1.
Allan Warren
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Michael Allan Warren is an English portrait photographer, primarily known for his images of members of high society. After growing up in post-war London with his mother, Warren attended Terrys Juveniles and it was during this period that he attended auditions through which he received several assignments. Warren started his career at the age of 17 when he was acting in Alan Bennetts play Forty Years On with John Gielgud in the West End at the Apollo Theatre. Around this time Warren bought his first second-hand camera and began to take photographs of his fellow actors and his first major assignment was when his friend Mickey Deans asked him to cover his wedding to Judy Garland, which marked the beginning of Warrens work as a professional photographer. When in New York for personal reasons, he attended an audition for the Broadway production of Minnies Boys, however, he later declined the role offered to him in favour of returning to London and pursuing photography as his vocation. In the early 1980s Warren embarked on a quest to photograph all 26 non-royal, together with the 12th Duke of Manchester he set up the Dukes Trust, a charity for children in need. Warren has uploaded many pictures from his archive to Wikimedia Commons, in the early 90s Warren embarked on writing plays. One of his works, The Lady of Phillimore Walk, was directed by Frank Dunlop and critics went as far as comparing it to Sleuth, the cast of The Lady of Phillimore Walk consisted of Zena Walker and Philip Lowrie, and saw productions in the United States. Warren invented the Hankybreathe, a handkerchief which allows the user to inhale air through a filter at the mouth. The invention, which is meant to be dabbed in eucalyptus oil, harks back to the nosegay and stems from Warrens experience with asthma in heavily polluted London
2.
Chester, Pennsylvania
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Chester is a city in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States, with a population of 33,972 at the 2010 census. Chester is situated on the Delaware River, between the cities of Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, the current mayor of Chester, Thaddeus Kirkland, was elected on November 3,2015 and served his first day in office on January 4,2016. The first European settlers in the area were Swedes and they called the settlement that became Chester first Finlandia, then Upland. They built Fort Mecoponacka in 1641 to defend the settlement, by 1682, Upland was the most populous town of the new Province of Pennsylvania. On October 27, the ship Welcome arrived at the town, Penn renamed the settlement for the English city of Chester. Chester served as the county seat for Chester County, which stretched from the Delaware River to the Susquehanna River. In 1789, the city became the county seat for the newly created Delaware County, the courthouse is near the new City Hall building. Chesters naval shipyard supplied the Union during the Civil War, the Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. later Pennsylvania Shipyard & Dry Dock Company, was located in Chester until it closed in 1990. Two ships of the United States Navy have been named USS Chester in honor of the city, on April 10,1917, an explosion at the Eddystone Ammunition Corporation near Chester resulted in the deaths of 133 workers, mostly women. Chester is one of places that claim to be the birthplace of the hoagie sandwich. It is also known as the Cradle of Rock n Roll, poverty and crime rose as the city declined. In 1995, the state designated Chester as a distressed municipality. When Chester became eligible for Pennsylvanias Keystone Opportunity Zone program, firms began to accept state, one of its tenants is AdminServer, which makes software for the insurance industry. It moved from Malvern, Pennsylvania in 2003 and was acquired by Oracle in 2007, another one of the Wharfs tenants is Power Home Remodeling Group, the nations 2nd largest exterior home remodeling company. Harrahs Casino and Racetrack built its facilities beginning in 2005, launching harness racing along the Delaware River in September 2006, the employment status for workers sixteen and older, and not in the labor force is at 41 percent. Chester has a government system, consisting of a popularly elected city mayor. The terms of the mayor and members are four years, the Chester City Council is made up of four members, Councilwoman Elizabeth Williams, Portia West, William A. Jacobs, and Edith Blackwell and the presiding officer, the mayor, Thaddeus Kirkland. The City Controller is currently Ms. Edith Blackwell, the current mayor of the City of Chester is State Rep. Thaddeus Kirkland who won the Democratic nomination in May 2015 over incumbent Mayor John Linder
3.
Blues
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Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. Blue notes, usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also a part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove, Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. Many elements, such as the format and the use of blue notes. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later and it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century, the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues, World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a form called blues rock evolved. The term blues may have come from blue devils, meaning melancholy and sadness, the phrase blue devils may also have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, by the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, in lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. The lyrics of traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times. Two of the first published songs, Dallas Blues and Saint Louis Blues, were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times, the lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody
4.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
5.
Musical theatre
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Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement, since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the theatre works of American creators like George M. Cohan. Musicals are performed around the world and they may be presented in large venues, such as big-budget Broadway or West End productions in New York City or London. Alternatively, musicals may be staged in smaller fringe theatre, Off-Broadway or regional theatre productions, musicals are often presented by amateur and school groups in churches, schools and other performance spaces. In addition to the United States and Britain, there are vibrant musical theatre scenes in continental Europe, Asia, Australasia, Canada, the three main components of a book musical are its music, lyrics and book. The interpretation of a musical is the responsibility of its team, which includes a director. A musicals production is also characterized by technical aspects, such as set design, costumes, stage properties, lighting. The creative team, designs and interpretations generally change from the production to succeeding productions. Some production elements, however, may be retained from the production, for example. There is no fixed length for a musical, while it can range from a short one-act entertainment to several acts and several hours in length, most musicals range from one and a half to three hours. Musicals are usually presented in two acts, with one intermission, and the first act is frequently longer than the second. A book musical is usually built four to six main theme tunes that are reprised later in the show. Several shorter musicals on Broadway and in the West End have been presented in one act in recent decades, moments of greatest dramatic intensity in a book musical are often performed in song. Proverbially, when the emotion becomes too strong for speech, you sing, typically, many fewer words are sung in a five-minute song than are spoken in a five-minute block of dialogue. Therefore, there is time to develop drama in a musical than in a straight play of equivalent length. Within the compressed nature of a musical, the writers must develop the characters, the material presented in a musical may be original, or it may be adapted from novels, plays, classic legends, historical events or films. On the other hand, many musical theatre works have been adapted for musical films, such as West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Oliver
6.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
7.
Revue
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A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance and sketches. The revue has its roots in 19th century popular entertainment and melodrama, though most famous for their visual spectacle, revues frequently satirized contemporary figures, news or literature. Similar to the related subforms of operetta and musical theatre, the art form brings together music, dance. In contrast to these, however, revue does not have an overarching storyline, rather, a general theme serves as the motto for a loosely-related series of acts that alternate between solo performances and dance ensembles. George Lederers The Passing Show is usually held to be the first successful American review, the English spelling was used until 1907 when Florenz Ziegfeld popularized the French spelling. Follies is now employed as an analog for revue, though the term was proprietary to Ziegfeld until his death in 1932. Other popular proprietary revue names included George Whites Scandals and Earl Carrolls Vanities, Revues are most properly understood as having amalgamated several theatrical traditions within the corpus of a single entertainment. Minstrelsys olio section provided a map of popular variety presentation. Theatrical extravaganzas, in particular, moving panoramas, demonstrated a vocabulary of the spectacular, burlesque, itself a bawdy hybrid of various theatrical forms, lent to classic revue an open interest in female sexuality and the masculine gaze. Revues enjoyed great success on Broadway from the World War I years until the Great Depression, the high ticket prices of many revues helped ensure audiences distinct from other live popular entertainments during their height of popularity. In 1914, the Follies charged $5.00 for an opening night ticket, at time, many cinema houses charged from $0.10 to 0.25. Among the many producers of revues, Florenz Ziegfeld played the greatest role in developing the classical revue through his glorification of a new theatrical type. Revues took advantage of their revenue stream to lure away performers from other media. Performers such as Eddie Cantor, Anna Held, W. C, fields, Bert Williams, the Marx Brothers and the Fairbanks Twins found great success on the revue stage. One of Cole Porters early shows was Raymond Hitchcocks revue Hitchy-Koo, composers or lyricists such as Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, and George M. Cohan also enjoyed a tremendous reception on the part of audiences. Sometimes, an appearance in a revue provided a key early entry into entertainment, largely due to their centralization in New York City and adroit use of publicity, revues proved particularly adept at introducing new talents to the American theatre. Rodgers and Hart, one of the great composer/lyricist teams of the American musical theatre, comedian Fanny Brice, following a brief period in burlesque and amateur variety, bowed to revue audiences in Ziegfelds Follies of 1910. Specialist writers and composers of revues have included Sandy Wilson, Noël Coward, John Stromberg, George Gershwin, Earl Carroll, in Britain predominantly, Tom Arnold also specialised in promoting series of revues and his acts extended to the European continent and South Africa
8.
