as two policeman were killed, and 200 others wounded in what has become known as the Ponce Massacre. In 1947 Albizu returned to Puerto Rico and it was believed that he began preparing, along with other members of the Nationalist Party, an armed struggle against the proposed plans to change Puerto Rico's political status into a commonwealth of the United States. Pedro Albizu Campos would be jailed again after the revolt of 1950 when a group of Puerto Rican nationalists staged a revolt in the island, known as the Jayuya Uprising (El Grito de Jayuya) and which an attack on La Fortaleza (the Puerto Rican governor's mansion) and Blair House, by nationalist Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, where president Harry S. Truman was staying while the White House was being renovated. During the attack on the president, Torresola and policeman, Private Leslie Coffelt, were killed. Pedro Albizu Campos was arrested at his home after a brief shoot out with the police. Subsequently 3,000 independence supporters were arrested. In 1951 Pedro Albizu Campos was jailed and sentenced to eighty years in prison. Albizu was pardoned in 1953 by then governor Luis Muñoz MarÃn but the pardon was revoked the following year after the 1954 nationalist attack of the United States House of Representatives, when four Puerto Rican Nationalist, led by Lolita Lebron opened fire from the gallery of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.. Some members of Congress were wounded, one seriously; but no one was killed. The shooters did not resist arrest, claiming the action was to attract the world's attention to the US military occupation of Puerto Rico. Albizu refused to allow the police to enter his home in San Juan. A shootout occurred but he was later placed into custody in an unconscious state and jailed again at La Princesa in San Juan.Later Years and DeathWhile in prison, Pedro Albizu Campos' health deteriorated. In 1956, he suffered a stroke in prison and was transferred to San Juan's Presbyterian Hospital under police guard. He alleged that he was the subject of human radiation experiments in prison. Officials suggested that Albizu was insane although others who attended him believe that burns on his skin where consistent with radiation exposure. On November, 1964 Pedro Albizu Campos was again pardoned by outgoing governor Luis Muñoz MarÃn. Pedro Albizu Campos died on April 21, 1965. In 1994, under the administration of President Bill Clinton, the United States Department of Energy disclosed that human radiation experimentation was conducted without consent on prisoners during the 1950's-1970's. It is still unclear if Pedro Albizu Campos was among the subjects of such experimentation.LegacyThe extent of Albizu's legacy is generally the subject of -sometimes passionate- discussion by both accolytes and detractors. His followers state that Albizu's political and military actions served (even unintentionally) as a primer for positive change in Puerto Rico, these being the improvement of labor conditions for peasants and workers, a belated yet more accurate assessment of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States by the political establishment in Washington, and a set of social and political conditions that led to positive change in the political -and eventually economic- environment prevailing in the country (even if other politicians, such as Luis Muñoz MarÃn, were the ones who reaped the political benefit of these changes while essentially burying the Puerto Rican independence movement in the process). Detractors denounce Albizu as a radical fascist, whose actions only brought turmoil to Puerto Rico. Some claim that the weak following of the Puerto Rican independence movement in the present day can be traced, if not to Albizu, to the repression that his actions brought upon the movement (which, during Albizu's lifetime, attained its best acceptance levels in Puerto Rican history). Albizu can be definitely credited, however, with preserving and promoting Puerto Rican nationalism and national symbols, at a time where they were virtually a taboo in the country. The formal adoption of the Puerto Rican flag as a national emblem by the Puerto Rican government can be traced to Albizu (even while he denounced this adoption as the "watering-down" of an otherwise sacred symbol into a "colonial flag"); the revival of public observance of the Grito de Lares and its significant icons was a direct mandate from him as leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Albizu was the most vocal and visible Puerto Rican of African descent of his generation; Afro-Puerto Rican leaders of other political extractions (such as Ernesto Ramos Antonini and Jose Celso Barbosa) attained similar status only after facing (and enduring) considerable bouts with racism. Albizu, while not exempt from it, confronted it head-on, and vehemently denouncing it publicly. Albizu's diagnosis of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States earned him prison time, yet modern scholars take surprise at how accurate the diagnosis is, even years after Albizu's death. Finally, his political philosophy persists to this day, synthesized in quotes and verbal images. An alternative high school in Chicago, called the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School, is located in the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. There, students learn about Puerto Rican history and culture, in the context of local community development. Archives there include original letters, representations of Albizu Campos in sculpture and art, as well as other material related to his life. Additionally, five public schools in Puerto Rico are named after him, as well as numerous streets in most of Puerto Rico's municipalities. In 1976, Public School 161 in Harlem in New York City was named after him as well., Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr. KBE, (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977), better known as Charlie Chaplin, was an English comedy actor, becoming one of the most famous performers in the early to mid Hollywood cinema era, and also a notable director. He is considered to be one of the finest mimes and clowns caught on film and his influence on performers in both fields is great. Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities in the silent film era: he acted in, directed, scripted, produced, and eventually even scored his own films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 65 years, from the British Victorian stage and music hall in England as a child performer, almost until his death at the age of 88. He led one of the most remarkable and colourful lives of the 20th century, from a Dickensian London childhood to the pinnacle of world fame in the film industry and as a cultural icon. His principal character was "The Tramp" (known as "Charlot" in France, Italy and Spain): a vagrant with the refined manners and dignity of a gentleman who wears a tight coat, oversized trousers and shoes, a bowler hat, carries a bamboo cane, and has a signature toothbrush moustache. Chaplin's high-profile public and private life encompassed highs and lows of both adulation and controversy., Jesus (8–2 BC/BCE to 29–36 AD/CE), also known as Jesus of Nazareth, is the central figure of Christianity. He is commonly referred to as Jesus Christ, where "Christ" is a title derived from the Greek christos, meaning the "Anointed One", which corresponds to the Hebrew-derived "Messiah". The name "Jesus" is an Anglicization of the Greek Iesous, itself a transliteration of the Hebrew Jeshua, meaning "YHWH is salvation".,Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American politician who was elected the 16th President of the United States (serving from 1861 to 1865), and was the first president from the Republican Party. Today, he is best known for ending slavery and preserving the Union through his supervision of the Federal (i.e., Northern) forces during the American Civil War. He selected the generals and approved their strategy; selected senior civilian officials; supervised diplomacy, patronage, and party operations; and rallied public opinion through messages and speeches. Lincoln's influence was magnified by his powerful rhetoric; his Gettysburg Address rededicated the nation to freedom and democracy and remains a core component of the American value system.Major achievementsTo achieve his main goal of preserving the Union, Lincoln first ended slavery in the Confederacy through his Emancipation Proclamation (1863), then in 1865 secured passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to abolish slavery forever. He took personal charge of Reconstruction, seeking to speedily re-unite the nation through a policy of generous reconciliation. He was opposed by the Radical Republicans, who advocated much harsher policies. His leadership qualities were evident in his bringing all factions of the party into his cabinet, in defusing a war scare with Britain in 1861, in handling the border slave states in 1861, and in his landslide reelection in the 1864 presidential election. Copperheads criticized him vehemently for refusing to compromise on slavery, declaring martial law, suspending the writ of habeas corpus, ordering arrests of 18,000 opponents including public officials and newspaper publishers, needlessly ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers in the war, and for overstepping the bounds of executive power as set forth in the Constitution. On the other hand, Radical Republicans criticized him for moving too slowly in abolishing slavery, and not being ruthless enough toward the conquered South. Lincoln had a lasting influence on U.S. political values, redefining republican values, promoting nationalism, and enlarging the powers of the federal government. Scholars rank Lincoln as one of the two or three greatest presidents. His assassination in 1865 as the war ended made him a martyr for national unity and an icon of Americanism. Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism. It has been estimated that Picasso produced about 13,500 paintings or designs, 100,000 prints or engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures or ceramics., Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was an abstract expressionist painter, born in Rotterdam, Netherlands.BiographyThe Rotterdam Academy of Fine Art accepted de Kooning as a student in 1916. In 1926 he stowed away on a British freighter, the SS Shelly, to Newport, Virginia. He then went by ship to Boston, and took a train from Boston to Rhode Island. From there, he took another ship to New Jersey. De Kooning made his living for a time as a house painter. Later, he was a teacher at Black Mountain College with John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers. In the post World War II era, de Kooning painted in the area of abstract expressionism, sometimes labeled an action painter. Others in this movement include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Later, de Kooning experimented with other art movements. De Kooning's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and a stepfather. In 1916 he was apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists and decorators, and, about the same time, he enrolled in night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, where he studied for eight years. In 1920 he went to work for the art director of a large department store. In 1926 de Kooning entered the United States as a stowaway and eventually settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he supported himself as a house painter. In 1927 he moved to a studio in Manhattan and came under the influence of the artist, connoisseur, and