Kennedy Center Honors of 2007: Brian Wilson, Steve Martin, Leon Fleisher, Martin Scorsese, and Diana Ross Part III

Source: www.manythings.org www.voanews.com

Kennedy Center Honors of 2007: Brian Wilson, Steve Martin, Leon Fleisher, Martin Scorsese, and Diana Ross

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Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember. And I'm Barbara Klein. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. is one of the official cultural centers of America. For the past thirty years, the center has presented awards honoring five artists for their lifetime of work.

These artists were chosen this year for the Kennedy Center Honors: The singers Diana Ross and Brian Wilson. The actor and writer Steve Martin. The pianist Leon Fleisher. And the film director Martin Scorsese. They will be honored this Sunday, December second.

"Good Vibrations" and the other songs Brian Wilson wrote for The Beach Boys remain as fresh and energizing today as they were forty years ago. Wilson started the band with his two brothers, a cousin and a friend in the early nineteen sixties. The Beach Boys made a new kind of American rock music popular. Their songs express the fun of being young, enjoying girls, driving cars and surfing the ocean in California.

Brian Wilson not only wrote The Beach Boys' songs. He also sang, played the bass guitar and keyboard, and produced the band's records. Some experts believe that their album "Pet Sounds" was one of the most inventive and important records in rock music history.

The Beach Boys were also one of the most popular bands in America during a time when the British band The Beatles were capturing the attention of the world.

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Steve Martin is a popular writer, actor and comedian. He is also a skilled banjo player. Martin first started his career writing for funny television shows like "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." In the nineteen seventies he began performing his funny jokes and acts on the weekly television program "Saturday Night Live."

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Steve Martin: "You know, a lot of people ask me if Steve Martin is my real name. Have I changed it for show business or anything like that. And, now I am not ashamed to admit it. Because I did have a funny name when I was a kid, and I decided to change it for show business. But I think enough time has gone by and audiences are more sophisticated now that they won't laugh at my real name. My real name is bybybuhbuh … So my parents had a sense of humor. My sister's name is hurhurhurhr . And my mother would go out to call us for dinner and she'd go bybybuhbuh! Hrrhrhr bbrbrb! So, we had to move around a lot. But other than that I had a very normal childhood."

He also won Grammy awards for the records of his live comedy performances, one of which you just heard.

Steve Martin has also made over thirty-five movies, many of which he helped write. These include "The Jerk", "All of Me", "Parenthood", and, more recently, "Shopgirl."

Martin has written articles, books and successful plays such as "Picasso at the Lapin Agile." He wrote a book about his years of performing as a comedian, "Born Standing Up," that was released last week. His next movie will be "Pink Panther Deux."

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That was a recording of the pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher playing part of Schubert's Sonata in B Flat Major. Fleisher began studying the piano at the age of four. By the time he was sixteen, he was playing with the New York Philharmonic. Leon Fleisher traveled far and wide playing in the finest concert halls in the world and also recording music. In nineteen sixty-five, a neurological disorder called dystonia forced Fleisher to rethink his career. He lost the use of his right hand, but he did not let this stop him.

Leon Fleisher poured his energy into teaching and also conducting groups of musicians. He also began to specialize in performing piano music written for the left hand. In the nineteen nineties, doctors began to treat Fleisher's damaged hand with Botox injections.

Over time, Leon Fleisher recovered and started playing piano works for both hands once again. He has said that if he could relive his life, he would not change what happened to his hand. He says his experience helped him become a much better musician and teacher.

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That was a scene from the movie "Goodfellas", directed by Martin Scorsese. Many people consider him one of the greatest living American film directors. Scorsese is best known for his movies about characters linked to crime and violence. Many of his movies are about Italian-American characters. Still, over the years, he has made movies about many subjects. "Kundun" tells the story of the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. "The Aviator" is about the American businessman Howard Hughes. Scorsese also brought to life periods from the American past in movies like "Gangs of New York" and "The Age of Innocence."

His latest movie, "The Departed," is about opposing groups of criminals and police officers. It won four Academy Awards last year, including best director and best movie. Martin Scorsese has also made documentary movies about musicians, including Bob Dylan. He will soon release a movie about the Rolling Stones.

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That was the clear, sweet voice of Diana Ross singing "You Can't Hurry Love" with her back-up singers. The Supremes were from Detroit, Michigan. They became one of the most popular female singing groups of the nineteen sixties. The Supremes mixed the sounds of popular music with the soulful music born in Detroit called Motown. By nineteen seventy, Diana Ross had left the band to sing on her own. She made many best-selling records including "Diana Ross", "Surrender" and "diana."

Diana Ross also acted in television shows and movies. Her performance as Billie Holiday in the movie "Lady Sings the Blues" earned her an Academy Award nomination.

Over the years, Ross has won many American Music Awards. Billboard magazine named her the "Entertainer of the Century." The Guinness Book of World Records called Diana Ross the Most Successful Recording Artist of All Time. Her most recent album "I Love You" came out earlier this year.

Brian Wilson, Steve Martin, Leon Fleisher, Martin Scorsese and Diana Ross are remarkable performers. On Sunday, the Kennedy Center will honor them for sharing their artistic gifts with people all over the world.

Our program was written and produced by Dana Demange. I'm Steve Ember. And I'm Barbara Klein.