Bill Robinson
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Bill Bojangles Robinson was an American tap dancer and actor, the best known and most highly paid African American entertainer in the first half of the twentieth century. According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, Robinsons contribution to tap dance is exact and he brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging, giving tap a …hitherto-unknown lightness and presence. His signature routine was the dance, in which Robinson would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps. Robinson is also credited with having introduced a new word, copacetic, into popular culture, via his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances. Robinson is remembered for the support he gave to fellow performers, including Fred Astaire, Lena Horne, Jesse Owens, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ann Miller credited him as a teacher and mentor, and Miller credits him with having changed the course of my life. Gregory Hines produced and starred in a movie about Robinson for which he won the NAACP Best actor Award. In 1989, the U. S. Congress designated May 25, Robinsons birthday, luther Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia and raised in its Jackson Ward neighborhood. His parents were Maxwell, a worker, and Maria Robinson. His grandmother raised him after both died in 1884 when he was eight years old—his father from chronic heart disease. Details of Robinsons early life are only through legend, much of it perpetuated by Robinson himself. He claimed he was christened Luther—a name he did not like and he suggested to his younger brother Bill that they should exchange names. Eventually, the exchange between the names of both brothers was made, the brother subsequently adopted the name of Percy and under that name achieved recognition as a musician. At the age of five, Robinson began dancing for small change, appearing as a hoofer or busker in local beer gardens, a promoter saw him performing outside the Globe Theater in Richmond and offered him a job as a pick in a local minstrel show. At that time, minstrel shows were staged by performers in blackface. Pickaninnies were cute black children at the edge of the singing, dancing. In 1890, at the age of 13, Robinson ran away to Washington, D. C. where he did odd jobs at Benning Race Track and he teamed up with a young Al Jolson, with Jolson singing while Robinson danced for pennies or to sell newspapers. In 1891 he was hired by Whallen and Martel, touring with Mayme Remingtons troupe in a show titled The South Before the War, performing again as a pickaninny and he travelled with the show for over a year before growing too mature to play the role credibly. In 1898, he returned to Richmond where he joined the United States Army as a rifleman when the Spanish–American War broke out and he received an accidental gunshot wound from a second lieutenant who was cleaning his gun
9.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
10.
Piccadilly Theatre
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The Piccadilly Theatre is a West End theatre located at 16 Denman Street, behind Piccadilly Circus and adjacent to the Regent Palace Hotel, in the City of Westminster, England. Gold and green are the dominant colours in the bars and foyer, upon its opening on 27 April 1928, the theatres souvenir brochure claimed, If all the bricks used in the building were laid in a straight line, they would stretch from London to Paris. The opening production, Jerome Kerns musical Blue Eyes, starred Evelyn Laye, the theatre reopened in November 1929, with a production of The Student Prince, having a success in January 1931 with Folly to be Wise, running for 257 performances. Following a conversion into a restaurant, the theatre reopened in April 1936 as the London Casino. The building sustained damage when it was hit by a stray German bomb during World War II. After renovations in the early 1950s, it returned to its name and became a venue for plays, revues. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Piccadilly improved its reputation with a series of transfers from Broadway. A Streetcar Named Desire and Man of La Mancha made their London debuts at the theatre, the Beatles recorded a number of songs at the Piccadilly on 28 February 1964 for the BBC Radio show, From Us to You. In 1976, the Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton musical Very Good Eddie ran for 411 performances at the theatre, in 1986, the venue was the setting for ITVs popular Sunday evening variety show, Live From the Piccadilly, hosted by Jimmy Tarbuck. The 1990s witnessed an expansion in ballet and dance, notably the most successful commercial ballet season ever to play in the West End, including Matthew Bournes acclaimed production of Swan Lake. The Piccadilly has played host to such renowned stars as Henry Fonda, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Michael Pennington, Barbara Dickson, Lynn Redgrave, Julia McKenzie, Eric Sykes, and Dame Edna. Its productions have run the gamut from Wish You Were Here to Edward II to Spend Spend Spend to Noises Off to Blues in the Night to a season of plays directed by Sir Peter Hall. The Donmar Warehouse production of Guys and Dolls ran at the Piccadilly from 19 May 2005 to 14 April 2007, jersey Boys based on the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Guide to British Theatres 1750-1950, John Earl and Michael Sell pp.131 ISBN 0-7136-5688-3
11.
London
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London /ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain and it was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. Londons ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1. 12-square-mile medieval boundaries. London is a global city in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism. It is crowned as the worlds largest financial centre and has the fifth- or sixth-largest metropolitan area GDP in the world, London is a world cultural capital. It is the worlds most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the worlds largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic, London is the worlds leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. Londons universities form the largest concentration of education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times, London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2015 municipal population was 8,673,713, the largest of any city in the European Union, Londons urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. The citys metropolitan area is the most populous in the EU with 13,879,757 inhabitants, the city-region therefore has a similar land area and population to that of the New York metropolitan area. London was the worlds most populous city from around 1831 to 1925, Other famous landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and The Shard. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world, the etymology of London is uncertain. It is an ancient name, found in sources from the 2nd century and it is recorded c.121 as Londinium, which points to Romano-British origin, and hand-written Roman tablets recovered in the city originating from AD 65/70-80 include the word Londinio. The earliest attempted explanation, now disregarded, is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae and this had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had allegedly taken over the city and named it Kaerlud. From 1898, it was accepted that the name was of Celtic origin and meant place belonging to a man called *Londinos. The ultimate difficulty lies in reconciling the Latin form Londinium with the modern Welsh Llundain, which should demand a form *lōndinion, from earlier *loundiniom. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the Welsh name was borrowed back in from English at a later date, and thus cannot be used as a basis from which to reconstruct the original name. Until 1889, the name London officially applied only to the City of London, two recent discoveries indicate probable very early settlements near the Thames in the London area
12.