art critic John D. Graham and the painter Arshile Gorky. Gorky became one of de Kooning's closest friends. From about 1928 de Kooning began to paint still life and figure compositions reflecting School of Paris and Mexican influences. By the early 1930s he was exploring abstraction, using biomorphic shapes and simple geometric compositions, an opposition of disparate formal elements that prevails in his work throughout his career. These early works have strong affinities with those of his friends Graham and Gorky and reflect the impact on these young artists of Pablo Picasso and the Surrealist Joan Miró, both of whom achieved powerfully expressive compositions through biomorphic forms. In October 1935 de Kooning began to work on the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project. He was employed by this work-relief program until July 1937, when he resigned because of his alien status. This period of about two years provided the artist, who had been supporting himself during the early Depression by commercial jobs, with his first opportunity to devote full time to creative work. He worked on both the easel-painting and mural divisions of the project (the several murals he designed were never executed). In 1938, probably under the influence of Gorky, de Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously embarking on a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such as Pink Landscape and Elegy. As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes the representational but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man, along with numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. By about 1945 the two tendencies seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels. In 1946, too poor to buy artists' pigments, he turned to black and white household enamels to paint a series of large abstractions; of these works, Light in August (c. 1946) and Black Friday (1948) are essentially black with white elements, whereas Zurich (1947) and Mailbox (1947/48) are white with black. Developing out of these works in the period after his first show were complex, agitated abstractions such as Asheville (1948/49), Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950; Art Institute, Chicago), which reintroduced color and seem to sum up with taut decisiveness the problems of free-associative composition he had struggled with for many years. In 1938 de Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning, whom he married in 1943. She also became a significant artist. During the 1940s and thereafter he became increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and was recognized as one of its leaders in the mid-1950s. He had his first one-man show, which consisted of his black-and-white enamel compositions, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948 and taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 and at the Yale School of Art in 1950/51. [edit]Mature worksde Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions can be interpreted as female symbols. But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. In the summer of that year he began Woman I (located at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City), which went through innumerable metamorphoses before it was finished in 1952. During this period he also created other paintings of women. These works were shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 and caused a sensation, chiefly because they were figurative when most of his fellow Abstract Expressionists were painting abstractly and because of their blatant technique and imagery. The savagely applied pigment and the use of colors that seem vomited on his canvas combine to reveal a woman all too congruent with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears. The toothy snarls, overripe, pendulous breasts, vacuous eyes, and blasted extremities imaged the darkest Freudian insights. He also had many paintings that seemed to hearken back to early Mesopotamian / Akkadian works, with the large, almost "all-seeing" eyes. The Woman' paintings II through VI (1952-53) are all variants on this theme, as are Woman and Bicycle (1953; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and Two Women in the Country (1954). The deliberate vulgarity of these paintings contrasts with the French painter Jean Dubuffet's no less harsh Corps de Dame series of 1950, in which the female, formed with a rich topography of earth colours, relates more directly to universal symbols. By 1955, however, de Kooning seems to have turned to this symbolic aspect of woman, as suggested by the title of his Woman as Landscape, in which the vertical figure seems almost absorbed into the abstract background. There followed a series of landscapes such as Police Gazette, Gotham News, Backyard on Tenth Street, Parc Rosenberg, Suburb in Havana, Door to the River, and Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, which display an evolution from compositional and coloristic complexity to a broadly painted simplicity. About 1963, the year he moved permanently to East Hampton, Long Island, de Kooning returned to depicting women in such paintings as Pastorale and Clam Diggers. He re-explored the theme in the mid-1960s in paintings that were as controversial as his earlier women. In these works, which have been read as satiric attacks on the female anatomy, de Kooning painted with a flamboyant lubricity in keeping with the uninhibited subject matter. His later works, such as Whose Name Was Writ in Water and Untitled III, are lyrical, lush, and shimmering with light and reflections on water. He turned more and more during his late years to the production of clay sculpture. In the 1980s de Kooning was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and a court declared him unfit to manage his estate, which was turned over to