On April 7 in 1915, Eleanora Fagan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young 13-year-old girl, Eleanora learned songs and began singing while working in a brothel. After getting arrested and serving time in a workhouse, the girl began seeking a singing career and adopted her new first name from the actress Billie Dove and her last name from a jazz guitarist who was her father, Clarence Halliday (although that name later transformed into “Holiday”).
By 1946, Billie Holiday was so well-known for her singing that she appeared in the film New Orleans with Louis Armstrong, where she sang “The Blues are Brewin’.”
After a lifetime of facing racism, drug abuse, drinking, and abusive men, Holiday died in 1959 suffering from liver and heart disease. She was only 44. While she was in the hospital dying, police raided her room and arrested her for drug possession. Despite her troubled life, she had a unique influence on American music, much like Louis Armstrong. Thanks Eleanora.
After he sang, he graciously noted that he did not deserve all the credit for his reinterpretation because he took much of it from the band Quietdrive. If you’re not familiar with the group, the band is an alt-rock group from Minneapolis that formed in 2002 and has released several albums. Here is their interpretation of “Time After Time,” which was in the soundtrack for the 2006 film, John Tucker Must Die.
“Time After Time” is one of those songs that seems like it has been around forever and lends itself well to covers. I suspect most people are like me and prefer Lauper’s original above all others. I was fortunate to see her perform the song in a small club in Cleveland before “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” took her to superstar status. While she will always be most associated with “Girls,” it is “Time After Time” that probably will always be covered by other artists. Some of the versions of the song are by Eva Cassidy, Matchbox Twenty, and Sarah Mclachlan. One of my favorite interpretations is by Miles Davis.
“Time After Time” is timeless.
What is your favorite version of “Time After Time”? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Happy baseball opening day! One of the most famous works of art about the sport is the poem, “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” by New York newspaper columnist Franklin Pierce Adams. The 1910 poem is about the Chicago Cubs double-play combination of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance. In the poem, a New York Giants fan calls “Tinker to Evers to Chance” as “the saddest of possible words,” bemoaning the players’ ability to turn a hit into a double play. Richard Brundage narrates the poem in this video:
The line “Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble” always puzzled me. But “gonfalon” refers to a flag or pennant, so the line is a reference to the Cubs capturing the National League pennant, which they won four times (1906-1908, 1910) while going on to win two World Series wins (1907-1908). The poem first appeared in the New York Evening Mail in July 1910, and the Cubs would go on to win the pennant that Fall. But it was the last for the dynasty, as the poem’s author Franklin Pierce Adams got to see his New York Giants take the gonfalon in 1911 and the following two years (but not the World Series).
The poem’s biggest effect may have been the fame it heaped upon Tinker, Evers, and Chance. Fans have noted that the three men made double plays at around the average of the league and their batting averages were less than spectacular. So many believe the New York poem was the reason all three Cubs were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946. Meanwhile, the other Cubs infielder who was left out of the poem, Harry Steinfeldt, never made it to the Hall of Fame.
So whether your favorite player this day is a big-name star like the poetic double-play trio or a lesser-known player like Steinfeldt, enjoy your opening day, where every team is still in the race for the gonfalon.
The $250-million-film John Carter (2012) has made news recently as being a big bomb. The Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure film about a Civil War veteran who ends up on Mars in the middle of a war there and falls in love with a princess reportedly will lose an estimated $200 million on its U.S. release. Commentators note a number of reasons the film did not do will, with a lot of blame going to poor marketing and a generic title. Unfortunately, sometimes the fact that a film is expensive and called “the $250-million John Carter” leads to bad press when the film is not making back the money spent. The bashing of such films is okay if you are talking about bad business decisions, but if you are talking about the quality of the film, the fact that a movie lost a lot of money should not scare you away.
There are a number of famous bombs that are decent movies and of equal if not better quality than other similar films that got better press. As Kevin Costner’s post-apocalypse Waterworld (1995) became more costly in production the bad press started even before the film was released. Then it did not do well. But it is a decent science fiction film. Director Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is famous for costing so much money it brought down United Artists. But if you give the movie a chance and go into it with modest expectations, it is an entertaining, albeit long, film about Wyoming’s Johnson County War with excellent actors and nice cinematography. Are these movies great? No, not by a long shot. But they are as good or better than a lot of decent movies.
One such bomb cost me a job years ago when I was on a job interview. The job had nothing to do with film, but during the interview the subject of favorite movies came up. I asked the person in charge what his favorite film was, and with a smile on his face he said, “Ishtar.” They asked me what I thought of the 1987 movie starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, and I answered honestly that despite all of the bad press because it was so expensive, the movie entertained me when I saw it in the theater and was not as bad as a lot of other comedies. The interview continued, and the next week I found out I did not get the job.
The rejection letter made me realize that when the boss brought up Ishtar, he was testing me to see if I had the guts to disagree with him. To test me, he picked the most ridiculous favorite movie he could think of. So from his viewpoint, I failed the test because I did not stand up to him and tell him that Ishtar was a horrible movie. Little did he know though, that while he really believed Ishtar was one of the worst movies of all time, I did disagree with him on that point. But because he said the opposite of what he thought, he missed the real chance to test me. So I will disagree with him here. I was right. Wherever you are, you were wrong.
So now I will conclude this review of John Carter that does not talk about John Carter with my point: John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, is a fun movie if you are only paying the price of a ticket and not the $250 million production costs.
What did you think of John Carter? Leave your two cents in the comments.
For anyone like me who is tired of those tiny keyboards on smart phones, Google is introducing Gmail Tap. “Morse code is perfect. It’s just a dot and a dash. What’s simpler than that?”
On April 7 in 1915, Eleanora Fagan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young 13-year-old girl, Eleanora learned songs and began singing while working in a brothel. After getting arrested and serving time in a workhouse, the girl began seeking a singing career and adopted her new first name from the actress Billie Dove and her last name from a jazz guitarist who was her father, Clarence Halliday (although that name later transformed into “Holiday”).