Bessie Smith
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Bessie Smith was an American blues singer. Nicknamed the Empress of the Blues, she was the most popular female singer of the 1920s and 1930s. She is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was an influence on other jazz singers. The 1900 census indicates that Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July 1892, the 1910 census gave her age as 16. A birth date of April 15,1894, appears on subsequent documents and was observed as her birthday by the Smith family, the 1870 and 1880 censuses report three older half-siblings, but later interviews with Smiths family and contemporaries did not mention them among her siblings. She was the daughter of Laura and William Smith, a laborer and he died while his daughter was too young to remember him. By the time Bessie was nine, her mother and a brother had also died and her older sister Viola took charge of caring for her siblings. To earn money for their household, Smith and her brother Andrew began busking on the streets of Chattanooga, she sang and danced. Their favorite location was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets, in 1904, her oldest brother, Clarence, left home, joining a small traveling troupe owned by Moses Stokes. If Bessie had been old enough, she would have gone with him, said Clarences widow, thats why he left without telling her, but Clarence told me she was ready, even then. Of course, she was only a child, in 1912, Clarence returned to Chattanooga with the Stokes troupe and arranged an audition for his sister with the managers of the troupe, Lonnie and Cora Fisher. She was hired as a rather than a singer, because the company already included the well-known singer Ma Rainey. Smith eventually moved on to performing in various lines, making the 81 Theater in Atlanta her home base. She also performed in shows on the circuit and became its biggest star after she signed a recording contract with Columbia Records. Smiths recording career began in 1923 and she was then living in Philadelphia, where she met Jack Gee, a security guard, whom she married on June 7,1923, just as her first record was being released. Their marriage was stormy with infidelity on both sides, including numerous female lovers for Bessie, Gee was impressed by the money but never adjusted to show business life or to Smiths bisexuality. In 1929, when she learned of his affair with singer, Gertrude Saunders, Smith ended the relationship. Smith later entered a marriage with an old friend, Richard Morgan
13.
Gospel
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A gospel is an account describing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity places a value on the four canonical gospels, which it considers to be revelations from God. This position however, requires a view of Biblical inerrancy. The word gospel derives from the Old English gōd-spell, meaning good news or glad tidings, the gospel was considered the good news of the coming Kingdom of Messiah, and of redemption through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the central Christian message. The Greek word euangelion is also the source of the terms evangelist, the authors of the four canonical Christian gospels are known as the Four Evangelists. Paul the Apostle used the term εὐαγγέλιον when he reminded the people of the church at Corinth of the gospel I preached to you, the earliest extant use of gospel to denote a particular genre of literature dates to the 2nd century. Justin Martyr in the Apology wrote of. the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, more generally, gospels compose a genre of early Christian writings. Gospels that did not become canonical also circulated in Early Christianity, many, such as the work known today as Gospel of Thomas, lack the narrative framework typical of a gospel. Scholars hold a wide spectrum of views on the origins and composition of the gospels, for example, the vast majority of material in Mark is also present in either Luke or Matthew or both, suggesting that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke. He writes that the four gospels were probably all written by the end of the first century. But they did not yet at that time have a consistent narrative, in 170 Tatian sought to find a solution by composing a single narrative out of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, with some additional oral material. Richies concludes that the gospel passages themselves can be unclear, and some of the messages within are straightforwardly ambiguous, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are considered synoptic gospels on the basis of many similarities between them that are not shared by the Gospel of John. Synoptic means here that they can be seen or read together, the fourth gospel, the Gospel of John, presents a very different picture of Jesus and his ministry from the synoptics. Of the many gospels written in antiquity, only four came to be accepted as part of the New Testament. An insistence upon there being a canon of four gospels, and no others, was a theme of Irenaeus of Lyons. Irenaeus was ultimately successful in declaring that the four gospels collectively and he also supported reading each gospel in light of the others. This canon, which corresponds to the modern Catholic canon, was used in the Vulgate, Gospel of Matthew Gospel of John Gospel of Luke Gospel of Mark This order is found in the following manuscripts, Bezae, Monacensis, Washingtonianus, Tischendorfianus IV, Uncial 0234. Although there is no set order of the four gospels in patristic lists or discussions, moody Smith suggests that the standard order of Matthew-Mark-Luke-John projects a kind of intention that can scarcely be ignored
14.
William Faulkner
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William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and he is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally, two of his works, A Fable and his last novel The Reivers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Absalom, Absalom. is often included on similar lists, Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. He had three brothers, Murry Charles Jack Falkner, author John Faulkner, and Dean Swift Falkner. Soon after his first birthday, his family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, Murry hoped to inherit the railroad from his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, but John had little confidence in Murrys ability to run a business and sold it for $75,000. Following the sale of the business, Murry became disappointed and planned a new start for his family by moving to Texas. Maud, however, disagreed with this proposition, and it was decided that they would move to Oxford, Mississippi, where Murrys father owned several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work. Thus, four days prior to Williams fifth birthday on September 21,1902, the Falkner family settled in Oxford and his family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline Callie Barr crucially influenced the development of Faulkners artistic imagination. Both his mother and grandmother were avid readers and also painters and photographers, while Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before sending them to school and exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens. Faulkners lifelong education by Callie Barr is central to his novels preoccupations with the politics of sexuality, as a schoolchild, Faulkner had much success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and continued doing well through the third, however, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much more quiet and withdrawn child. He began to play hooky occasionally and became indifferent to his schoolwork. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh, and then final grade, Faulkner also spent much of his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders. These included war stories shared by the old men of Oxford and stories told by Barr of the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Falkner family. Faulkners grandfather would tell him of the exploits of Williams great-grandfather, after whom he was named, William Clark Falkner, who was a successful businessman, writer. Telling stories about William Clark Falkner, whom the family called Old Colonel, had become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy
15.
Requiem for a Nun
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Requiem for a Nun is a work of fiction written by William Faulkner which was first published in 1951. It is a sequel to Faulkners early novel Sanctuary, which introduced the characters of Temple Drake, her friend Gowan Stevens, and Gowans uncle Gavin Stevens. The events in Requiem are set in Faulkners fictional Yoknapatawpha County and Jackson, Mississippi, in November 1937 and March 1938, in Requiem, Temple, now married with a child, must learn to deal with her violent, turbulent past as related in Sanctuary. Requiem, originally published in form, was later adapted for the stage. It was also a co-source, along with Sanctuary, for the 1961 film Sanctuary, like many of Faulkners works, Requiem experiments with narrative technique, the book is part novel, part play. The main narrative, which is presented in form, is interspersed with prose sections recounting the history of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Each prose section focuses on an institution that serves as the setting for the following dramatic section of the story. The major theme of Requiem concerns spiritual redemption for past evil deeds through suffering, in Jefferson, Mississippi, Nancy Mannigoe, who was formerly employed as a nursemaid by Temple Drake Stevens, is found guilty of the murder of Temples six-month-old daughter and sentenced to death. Afterwards, Gowan married Temple out of a sense of honor and responsibility, Temple hired Nancy, a black drug addict and occasional prostitute, in order to have someone to talk to who understood her. Several months later, a week before Nancys scheduled execution, Temple returns to Jefferson, Gavin urges her to appeal directly to the state governor, although it may be too late to save Nancy. Unbeknownst to Nancy or Gavin, Gowan has overheard the entire conversation, as described in Sanctuary, Temple as a 17-year-old virgin was brutally raped with a corncob by the impotent gangster Popeye, who then forced her repeatedly to have sex with Red while he watched. Temple began to fall in love with Red, causing the jealous Popeye to murder him, after being rescued, Temple falsely accused another man, Goodwin, of being her rapist, causing Goodwin to be lynched by an angry mob. Before Reds murder, Temple had written him explicit love letters, which were found by his brother Pete. Temple found herself attracted to Pete and planned not only to him a large sum of money. The governor has refused to grant clemency for Nancy. Gowan tells Temple he too is sorry for his part in triggering the chain of events that happened eight years ago, Temple worries about the salvation of her own soul. On the morning of Nancys execution, Temple and Gavin visit her in her prison cell, now Nancy must die for smothering the baby while Temple must live with the consequences of her own actions. Nancy tells Temple to trust in God and extols the virtues of suffering, at the time of publication, Requiem received mixed reviews
16.