conservators. As the style of his later works began to take on an abrupt change, his vintage works drew increasing profits; at Sotheby's auctions Pink Lady (1944) sold for US$3.6 million in 1987 and Interchange (1955) brought $20.6 million in 1989. His wife, the former Elaine Fried, died from lung cancer, aged 70, in 1989. There is much debate over the relevance and significance of his later paintings, which became clean, sparse, and almost graphic, while alluding to the biomorphic lines of his early works. Some say his mental condition and attempts to recover from a life of alcoholism had rendered him unable to carry out the mastery indicated in his early works, while others see these late works as prophesizing the clean, surface-oriented painters of the 1990s and 21st century - and having a direct correlation to contemporary painters such as Brice Marden. Still others who knew de Kooning personally claim that his late paintings were being taken away and sold before he was able to finish them. Willem de Kooning has served as inspiration for the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers for three songs: "Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)", "His Last Painting" (about his battle with Alzheimer's), and the song "Door to the River" (named after the painting). The first full-length biography of the artist, titled de Kooning: An American Master, was published by Knopf in late 2004. Its authors, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, received the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Willem de Kooning is considered by many to be the most important painter of the last 50 years., Jean-Michel Basquiat (IPA: [??~ mi'??l bas'kja(t)]) (December 22, 1960 - August 12, 1988) was a Puerto Rican/Haitian American artist born in Brooklyn, New York City. He gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a highly successful Neo-expressionist artist in the international art scene of the 1980s. Many recognize Basquiat as a leading figure in contemporary art, and his paintings continue to command high prices in the art market., Siddhartha Gautama (Sanskrit ????????? ????, Pali Gotama Buddha) was a spiritual teacher from ancient India and the historical founder of Buddhism. He is universally recognized by Buddhists as the Supreme Buddha of our age. The time of his birth and death are uncertain; most modern historians date his lifetime from 563 BCE to 483 BCE, though some have suggested a date about a century later than this. Gautama is the key figure in Buddhism, and accounts of his life, discourses, and monastic rules were summarized after his death and memorized by the sa?gha. Passed down by oral tradition, the Tripi?aka, the collection of discourses attributed to Gautama, was committed to writing about 400 years later., Roberto Clemente Walker (August 18, 1934 – December 31, 1972) was a Major League Baseball right fielder and right-handed batter. He was elected to the Hall of Fame posthumously in 1973 as the second Hispanic American to be selected (Lefty Gomez being the first in 1972), and the only exception to the mandatory five-year post-retirement waiting period since it was instituted in 1954.Roberto Clemente is a member of the Baseball Hall of FameClemente was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, the youngest of four children. He played 18 seasons in the majors from 1955 to 1972, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates, winning the National League MLB Most Valuable Player Award in 1966. He was very helpful in his native land, and other Latin American countries, often bringing food, and baseball supplies to them. He died in a plane crash on December 31, 1972 while en route to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. His body was never recovered. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara or el Che, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, political figure, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara travelled throughout Latin America, bringing him into direct contact with the impoverished conditions in which many people lived. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to the conclusion that the region's socioeconomic inequalities could only be remedied by revolution, prompting him to intensify his study of Marxism and travel to Guatemala to learn about the reforms being implemented there by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Some time later, Guevara joined Fidel Castro's paramilitary 26th of July Movement, which seized power in Cuba in 1959. After serving in various important posts in the new government and writing a number of articles and books on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions first in Congo-Kinshasa, and then in Bolivia, where he was captured in a CIA/ U.S. Army Special Forces-organized military operation. Guevara was summarily executed by the Bolivian Army in La Higuera near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967. After his death, Guevara became an icon of socialist revolutionary movements worldwide. An Alberto Korda photo of him (shown) has received wide distribution and modification. The Maryland Institute College of Art called this picture "the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century.", John Arthur Johnson (March 31, 1878 – June 10, 1946), better known as Jack Johnson and nicknamed the "Galveston Giant", was an American boxer and arguably the best heavyweight of his generation. He was the first black Heavyweight Champion of the World, 1908-1915. In a documentary about his life, Ken Burns said: "For more than thirteen years, Jack Johnson was the most famous, and the most notorious, African-American on Earth". Outside the ring, he is known as the inventor of a type of wrench.Early lifeJack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas as the third child and