American City Life

Source: www.speakup.com.br

Language level: Advanced

Standard: American accent

American City Life

Our readings this month were recorded at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, which took place in New York in April. The first reading is set in San Francisco in the optimistic “flower power” era of the 1960s. It’s by the actor and comedian Steve Martin, who provides his own introduction:

1965: Steve Martin’s San Francisco

Steve Martin

I’m Steve Martin and let me just say that it’s a great honor for me be here among these great writers and it’s an incredible disgrace that they are here with me! I’m going to read from an unpublished book that will be published in December. It’s called Born Standing Up and it’s a memoir of my career as a stand-up comedian:

On a humid Monday night in the summer of 1965, after finding a $8 hotel room in the then economically-friendly city of San Francisco, I lugged my banjo and black hardshell prop case ten sweaty blocks uphill to the Coffee and Confusion, where I had signed up to play for free. The club was tiny and makeshift, decorated with chairs, tables, a couple of bare light bulbs and nothing else. I had romanticized San Francisco as an exotic destination, away from friends and family, and toward mystery and adventure. So I often drove my 20-year-old self up from Los Angeles to audition my fledglings comedy act at the club, or to play banjo on the street for tips. I would sleep in VW van, camp out in Golden Gate Park, pay for a cheap hotel, or snag a free room in a Haight Ashbury Victorian crash pad, by making an instant friend. At this point, my act was a catch all, cobbled together from the disparate universes of juggling, comedy, banjo playing, weird bits I’d written in college, and magic tricks. I was strictly Monday-night quality, the night when, traditionally, anyone could get up to perform. All we entertainers knew, Mondays were really audition nights for the club. I walked past Broadway and Columbus where Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ramshackle City Lights Books was jam-packed with thin, small-press publications, offering way-out poetry, and reissues of long ago banned erotic novels. Around the corner on Broadway was Mike’s Pool Hall, where bikers and hippies first laid eyes on each other, unsure of whether they should beat each other up, or just smoke pot and forget about it. Steps away was the Hungry Eye, a night club that had launched a thousand careers, including those of the Smothers Brothers, The Kingston Trio and Lenny Bruce, but I had to trudge on by. Just up Columbus, I passed the Condor, the first of a sudden explosion of topless clubs, where Carold Doda, in a new-fangled bathing suit that exposed her recently inflated, basketball breasts, descended from the ceiling on a gran piano that was painted virginal white. This cultural mélange and the growing presence of drugs made the crowded streets of North Beach shimmer with toxic vitality.

The Coffee and Confusion was on nearby Grant Avenue, a street dotted with used clothing stores and incense shops. I nervously entered the club and Ivan Holtz, the show runner, put me on the line-up. I lingered at the back, waiting for my turn and surveyed the audience of about fifteen people. They were arrayed in patchwork jeans with tie-dyed tops, and the room was thick with an illegal aroma. In the audience was a street poet dressed in rags and bearded like a yeti, who had a plastic, which he unloaded on performers he didn’t like. I was still untouched by the rapidly changing fashion scene – my short hair and conservative clothes weren’t going to help me with this crowd. Ivan introduced me. my opening line – “Hello,   I’m Steve Martin and I’ll be out here in a minute –was met with one lone chuckle.  I struggled through the first few minutes, keeping a wary eye on Mr. Ping Pong Ball, and filled in the dead air with some banjo tunes that went just OK. I could see Ivan standing nearby, concerned. I began to strum the banjo, singing a song that, I told the audience, my grandmother had taught me:

“Be courteous, kind and forgiving,

  Be gentle and peaceful each day,

  Be warm and human and grateful,

  And have a good thing to say.

  Be thoughtful and trustful and child-like,

  Be witty and happy and wise,

  Be honest and love all your neighbors,

  Be obsequious, purple and clairvoyant,

  Be pompous, obese and eat cactus,

  Be dull and boring and omnipresent,

  Criticize thing you don’t know about,

  Be oblong and have you knees removed.”

And then I said, “Now everyone” and I repeated the entire thing, adding in, “Ladies only: ‘Never make love to Big Foot.’ Men  only: ‘Hello, my name is Big Foot.’” Not many people sang along.

9/11/2001: Don DeLillo’s New York

Our second reading is set in New York and in a darker era – that of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11^th September 2001. Don DeLillo reads from his latest novel, Falling Man, which was published in May of this year:

Don DeLillo:

Standard: American accent:

The first cop told him to go to the checkpoint on block east of here and he did this and there were military police and troops in Humvees and a convoy of dump trucks and sanitation sweepers moving south though the parted saw horse barriers. He showed proof of address with pictures 10 and the second cop told him to go to the next checkpoint, east of here, and he did this and saw a chain-link barrier stretching down the middle of Broadway patrolled by troops in gas masks. He told the cop at the checkpoint that he had a cat to feed and if it died his child would be devastated and the man was sympathetic but told him to try the next checkpoint. There were fire-rescue cars and ambulances; there were state police cruisers, flatbed trucks, vehicles with cherry pickers, all moving through the barricades, and into the shroud of sand and ash. He showed the next cop his proof of address and picture 10 and told him there were cats he had to feed three of them, and if they died his children would be devastated and he showed the splint on his left arm. He had to move out of the way when a drove of enormous bulldozers and backhoes moved through the parted barricades, marking the sound of hell machines at endless revving pitch.

He started over again with the cop and showed his wrist splint and said he needed only fifteen minutes in the apartment to feed the cats and then he’d go back to the hotel and reassure the children. The cop said okay but if you’re stopped down there be sure to tell them you went through the broadway checkpoint, not this one. He worked his way through the frozen zone, south and west, passing through smaller checkpoints and detouring around others. There was a Guard troop in battle jackets and sidearm and now and then he saw a figure in a dust mask man or woman, half surreptitious, the only other civilians. The streets and cars were surfaced in ash and there were garbage bags stacked high at curb stones and against the sides of buildings. He walked slowly, watching for something he could not identify. Everything was gray, it was limp and failed storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else under permanent siege, and a stink in the air that infiltrated the skin.