Tony Award
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The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Award, recognizes excellence in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at a ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway productions and performances, and an award is given for regional theatre, several discretionary non-competitive awards are also given, including a Special Tony Award, the Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre, and the Isabelle Stevenson Award. The awards are named after Antoinette Tony Perry, co-founder of the American Theatre Wing, the rules for the Tony Awards are set forth in the official document Rules and Regulations of The American Theatre Wings Tony Awards, which applies for that season only. It also forms the fourth spoke in the EGOT, that is someone who has won all four awards, the Tony Awards are also considered the equivalent of the Laurence Olivier Award in the United Kingdom and the Molière Award of France. From 1997 to 2010, the Tony Awards ceremony was held at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in June and broadcast live on CBS television, except in 1999, in 2011 and 2012, the ceremony was held at the Beacon Theatre. From 2013 to 2015, the 67th, 68th, and 69th ceremonies returned to Radio City Music Hall, the 70th Tony Awards were held on June 12,2016 at the Beacon Theatre. The 71st Tony Awards will be held on June 11,2017, as of 2014, there are 24 categories of awards, plus several special awards. Starting with 11 awards in 1947, the names and number of categories have changed over the years, some examples, the category Best Book of a Musical was originally called Best Author. The category of Best Costume Design was one of the original awards, for two years, in 1960 and 1961, this category was split into Best Costume Designer and Best Costume Designer. It then went to a category, but in 2005 it was divided again. For the category of Best Director of a Play, a category was for directors of plays. A newly established non-competitive award, The Isabelle Stevenson Award, was given for the first time at the ceremony in 2009. The award is for an individual who has made a contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of one or more humanitarian. The category of Best Special Theatrical Event was retired as of the 2009–2010 season, the categories of Best Sound Design of a Play and Best Sound Design of a Musical were retired as of the 2014-2015 season. Performance categories Show and technical categories Special awards Retired awards The award was founded in 1947 by a committee of the American Theatre Wing headed by Brock Pemberton. The award is named after Antoinette Perry, nicknamed Tony, an actress, director, producer and co-founder of the American Theatre Wing, who died in 1946. As her official biography at the Tony Awards website states, At Jacob Wilks suggestion, proposed an award in her honor for distinguished stage acting, at the initial event in 1947, as he handed out an award, he called it a Tony
17.
Broadway theatre
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Along with Londons West End theatres, Broadway theatres are widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. The Theater District is a popular tourist attraction in New York City, the great majority of Broadway shows are musicals. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggars Opera, in 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice, the company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, by the 1840s, P. T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan. In 1829, at Broadway and Prince Street, Niblos Garden opened, the 3, 000-seat theatre presented all sorts of musical and non-musical entertainments. In 1844, Palmos Opera House opened and presented opera for four seasons before bankruptcy led to its rebranding as a venue for plays under the name Burtons Theatre. The Astor Opera House opened in 1847, booth played the role for a famous 100 consecutive performances at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1865, and would later revive the role at his own Booths Theatre. Other renowned Shakespeareans who appeared in New York in this era were Henry Irving, Tommaso Salvini, Fanny Davenport, lydia Thompson came to America in 1868 heading a small theatrical troupe, adapting popular English burlesques for middle-class New York audiences. Thompsons troupe called the British Blondes, was the most popular entertainment in New York during the 1868–1869 theatrical season, the six-month tour ran for almost six extremely profitable years. Theatre in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown beginning around 1850, in 1870, the heart of Broadway was in Union Square, and by the end of the century, many theatres were near Madison Square. Broadways first long-run musical was a 50-performance hit called The Elves in 1857, New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keenes musical burletta The Seven Sisters shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances. It was at a performance by Keenes troupe of Our American Cousin in Washington, the production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a musical comedy, Tony Pastor opened the first vaudeville theatre one block east of Union Square in 1881, where Lillian Russell performed. Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 and 1890, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. They starred high quality singers, instead of the women of repute who had starred in earlier musical forms. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits, as in England, during the latter half of the century, the theatre began to be cleaned up, with less prostitution hindering the attendance of the theatre by women
18.
Ronald Firbank
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Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was an innovative English novelist. His eight short novels, partly inspired by the London aesthetes of the 1890s, especially Oscar Wilde, consist largely of dialogue, with references to religion, social-climbing, and sexuality. Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was born on 17 January 1886, in Clarges Street, Westminster, the son of a Member of Parliament, Sir Thomas Firbank and he had an older brother, Joseph Sydney, a younger brother, Hubert Somerset, and a sister, Heather. At the age of ten Firbank went briefly to Uppingham School and then on to Trinity Hall and he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1907. In 1909 he left Cambridge without taking a degree, living off his inheritance, he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. Openly gay and chronically shy, he was a consumer of alcohol. He died of disease in Rome, aged 40, and is buried in the Campo Verano cemetery. Firbank published his first story, Odette dAntrevernes, in 1905 and he then produced a series of novels, from The Artificial Princess and Vainglory to Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. Inclinations is set mainly in Greece, where the fifteen-year-old Mabel Collins is travelling with her chaperone, Mabel elopes with an Italian conte, but the plot is of minor importance and the interest, as with all Firbanks work, lies in the dialogue. His next novel Caprice followed in 1917, Valmouth is based on the lives of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England, most of the inhabitants are centenarians, and some are older. The inconsequential plot is concerned with the attempts of two ladies, Mrs Hurstpierpoint and Mrs Thoroughfare, to marry off the heir to Hare-Hatch House. Captain Thoroughfare, who is engaged to a woman, Niri-Esther, is loved frantically by Thetis Tooke, a farmers daughter. Meanwhile Mrs Yajñavalkya, a masseuse, manages an alliance between the centenarian Lady Parvula de Panzoust and David Tooke, Thetiss brother. A musical comedy of 1958 by Sandy Wilson gave the novel some popularity in the 1960s and this was followed by a story, Santal, that describes an Arab boys search for God. In his next novel, The Flower Beneath The Foot, the setting is an imaginary country somewhere in the Balkans, the characters include the King and Queen, sundry high-born ladies about the Court, and the usual attendant chorus of priests and nuns. Sorrow in Sunlight, renamed Prancing Nigger at the suggestion of the American publisher and it is set in a Caribbean republic. A socially ambitious black family move from their home to the capital, and the story is concerned with their attempts. Firbanks play The Princess Zoubaroff has been compared to William Congreve, dame Edith Evans, perhaps the greatest British actress of her time, played the title part in a radio production in 1964
19.