first son of Henry and Tina "Tiny" Johnson, former slaves and faithful Methodists, who both worked blue-collar jobs to earn enough to raise six children (the Johnsons had nine children, four of whom survived to adulthood, and an adopted son) and teach them how to read and write. Jack Johnson had five years of formal schooling. Johnson fought his first bout, a 16-round victory, at age 15. He turned professional around 1897, fighting in private clubs, and by age 18 was earning more in one night than his father earned in an entire week. In 1901, Joe Choynski, the small Jewish heavyweight, came to Galveston to train Jack Johnson. Choynski, an experienced boxer, knocked Johnson out in round three, and the two were arrested for "engaging in an illegal contest" and put in jail for 23 days. (Although boxing was one of the three most popular sports in America at the time, along with baseball and horse-racing, the practice was officially illegal in most states, including Texas.) Choynski began training Johnson in jail.Professional boxing careerJohnson developed a more patient style than was customary in that day: playing defensively, waiting for a mistake, and then capitalizing on it. It was very effective, but it was criticized in the press as being cowardly and devious. ( World Heavyweight Champ "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, who was white, had used many of the same techniques and was praised by the press as "the cleverest man in boxing.") By 1902, Johnson had won at least 27 fights against both white and black opponents. Johnson won his first title on February 3, 1903, beating "Denver" Ed Martin over 20 rounds for the "Colored Heavyweight Championship". His efforts to win the full title were thwarted as World Heavyweight Champion James J. Jeffries refused to face him. Blacks could box whites in other arenas, but the heavyweight championship was such a respected and coveted position in America that blacks were not deemed worthy to compete for it. Johnson was able to fight former champion, Bob Fitzsimmons, in July 1907 and knocked him out in two rounds. He eventually won the World Heavyweight Title on December 26, 1908, when he fought the World Heavyweight Champion, Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, after following him all over the world, taunting him in the press for a match. The fight lasted fourteen rounds before being stopped by the police. The title was awarded to Johnson on a referee's decision as a T.K.O, but he had severely beaten the champion. During the fight, Johnson had mocked both Burns and his ringside crew. Every time Burns was about to go down, Johnson would hold him up again, punishing him more. The camera was stopped just as Johnson was finishing off Burns so that nobody could actually see Johnson becoming the champion. As title holder, Johnson had to face a series of fighters billed by boxing promoters as "great white hopes", often as exhibition matches. In 1909 he beat Victor McLaglen, Frank Moran, Tony Ross, Al Kaufman, and the middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel. The fight with Ketchel was keenly fought by both men until the 12th and last round. Ketchel threw a right to Johnson's head, knocking him down; slowly regaining his feet, Johnson threw a straight to Ketchel's jaw, knocking him and several of his teeth out. His fight with "Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien was a disappointing one for Johnson: scaling 205 pounds to O'Brien's 161, he could only achieve a 6 round draw with the great middleweight. Johnson's fighting style was very distinctive. He always began a bout cautiously, slowly building up over the rounds into a more aggressive fighter. He often fought to punish his opponent rather than knock him out, endlessly avoiding their blows and striking with swift counters. He always gave the impression of having much more to offer and, if pushed, he could punch quite powerfully.On July 4, 1910 in front of 22,000 people at a ring built just for the occasion in downtown Reno, Nevada, he defeated James J. Jeffries, with a K.O. in the 15th round. Jeffries had not fought in 6 years and had to lose around 100 pounds to try to get back to his championship fighting weight. The "Fight of the Century" earned Johnson $115,000 and silenced critics, who had belittled Johnson's previous victory over Tommy Burns as empty, claiming Burns was a false champion since Jeffries had retired undefeated. His victory sparked race riots among his black fans and certain states banned the filming of Johnson's victories over white fighters. In 2005, the United States National Film Preservation Board deemed the fight "historically significant" and put it in the National Film Registry. Johnson married Etta Duryea in late 1910 or early 1911. She committed suicide in September of 1911, and Johnson quickly remarried, to Lucille Cameron. Both women were white, a fact that caused considerable controversy at the time. The couple fled to France soon after their marriage. On April 5, 1915 Johnson lost his title to Jess Willard, a working cowboy who did not start boxing until he was almost thirty years old. With a crowd of 25,000 at the Vedado Racetrack in Havana, Cuba, Johnson was K.O.'d in the 26th round of the scheduled 45-round fight, which was co-promoted by Roderick James "Jess" McMahon and a partner. Johnson found that he could not knock out the giant Willard, who fought as a counterpuncher, making Johnson do all the leading. Johnson began to tire after the 20th round, and was visibly hurt by heavy body punches from Willard in rounds preceding the 26th round knockout. Johnson spread rumors that he took a dive, but Willard is widely regarded as winning fairly. Willard said, "If he was going to throw the fight, I wish he'd done it sooner."Later daysJohnson fought a number of bouts in Mexico before returning to the U.S. on