Jean
Parker Shepherd, Jr. (1921–1999)
was an American storyteller, radio and TV personality, writer and actor.
With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is known to modern audiences
for the film A Christmas Story (1983),
which he narrated and co-scripted, based on his own semi-autobiographical stories. Shepherd narrates the film as
the adult Ralph Parker, and also has a cameo role playing a man in line at
the department store waiting
for Santa Claus.
Ten years later, Shepherd and A Christmas Story director Bob Clark returned to the same
working-class Cleveland street neighborhood to film a sequel, It Runs
in the Family (later known as My Summer Story),
released by MGM in 1994 and featuring an almost entirely different cast from
the previous film. PBS aired
several television movies based on Shepherd stories, also featuring the Parker
family. These included The
Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), which aired as part of the
anthology series Visions; The Great American Fourth of July
and Other Disasters (1982) and The Star-Crossed Romance of
Josephine Cosnowski (1985), both as part of the anthology series American Playhouse;
and Ollie
Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss (1988), a co-production
with The Disney Channel. Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote
that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that
he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season six DVD set, commenting on
the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really
formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean
Shepherd." Furthermore, the first name of Seinfeld's third child is
"Shepherd." On January 23, 2012 the Paley Center for
Media (formerly The Museum of Television and Radio) presented a
tribute to Shepherd. Shepherd's life and
multimedia career are examined in the 2005 book Excelsior, You
Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean
Shepherd by Eugene B. Bergmann.
In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous
figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean
Shepherd. Though he primarily spent his
radio career playing music, New York Top 40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's
style as an influence. An article he
wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD magazine,
"The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences
between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and
"night people" (non-conformists).
The opening credits of John Cassavetes' 1959 film Shadows include
"Presented by Jean Shepherd's Night People". In 2005, Shepherd was posthumously inducted
into the National Radio
Hall of Fame, and in November 2013 he was posthumously inducted into
the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia Hall of Fame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Shepherd
In 2000, a stage play adaptation of A
Christmas Story was written by Philip Grecian. In November
2012, A Christmas
Story: The Musical, based on the film, opened on Broadway.
Written by Benj Pasek and
Justin Paul (music and lyrics) and Joseph Robinette (book), the
musical opened to positive reviews. The run ended December 30, 2012.
The musical was directed by John Rando with choreography by Warren Carlyle and featured Dan Lauria as Jean Shepherd. The musical received Tony Award nominations for Best Musical,
Best Book of a Musical (Robinette), and Best Original Score (Music and/or
Lyrics) Written for the Theatre. The
musical was then adapted for television as A Christmas Story
Live!, which aired on the Fox network
in the United States on December 17, 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Story
The largest city in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia has a population of over 1.5 million people in its
142 square miles on the banks of the Delaware River. From the city’s historic “Center” with
Independence Hall, to its great “Northeast,” Philadelphia hosts four sports
arenas, an international airport and one of the largest in-land ports in the
nation. The city lies about 80 miles
from New York City and about 100 miles from Washington, DC, making it a central
hub in a very high-volume corridor. It
was at the center of Revolutionary America that saw the announcement of the
Declaration of Independence as well as the formation of the Constitution.
Philadelphia, a city of firsts, was also the first city in the nation to
develop a SWAT-type unit. In 1964,
Philadelphia experienced a rash of bank robberies. To answer that threat, the Philadelphia
Police Department established a 100-man Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT)
squad. The purpose of this squad was to
react quickly and decisively to the bank robberies while they were in progress
by utilizing specially trained officers who had superior firepower. Donald J. Mihalek https://www.tactical-life.com/lifestyle/military-and-police/philly-swat/
camaraderie
[kah-muh-rah-duh-ree, -rad-uh-, kam-uh-] noun comradeship; good-fellowship. Origin:
1830-40 French, equivalent to camarade comrade + -erie -ery http://www.dictionary.com/browse/camaraderie
Alf Prøysen (1914–1970), was a writer and
musician from Norway. His Mrs. Pepperpot
books established him as a children's author.
Prøysen was one of the most important Norwegian cultural personalities
in the second half of the twentieth century, and he made significant
contributions to literature, music, TV and radio. Find a list of books by Prøysen at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012474.Alf_Pr_ysen
Christmas Eve Ballad by Alf Prøysen, translated by
Eyvind Riis
New Scandinavian
Cooking is a Scandinavian cooking show which, over the course of
ten seasons, was hosted by Andreas Viestad, Tina Nordström, and Claus Meyer, produced by the Norwegian
production company Tellus Works in collaboration with American Public
Television (APT). A
sequel series titled Perfect Day continued with the
original hosts in rotation, with the cast addition of Sara La Fountain. It is also broadcast
on channels such as AFC. Beginning in 2003, the show debuted on PBS in
the United States (72% of the 347 regional PBS channels). It has also
been broadcast in more than 130 other countries, including the United
Kingdom, China, Germany, Italy, and France, according to the show's producers a
viewership of 100 million per episode. The first, second, fourth, fifth,
and sixth seasons were hosted by Norwegian food writer Andreas Viestad, the third
season by Swedish chef and television
personality Tina Nordström, and the fifth season was hosted
by Danish chef
and cookbook author Claus Meyer. The
sixth season, a sequel series Perfect Day rotated the original
hosts Viestad, Nordström, and Meyer, with the addition of Finnish TV chef Sara La Fountain. The seventh season was once again named New
Scandinavian Cooking, and still rotated between the Nordic hosts. During the eighth and ninth seasons Andreas
continued the series on his own, with his passionate storytelling, fusing
history, nature, and cooking--seeking out the origins of the food with his
mobile kitchen. In season 10 which was
broadcast in 2013, the last of the Nordic countries was introduced to the
series namely Iceland, the land of fire and ice. The food is not prepared in a studio but
executed on location outdoors, at a mobile kitchen often situated in faraway
places, such as remote beaches or mountain precipices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scandinavian_Cooking
See also
New Scandinavian Cooking at http://www.newscancook.com/
Fin de Siècle is a French
phrase meaning 'end of century' and is applied specifically as a historical
term to the end of the nineteenth century and even more specifically to decade
of 1890s. Fin de Siècle is an umbrella
term embracing symbolism, decadence and all related phenomena
(e.g. art nouveau) which reached a peak in
1890s. Although almost synonymous with
other terms such as the Eighteen-Nineties, the Mauve Decade, the Yellow Decade
and the Naughty Nineties, the fin de siècle however expresses an apocalyptic
sense of the end of a phase of civilisation.
The real end of this era came not in 1900 but with First World War
1914. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fin-de-siecle See also Literature at the Turn of the Century (1890-1918) at http://www.ruthnestvold.com/endcent.htm
and
How to pronounce the
adjective fin-de-siècle in British English and in
American English at
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1821
January 5, 2018 On this date in
1973, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center premiered a new work by Pierre Boulez, a piece for solo flute
and seven instruments, plus interaction with an electronic computer program,
which generated sounds that reacted to (and interacted with) the solo flute. The piece was titled “explosante-fixe,” which
translates as “exploding-fixed.” At the
time, however, Boulez was frustrated by the still primitive computer
technology. Twenty years later, Boulez
presented this new version of “explosante-fixe,” employing updated computer technology
and midi-flute. This version was
recorded, in effect “fixing the explosion.” Composers Datebook
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