Cabaret
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Cabaret is a form of entertainment featuring music, song, dance, recitation, or drama. It is mainly distinguished by the venue, which might be a pub. The audience, often dining or drinking, does not typically dance, performances are usually introduced by a master of ceremonies or MC. The entertainment, as done by an ensemble of actors and according to its European origins, is oriented towards adult audiences. In the United States striptease, burlesque, drag shows, or a solo vocalist with a pianist, the word cabaret was first used in 1655. It is derived from tavern probably from Middle Dutch cambret, the word cabaret came to mean a restaurant or night club by 1912. Cabaret can be divided in 10 different types. However, these are artificial dividing lines, cabaret shows are most of the time a compound of elements from the different types, the cabaret performer plays with language, sometimes poetic, but often is he or she rock hard and hateful. The cabaret performer analyses in his/her stubborn manner actual, social and political topics, the cabaret performer tells an often slightly absurd story with a moral packed in it. The cabaret performer plays with music, for example by twisting or combining familiar melodies, the cabaret performer tells nonsensical and absurd stories and plays idiotic types. The emphasis is less on text in the show of cabaret performer. Here the cabaret performer eludes on his liberating through laughter role, an iteration of storytelling cabaret The cabaret performer quickly switches between the different styles/types of cabaret, types, or songs. In this the cabaret performer is a guest at a government, institution or a company, cabarets existed in Paris in the 16th century, they were ancestors of the modern restaurant. Unlike taverns they sold wine not by itself but only with a meal, customers might sing if they had drunk enough wine, but early cabarets did not have formal programs of entertainment. Cabarets were frequently used as meeting places for writers and artists, in 1773 French poets, painters, musicians and writers began to meet in a cabaret called Le Caveau on rue de Buci, where they composed and sang songs. The Caveau continued until 1816, when it was forced to close because its clients wrote songs mocking the royal government, in the 18th century the café-concert or café-chantant appeared, which offered food along with music, singers, or magicians. The most famous was the Cafe des Aveugles in the cellars of the Palais-Royal, in the early 19th century many cafés-chantants appeared around the city, the most famous were the Café des Ambassadeurs on the Champs-Élysées and the Eldorado on boulevard Strasbourg. By 1900 there were more than 150 cafés-chantants in Paris, the first cabaret in the modern sense was Le Chat Noir in the Bohemian neighborhood of Montmartre, created in 1881 by Rodolphe Salis, a theatrical agent and entrepreneur
20.
Roundhouse (venue)
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The Roundhouse is a performing arts and concert venue situated at the Grade II* listed former railway engine shed in Chalk Farm, London, England. It was originally built in 1847 by the London and North Western Railway as a roundhouse, a building containing a railway turntable. After being used as a warehouse for a number of years and it reopened twenty-five years later, in 1964, as a performing arts venue, when the playwright Arnold Wesker established the Centre 42 Theatre Company and adapted the building as a theatre. The Greater London Council ceded control of the building to the Camden London Borough Council in 1983, by that time, Centre 42 had run out of funds and the building remained unused until a local businessman purchased the building in 1996 and performing arts shows returned. It was closed again in 2004 for a multi-million pound redevelopment, on 1 June 2006, the Argentine show Fuerzabruta opened at the new Roundhouse. Since 2006, Roundhouse has hosted the BBC Electric Proms and numerous iTunes Festivals, as well as ceremonies such as the BT Digital Music Awards. In 2009, Bob Dylan performed a concert, and iTunes promoted a music iTunes Festival, in line with the continuing legacy of avant-garde productions, No Fit State Circus performed Tabu during which the audience were encouraged to move around the performance space. The Roundhouse was built in 1846 as an engine shed for the London and Birmingham Railway. The original building was built by Branson & Gwyther, using designs by architects Robert B, within ten years locomotives became too long for the building to accommodate, and the Roundhouse was used for various other purposes. The longest period of use was as a warehouse for Gin distillers W & A Gilbey Ltd. This was estimated to cost between £300,000 and £600,000, and was supported by actors, playwrights, authors, musicians. In 1966 the Roundhouse became a venue, after the freehold was taken up by the then new Greater London Council. On 15 October 1966 Soft Machine and Pink Floyd appeared at the launch of the underground newspaper International Times, during the next decade the building became a significant venue for UK Underground music events Middle Earth and Implosion. Many of these were hosted and promoted by Jeff Dexter, the building was used in 1996 to film the promotional video for the Manic Street Preachers single A Design for Life prior to the start of redevelopment. Promotional videos for the singles Handbags and Gladrags by Stereophonics, the Roundhouse has also been used for theatre, and has had two periods of theatrical glory, with musicals such as Catch My Soul. Under administrator George Hoskins, the first phase also featured experimental theatre productions, such as the Living Theatre production of 1776, the once controversial nude revue Oh. Opened in July 1970, and started a run of four thousand performances in London. The Greater London Council passed the building to the Camden London Borough Council in 1983, the building lay largely empty until it was purchased for £6m in 1996 by the Norman Trust led by the philanthropist Torquil Norman
21.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
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Lyricist Jerome Jerry Leiber and composer Mike Stoller were American songwriting and record producing partners. They found initial successes as the writers of such hit songs as Hound Dog. Leiber and Stoller wrote hits for Elvis Presley including Love Me, Jailhouse Rock, Loving You, Dont and they were sometimes credited under the pseudonym Elmo Glick. In 1964, they launched Red Bird Records with George Goldner and, focusing on the group sound. In all, Leiber and Stoller wrote or co-wrote over 70 chart hits and they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. After school, Stoller played piano, and Leiber worked in Nortys, a store on Fairfax Avenue. In 1950, Jimmy Witherspoon recorded and performed their first commercial song, Stollers name at birth was Michael Stoller, but he later changed it legally to Mike. Their first hit composition was Hard Times, recorded by Charles Brown, Kansas City, first recorded in 1952 by rhythm & blues singer Little Willie Littlefield, became a No.1 pop hit in 1959 for Wilbert Harrison. In 1952, the partners wrote Hound Dog for blues singer Big Mama Thornton, the 1956 Elvis Presley rock version, which was a takeoff of the adaptation that Presley picked up from Freddie Bells lounge act in Las Vegas, was a much bigger hit. Allen pronounced Presley a good sport, and the Leiber-Stoller song would be linked to Presley. Leiber and Stollers later songs often had more appropriate for pop music, and their combination of rhythm and blues with pop lyrics revolutionized pop, rock and roll. They formed Spark Records in 1953 with their mentor, Lester Sill and their songs from this period include Smokey Joes Cafe and Riot in Cell Block #9, both recorded by The Robins. The label was bought by Atlantic Records, which hired Leiber and Stoller in an innovative deal that allowed them to produce for other labels. This, in effect, made them the first independent record producers, at Atlantic, they revitalized the careers of The Drifters and wrote a number of hits for The Coasters, a spin-off of the Robins. Their songs from this period include Charlie Brown, Searchin, Yakety Yak, Stand By Me, for the Coasters alone, they wrote twenty-four songs that appeared in the US charts. In 1955, Leiber and Stoller produced a recording of their song Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots with a vocal group. Soon after, the song was recorded by Édith Piaf in a French translation titled, the European royalties from another Cheers record, Bazoom, funded a 1956 trip to Europe for Stoller and his first wife, Meryl, on which they met Piaf. Their return to New York was aboard the ill-fated SS Andrea Doria, the Stollers had to finish the journey to New York aboard another ship, the Cape Ann
22.