July 20, 1920 and surrendering to Federal agents for allegedly violating the Mann Act against "transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes" by sending his white girlfriend, Belle Schreiber, a railroad ticket to travel from Pittsburgh to Chicago. This is generally considered an intentional misuse of the Act, which was intended to stop interstate traffic in prostitutes. He was sent to the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth to serve his sentence of one year and was released on July 9, 1921. There have been recurring proposals to grant Johnson a posthumous Presidential pardon. While incarcerated, he found need for a tool that would help tighten loosening fastening devices, and modified a wrench for the task. He patented these improvements on 18th April 1922, as US Patent 1,413,121. He continued fighting, but age was catching up with him. After two losses in 1928 he participated only in exhibition bouts. He opened a night club in Harlem, which later became the Cotton Club. His wife, Lucille Cameron, divorced him in 1924 on the grounds of infidelity. Jack Johnson then married an old friend named Ms. Irene Pineau, in 1925. She outlived him. Johnson had no children. He died in a car crash near Raleigh, North Carolina in 1946, aged 68, and was buried next to Etta Duryea in Graceland Cemetery, in Chicago. He was inducted to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954.Personal habitsJohnson was an early example of the celebrity athlete, appearing regularly in the press and later on radio and in motion pictures. He earned considerable sums endorsing various products, including patent medicines, and indulged several expensive hobbies, including automobile racing and the purchase of jewellery and furs for his wives. Johnson flouted conventions regarding the social and economic "place" of African Americans. As a black man, he broke a powerful taboo in consorting with white women and would verbally taunt men (white and black) both inside and outside the ring. Once, when he was pulled over for a $50 speeding ticket, he gave the officer a $100 bill, telling the officer he should keep the change as he was going to make his return trip at the same speed. Asked the secret of his staying power by a reporter who had watched a succession of women parade into, and out of, the champion's room, Johnson supposedly said, "Eat jellied eels and think distant thoughts." Johnson was also interested in opera (his favorite being Il Trovatore), history (he was an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte, believing him to have risen from a similar origin as himself), and automobile racing. LegacyJohnson is also a member of the modern International Boxing Hall of Fame, which was established in 1990 at Canastota, New York. Johnson's skill as a fighter and the money that it brought him made him unable to be ignored by the white establishment. In the short term, the boxing world reacted against this legacy. Joe Louis, later, was not able to box for the heavyweight title until he proved he could "act white", and was warned against gloating over fallen opponents or having his picture taken with a white woman. But Johnson foreshadowed, in many ways, perhaps the most famous boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali. In fact, Muhammad Ali often spoke of how he was influenced by Jack Johnson. He identified with him because he felt white America ostracized him in the same manner because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Muhammad Ali in his autobiography relates how he and Joe Frazier agreed that Johnson and Joe Louis were the greatest boxers of old. Jack Johnson's story is the basis of the play and subsequent 1970 movie, The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones as Johnson (known as Jack Jefferson in the movie), and Jane Alexander as his love interest. In 2005 Ken Burns produced a documentary about Johnson's life, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, based on the nonfiction book by Geoffrey C. Ward.Popular culture Southern punk rock band This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb has a song about Jack Johnson. It appears on both their Three Way Tie for a Fifth CD and split seven inch with Carrie Nations. Several hip-hop artists have also reflected on Johnson's legacy, most notably in the album New Danger, by Mos Def, in which songs like "Zimzallabim" and "Blue Black Jack" are devoted to the artist's pugilistic hero. Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis both have done soundtracks for documentaries about Jack Johnson. There are also several references to Jack Johnson, made by the main character Ron Burgundy, in the movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Miles Davis's 1970 (see 1970 in music) album "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" was inspired by Johnson. The end of the record features the actor Brock Peters (as Johnson) saying:I'm Jack Johnson. Heavyweight champion of the world. I'm black. They never let me forget it. I'm black all right! I'll never let them forget it!,Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an Oscar-winning American actor who is widely regarded as one of the greatest film actors of the 20th century. He brought the techniques of method acting to prominence in the films A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s. His acting style, combined with his public persona as an outsider uninterested in the Hollywood of the early 1950s, had a profound effect on a generation of actors that would come after him. Brando was also an activist, lending his presence to many issues, including the American Indian Movement. He was named the fourth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. In a recent Channel 4 television poll voted for by his fellow actors, Brando was named the "World's Greatest Actor".