birthday

31Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

MOVIES

Happy 50th Birthday Godfather: Set Among The American Mafia Of The 40s, Coppola’s Film The Godfather Is Unmistakably A Film Of The Disillusioned 70s

When it was released 50 years ago, The Godfather won a swag of Oscars and hailed director Francis Ford Coppola as the voice of a new auteur. But timing is, as they say, everything. The story of an ageing Mafia Don and his family in New York City from 1945 to 1955, The Godfather is a sweeping saga of the trials and tribulations of running a criminal organization. There are two timelines that need to be looked at when watching The Godfather: when it was set, and when it was made. They are inextricably linked, yet polar opposites of the moral, cultural and social fabric of the United States. Post-war optimism Coming out of the devastating destruction and loss of life of the second world war, Americans had a newfound sense of optimism that the worst was behind them. After years of uncertai...

Why Some Of The Best-Known Tunes, Like ‘Happy Birthday,’ Are The Hardest To Sing

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

Why Some Of The Best-Known Tunes, Like ‘Happy Birthday,’ Are The Hardest To Sing

Some friends and I recently went to karaoke. You can likely picture the scene: a restaurant adjacent to a bowling alley with a cheerful crowd and enthusiastic DJ aiming lights at a small stage. We sang a popular duet, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s “Shallow,” to the room’s applause, and I remembered how good it felt to sing into a microphone. It brought me back to my time as a music teacher in the late 2000s in my home state of Kentucky. Like all of us, my students had their own preferences in terms of the styles and genres they liked to sing, but of course there were the mainstays that we all had to learn – for example, the national anthem, which we practiced as soloists and as a multi-part choir. We often sang spontaneously, too, belting out “Happy Birthday” if someone was celebrating t...