King's Head Theatre
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The Kings Head Theatre, founded in 1970 by Dan Crawford, is an off-West End venue in London. It is the second oldest operating pub theatre in the UK, in March 2010 Adam Spreadbury-Maher became Artistic Director and the theatre became home to now resident company OperaUpClose. The small theatre is located in the room behind the bar at the Kings Head pub on Upper Street. The theatre is housed in a Victorian building, but a house, originally known as The Kings Head Tavern, has been on the same site, opposite the parish church. The theatres reconstruction in 2007-2008 increased both the size and seating capacity, with the addition of new seating. Dan Crawford ran the venue until his death in 2005 and his wife and long-serving associate artistic director Stephanie Sinclaire took over with help from those who had worked with Crawford. In 2007, Sinclaire was joined by the Tony-Award winning New York producer, Steven M. Levy, Levy and Sinclaire got the theatre producing for a year and presented several musical and play premieres. The atmosphere Crawford created in 1970 was intended to be enjoyed by an interesting, cosmopolitan, noise complaints have limited the music from its previous 7 nights a week. Dan Crawford disagreed with the introduction of decimal currency, for over twenty years after decimalisation of the pound, the bar continued to show prices and charge for drinks in pre-decimal currency. However, the current management decided to introduce computerised tills, while keeping the antique till as the focal point in the pub. The Kings Head has presented an array of productions, musicals, stand-up comedy, revues, contemporary forgotten classics. Under the Crawfords leadership The King’s Head has won awards and numerous productions have transferred to mainstream West End. Fucking Men also ran at the theatre for nine months in the night slot as well as the main time slot before Steven Levy transferred it to The Arts Theatre. A documentary about the theatre, The Kings Head, A Maverick in London was produced by Dragonfly Films and Xi Pictures and co-directed by Stephanie Sinclaire and it ran on Sky ARTSWorld for three years. In March 2010, Adam Spreadbury-Maher was appointed Artistic Director, in October 2010, it was announced that the theatre would become Londons Little Opera House, the first new opera house in London for over 40 years. The first opera performed was an adaption of Rossinis Barber of Seville set in the times of Jane Austen, also in October 2010 Mark Ravenhill became associate director, and Jonathan Miller joined existing patrons Joanna Lumley, Janie Dee, Tom Stoppard and Alan Parker. The Kings Head Theatre site Dan Crawford, Obituary Guardian article Review of the Kings Head Theatre Pub Betwixt - The Musical
23.
Islington
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Islington is a district in Greater London, England, and part of the London Borough of Islington. Islington grew as a sprawling Middlesex village along the line of the Great North Road and this gave rise to some confusion, as neighbouring districts may also be said to be in Islington. This district is bounded by Liverpool Road to the west and City Road and its northernmost point is in the area of Canonbury. The main north-south high street, Upper Street splits at Highbury Corner to Holloway Road to the west, Islington was originally named by the Saxons Giseldone, then Gislandune. The name means Gīslas hill from the Old English personal name Gīsla, the name later mutated to Isledon, which remained in use well into the 17th century when the modern form arose. In medieval times, Islington was just one of many small manors thereabouts, along with Bernersbury, some roads on the edge of the area, including Essex Road, were known as streets by the medieval period, possibly indicating a Roman origin, but little physical evidence remains. What is known is that the Great North Road from Aldersgate came into use in the 14th century and this was along the line of modern Upper Street, with a toll gate at The Angel defining the extent of the village. The Back Road, the modern Liverpool Road, was primarily a road where cattle would be rested before the final leg of their journey to Smithfield. Pens and sheds were erected along this road to accommodate the animals, the first recorded church, St Marys, was erected in the twelfth century and was replaced in the fifteenth century. Islington lay on the estates of the Bishop of London and the Dean, there were substantial medieval moated manor houses in the area, principally at Canonbury and Highbury. In 1548, there were 440 communicants listed and the atmosphere, with access to the City and Westminster, made it a popular residence for the rich. The local inns, however, harboured many fugitives and recusants, the Royal Agricultural Hall was built in 1862 on the Liverpool Road site of William Dixons Cattle Layers. The hall was 75 ft high and the glass roof spanned 125 ft. It was built for the annual Smithfield Show in December of that year but was popular for other purposes, including recitals and it was the primary exhibition site for London until the 20th century and the largest building of its kind, holding up to 50,000 people. It was requisitioned for use by the Mount Pleasant sorting office during World War II, the main hall has now been incorporated into the Business Design Centre. The hill on which Islington stands has long supplied the City of London with water and these included Sadlers Wells, London Spa and Clerkenwell. The river was opened on 29 September 1613 by Sir Hugh Myddelton and his statue still stands where Upper Street meets Essex Road. The course of the river ran to the east of Upper Street, the Regents Canal passes through Islington
24.
Tutu (clothing)
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The modern tutu is a dress worn as a costume in a ballet performance, often with attached bodice. It may be made of tarlatan, muslin, silk, tulle, gauze, modern tutus have two basic types, the Romantic tutu is soft and bell-shaped, reaching the calf or ankle, the Classical tutu is short and stiff, projecting horizontally from the waist and hip. The derivation of the word tutu is unknown, the word was not recorded anywhere until 1881. One theory is that it is derived from the word tulle. Another theory is that it derives from French babytalk for bottom, during that era, the abonnés were encouraged to mix with the girls in the foyer. It is suggested the expression came from the abonnés playfully patting the back of the dress with the saying pan-pan cucul. A third, related theory suggests a derivation from the more vulgar French word, during this era, women wore pantalettes as underwear, which were open at the crotch. The abonnés favoured the very front rows in the hope of a view. This is supported by the description by nineteenth-century balletomane, Charles Nuitter, fashion designers have often been involved in design for ballet. Fashion designers Cecil Beaton in England, Christian Lacroix in France, the Romantic tutu is still based on Marie Taglionis original costume, though modern materials mean it is lighter and may be more transparent. The hem falls between the knee and ankle, the Inverted Bell tutu is midway between the classical tutu and the Romantic tutu. It is made of layers of tulle which jut out similar to a classical tutu. There are several versions of the modern tutu, Classical tutu, the lower, short layers of tulle support the top layers, making them jut out from the hip. Pancake tutu, this tutu is supported by a hoop and is very flat, platter tutu, similar to the pancake tutu but sitting at the waist instead of the hip. American tutu, Very short ruffles of tulle are loosely sewn on to a pantie to give a soft effect, the story of a Swan Lake tutu. Dancewear Through the Ages An Inside Look at the Costumes of the New York City Ballet Pictures of tutus tulle skirt
25.
The Nutcracker
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The Nutcracker is a two-act ballet, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmanns story The Nutcracker and it was given its premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on Sunday, December 18,1892, on a double-bill with Tchaikovskys opera Iolanta. Although the original production was not a success, the 20-minute suite that Tchaikovsky extracted from the ballet was, major American ballet companies generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenues from performances of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovskys score has become one of his most famous compositions, in particular the pieces featured in the suite. Among other things, the score is noted for its use of the celesta, for the ballet, Tchaikovsky would again join forces with Marius Petipa, with whom he had collaborated on The Sleeping Beauty. The material Petipa chose was an adaptation of E. T. A, Hoffmanns story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by Alexandre Dumas père called The Tale of the Nutcracker. The plot of Hoffmanns story was simplified for the two-act ballet. Hoffmanns tale contains a flashback story within its main plot titled The Tale of the Hard Nut. This had to be excised for the ballet, Petipa gave Tchaikovsky extremely detailed instructions for the composition of each number, down to the tempo and number of bars. The completion of the work was interrupted for a time when Tchaikovsky visited the United States for twenty-five days to conduct concerts for the opening of Carnegie Hall. Tchaikovsky composed parts of The Nutcracker in Rouen, France, the first performance of the ballet was held as a double premiere together with Tchaikovskys last opera, Iolanta, on 18 December 1892, at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. Although the libretto was by Marius Petipa, who choreographed the first production has been debated. Petipa began work on the choreography in August 1892, however, illness removed him from its completion and his assistant of seven years, although Ivanov is often credited as the choreographer, some contemporary accounts credit Petipa. The childrens roles, unlike many later productions, were performed by real children rather than adults, students of Imperial Ballet School of St. Petersburg, the first performance of The Nutcracker was not deemed a success. The reaction to the dancers themselves was ambivalent, while some critics praised DellEra on her pointework as the Sugar Plum Fairy, one critic called her corpulent and podgy. Olga Preobrajenskaya as the Columbine doll was panned by one critic as completely insipid, Alexandre Benois described the choreography of the battle scene as confusing, One can not understand anything. Disorderly pushing about from corner to corner and running backwards and forwards – quite amateurish, the libretto was criticized for being lopsided and for not being faithful to the Hoffmann tale. Some found the transition between the world of the first scene and the fantasy world of the second act too abrupt
26.
Little Shop of Horrors (musical)
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Little Shop of Horrors is a horror comedy rock musical, by composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman, about a hapless florist shop worker who raises a plant that feeds on human blood and flesh. The musical is based on the low-budget 1960 black comedy film The Little Shop of Horrors, the musical premiered Off-Off-Broadway in 1982 before moving to the Orpheum Theatre Off-Broadway, where it had a five-year run. It later received numerous productions in the U. S. and abroad, because of its small cast and relatively simple orchestrations, it has become popular with community theatre, school and other amateur groups. The musical was made into a 1986 film of the same name. An offstage voice recalls a time when the human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence, a trio of 1960s street urchins named Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon set the scene and comment on the action throughout the show. Seymour Krelborn is a young man, an orphan living in an urban skid row. Audrey is a pretty blonde with a sense that leans towards the tacky. They lament their stations in life and the blight in their neighborhood. They are co-workers at Mushniks Skid Row Florists, a flower shop owned and operated by the cranky Mr. Mushnik. Seymour has recently obtained a mysterious plant that looks like a venus flytrap. While he was browsing the wholesale district, a sudden eclipse of the sun occurred, and when the light returned. Seymour is secretly in love with Audrey and names the plant Audrey II in her honor, the plant does not thrive in its new environment and appears to be dying. Seymour questions why it should be doing poorly, since he takes good care of it. He accidentally pricks his finger on a thorn, which draws blood. Seymour realizes that Audrey II requires blood to survive and allows the plant to suckle from his finger, as Audrey II grows, it becomes an attraction and starts generating brisk business for Mushnik. As the caretaker of the plant, the timid Seymour is suddenly regarded as a hero and he is elated to find out that Audrey secretly returns his feelings and wishes to leave her abusive boyfriend. Her dream is to lead an ideal suburban life with Seymour, complete with a home, frozen dinners. Meanwhile, the employees at Mushniks are sprucing up the shop because of the popularity of the rapidly growing Audrey II
27.
TV-am
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TV-am was a TV company that broadcast the ITV franchise for breakfast television in the United Kingdom from 1 February 1983 until 31 December 1992. The station was the UKs first national operator of a commercial breakfast television franchise and its daily broadcasts were between 6 am and 9,25 am. Throughout its nine years and eleven months of broadcast, the station regularly had problems resulting in numerous management changes and it also suffered from major financial cutbacks hampering its operations. Though on a footing by 1986 and winning its ratings battle with BBC Breakfast Time. Despite these setbacks, by the 1990s TV-am had become the UKs most popular breakfast show, however, following a change in the law regarding TV franchising, the company lost its licence. It was replaced by GMTV in 1993, the Independent Broadcasting Authority awarded the breakfast franchise to TV-am on 28 December 1980. This hurried start affected the company in two ways, firstly, ITV had failed in its negotiations for royalties and rates for advertising on the new Channel 4 and the breakfast service with the actors trade union, Equity. The union instructed its members to boycott the new station, which meant there was little or no revenue from advertising in the early days. Secondly, it was believed that the BBCs breakfast service would be highbrow, focusing on news and analysis, however, the BBC launched a lightweight, magazine-style programme that mimicked the style of United States breakfast television. With the launch of the BBCs Breakfast Time brought forward at short notice this gave little time for TV-am to redevelop its plans. TV-am was spearheaded by the Famous Five who were not only lined up as presenters on the station, but were also shareholders, Michael Parkinson, David Frost, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and Robert Kee. She had also persuaded by the BBC to continue producing and presenting Thats Life. and conceded she did not want to give up the show, or worse. There had been many difficulties for the presenters in the run-up to launch. When the franchise was announced in December 1980, Angela Rippons contract with the BBC was about to expire and this left her seeking freelance work before TV-am went on air. Anna Ford was dismissed by ITN, which had part of another consortium bidding for the breakfast contract. ITN had presented Ford as their female programme anchor as part of their bid, ITN heavily criticised her disloyalty and said that her dishonesty had made their bid seem ridiculous to the IBA. ITN replaced Ford with Selina Scott, who landed a double blow to ITN when she defected to the BBC to present Breakfast Time towards the end of 1982. Michael Parkinson did remain with the BBC, who hoped to persuade him to stay as they had with Rantzen, TV-ams headquarters and studios were at Breakfast Television Centre, Hawley Crescent, Camden Town, London
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Good Morning Britain (1983 TV programme)
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Good Morning Britain was TV-ams flagship breakfast television show, broadcast on weekdays from February 1983 until the franchise ended in 1992. It had many different presenters throughout its run but the most enduring pairing was Anne Diamond, from a slow start, which almost led to the closure of the channel, Good Morning Britain became very successful and ultimately achieved impressive ratings. According to one presenter Mike Morris they estimated to have interviewed over 30, ITV has revived the programme in 2014, with Susanna Reid, Ben Shephard, Charlotte Hawkins and Sean Fletcher as the main weekday presenters between 6am and 8. 30am. Good Morning Britain had a mixture of news and current affairs, weather, cartoons, music and it also featured a popular exercise section, hosted in the early days by Michael Van Straten and Jackie Genova, and then more famously by Mad Lizzie Webb. The show displayed a famous analogue-style clock on the bottom-right of the screen, the news was provided in-house by TV-am but following its loss of the licence the news provision was contracted out to Sky News. In its heyday, the programme would feature large outside broadcasts throughout the European winter/Australian summer from Bondi Beach in Australia, TV-am. org. uk – The TV-am Television Archives Good Morning Britain at TV. com
29.
South Pacific (musical)
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South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, the plot of the musical is based on James A. Micheners Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Micheners work that would be successful and, at the same time. A secondary romance, between a U. S. lieutenant and a young Tonkinese woman, explores his fears of the consequences should he marry his Asian sweetheart. The issue of prejudice is candidly explored throughout the musical, most controversially in the lieutenants song. Supporting characters, including a comic petty officer and the Tonkinese girls mother, the original Broadway production enjoyed immense critical and box-office success, became the second-longest running Broadway musical to that point, and has remained popular ever since. After they signed Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin as the leads, Rodgers, the piece won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950. Especially in the Southern U. S. its racial theme provoked controversy, the production won ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Libretto, and it is the only musical production to win Tony Awards in all four acting categories. Its original cast album was the record of the 1940s. The show has enjoyed many revivals and tours, spawning a 1958 film. The 2008 Broadway revival, a success, ran for 996 performances and won seven Tonys. Although book editor and university instructor James Michener could have avoided military service in World War II as a birthright Quaker, he enlisted in the U. S. Navy in October 1942. He was not sent to the South Pacific theater until April 1944 and he survived a plane crash in New Caledonia, the near-death experience motivated him to write fiction, and he began listening to the stories told by soldiers. One journey took him to the Treasury Islands, where he discovered an unpleasant village, called Bali-hai, populated by scrawny residents, struck by the name, Michener wrote it down and soon began to record, on a battered typewriter, his version of the tales. On a plantation on the island of Espiritu Santo, he met a woman named Bloody Mary, she was small, almost toothless and she told him also of her plans to oppose colonialism in French Indochina. These stories, collected into Tales of the South Pacific, won Michener the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Tales of the South Pacific comprises nineteen stories. Each stands independently but revolves around the preparation for an American military operation to dislodge the Japanese from a nearby island and this operation, dubbed Alligator, occurs in the penultimate story, The Landing at Kuralei. Many of the die in that battle, and the last story is titled The Cemetery at Huga Point
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Bournemouth
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Bournemouth /ˈbɔːrnməθ/ is a large coastal resort town on the south coast of England directly to the east of the Jurassic Coast, a 96-mile World Heritage Site. According to the 2011 census, the town has a population of 183,491 making it the largest settlement in Dorset. With Poole to the west and Christchurch in the east, Bournemouth forms the South East Dorset conurbation, before it was founded in 1810 by Lewis Tregonwell, the area was a deserted heathland occasionally visited by fishermen and smugglers. Initially marketed as a resort, the town received a boost when it appeared in Dr Granvilles book. Bournemouths growth really accelerated with the arrival of the railway and it became a town in 1870. Historically part of Hampshire, it joined Dorset with the reorganisation of government in 1974. Since 1997, the town has been administered by a unitary authority, the local council is Bournemouth Borough Council. The town centre has notable Victorian architecture and the 202-foot spire of St Peters Church, Bournemouths location has made it a popular destination for tourists, attracting over five million visitors annually with its beaches and popular nightlife. The town is also a centre of business, home of the Bournemouth International Centre or BIC. The word bourne, meaning a stream, is a derivative of burna. A travel guide published in 1831 calls the place Bourne Cliffe or Tregonwells Bourne after its founder, the Spas of England, published ten years later, calls it simply Bourne as does an 1838 edition of the Hampshire Advertiser. In the late 19th century Bournemouth became predominant, although its two-word form appears to have remained in use up until at least the early 20th century, in the 12th century the region around the mouth of the River Bourne was part of the Hundred of Holdenhurst. Although the Dorset and Hampshire region surrounding it had been the site of settlement for thousands of years, Westover was largely a remote. In 1574 the Earl of Southampton noted that the area was Devoid of all habitation, on this barren and uncultivated heath there was not a human to direct us. Bronze Age burials near Moordown, and the discovery of Iron Age pottery on the East Cliff in 1969, Hengistbury Head, added to the borough in 1932, was the site of a much older Palaeolithic encampment. No-one lived at the mouth of the Bourne river and the regular visitors to the area before the 19th century were a few fishermen, turf cutters. Prior to the Christchurch Inclosures Act 1802, more than 70% of the Westover area was common land, in 1809 the Tapps Arms public house appeared on the heath. A few years later, in 1812, the first official residents, retired army officer Lewis Tregonwell and his wife, the area was well known to Tregonwell who, during the Napoleonic wars, spent much of his time searching the heath and coastline for French invaders and smugglers
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International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
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IMDb
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In 1998 it became a subsidiary of Amazon Inc, who were then able to use it as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes. As of January 2017, IMDb has approximately 4.1 million titles and 7.7 million personalities in its database, the site enables registered users to submit new material and edits to existing entries. Although all data is checked before going live, the system has open to abuse. The site also featured message boards which stimulate regular debates and dialogue among authenticated users, IMDb shutdown the message boards permanently on February 20,2017. Anyone with a connection can read the movie and talent pages of IMDb. A registration process is however, to contribute info to the site. A registered user chooses a name for themselves, and is given a profile page. These badges range from total contributions made, to independent categories such as photos, trivia, bios, if a registered user or visitor happens to be in the entertainment industry, and has an IMDb page, that user/visitor can add photos to that page by enrolling in IMDbPRO. Actors, crew, and industry executives can post their own resume and this fee enrolls them in a membership called IMDbPro. PRO can be accessed by anyone willing to pay the fee, which is $19.99 USD per month, or if paid annually, $149.99, which comes to approximately $12.50 per month USD. Membership enables a user to access the rank order of each industry personality, as well as agent contact information for any actor, producer, director etc. that has an IMDb page. Enrolling in PRO for industry personnel, enables those members the ability to upload a head shot to open their page, as well as the ability to upload hundreds of photos to accompany their page. Anyone can register as a user, and contribute to the site as well as enjoy its content, however those users enrolled in PRO have greater access and privileges. IMDb originated with a Usenet posting by British film fan and computer programmer Col Needham entitled Those Eyes, others with similar interests soon responded with additions or different lists of their own. Needham subsequently started an Actors List, while Dave Knight began a Directors List, and Andy Krieg took over THE LIST from Hank Driskill, which would later be renamed the Actress List. Both lists had been restricted to people who were alive and working, the goal of the participants now was to make the lists as inclusive as possible. By late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 movies and television series correlated with actors and actresses appearing therein. On October 17,1990, Needham developed and posted a collection of Unix shell scripts which could be used to search the four lists, at the time, it was known as the rec. arts. movies movie database
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Virtual International Authority File
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The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library, the National Library of France joined the project on October 5,2007. The project transitions to a service of the OCLC on April 4,2012, the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together, a VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary see and see also records from the original records, and refers to the original authority records. The data are available online and are available for research and data exchange. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol, the file numbers are also being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAFs clustering algorithm is run every month, as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records
34.
MusicBrainz
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MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open data music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the placed on the Compact Disc Database. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become an open online database for music. MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and these entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the date and country. As of 26 July 2016, MusicBrainz contained information about roughly 1.1 million artists,1.6 million releases, end-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC. As with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge for maintaining and reviewing the data, besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this, in 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatables patented TRM for acoustic fingerprint matching. This feature attracted many users and allowed the database to grow quickly, however, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions. This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP, tRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008. In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND, some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems. Since the future of the free service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought. The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský, while AcoustID and Chromaprint are not officially MusicBrainz projects, they are closely tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these 8 times per second, additional post-processing is then applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns. The AcoustID search server then searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity, since 2003, MusicBrainzs core data are in the public domain, and additional content, including moderation data, is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license. The relational database management system is PostgreSQL, the server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, in December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye
