ABC: ARTIST BOOK CELEBRITY

With every edition one artist, one book title and one celebrity are selected to appear in an article that highlights the artworks, songs, movie scenes, and performances that made them stand out of the crowd. The principle of following the chronological order of the alphabet and of finding names that all share the same initial letter has been inspired by the German game 'Stadt Land Fluss'. To help people to remember the names easier, I create little aide-memoires from emojis (so far they have proved to be fairly efficient).

By @carolinetruyol 

 

 

Photo via Jmeshel.

Chuck (Charles Edward Anderson) Berry was born in 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri. The guitarist and songwriter is also known as “The Father of Rock’n Roll”, as he has introduced rock’n’roll some 70 years ago, while at the same time trying to merge the worlds of black and white through music. His performances such as Maybellene (1955) (watch online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvKDr8AgvK8), Roll Over Beethoven (1956), Rock and Roll Music (1957), and Johnny B. Goode (1958), are well known because of his approach to entertain the crowd according to their immediate feedback on stage. (Chuckberry.com/biography: http://chuckberry.com/biography/). Although his first notable performance was on his school's musical stage singing ‘Confessin The Blues’ (listen on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qVbQNRjJU) accompanied by his friend, Tommy Stevens, on guitar it was not until he met Muddy Waters in 1955 when his career started to pick up. He was sentenced to prison for the first time while he still was at high school, from 1944 to 1947 for armed robbery from and again in 1960 to 1963 for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines. In between he was trained as a hairdresser at the Poro School, freelanced as a photographer, assisted his father as a carpenter and even owned a restaurant while beginning his career as a musician. His passion for food made him choose the locations of his performances according to the proximity to the next Indian restaurant. Berry was included in several Rolling Stone “Greatest of All Time” lists and three of his songs made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. Today at the age of 87 Chuck Berry is still performing live.

ETP (5-8')

Beloved was written in (1987) by american writer Toni Morrison. The novel is set after the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade. Morrison's fifth novel is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1956 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. After a posse arrived to retrieve her and her children Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured. Beloved's main character, Sethe, kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation from which Sethe recently fled. The tombstone of the daughters grave shows the word "Beloved". A  woman presumed to be her daughter, called Beloved, returns years later to haunt Sethe's home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati. The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." Beloved is not narrated chronologically; it is composed of flashbacks, memories, and nightmares. As a result, it is not an easy read if you haven't encountered William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. It aims to point the difficulties victims of slavery experience to deal with the past that leads to a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. The novel received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted during 1998 into a movie of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (watch the trailer). A New York Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it the best work of American fiction from 1981-2006.

You can read more here and here.

Photo via Deadline.

 Kobe Bean Bryant (born August 23, 1978) is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He entered the NBA directly from high school, and has played for the Lakers his entire career, winning five NBA championships. Bryant is a 16-time All-Star, 15-time member of the All-NBA Team, and 12-time member of the All-Defensive team. As of March 2013, he ranks third and fourth on the league's all-time postseason scoring and all-time regular season scoring lists, respectively. Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal led the Lakers to three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002. He is also the all-time leading scorer in Lakers franchise history. Since his second year in the league, Bryant has been selected to start every All-Star Game. He has won the All-Star MVP Award four times (2002,2007, 2009, and 2011), tying him for the most All Star MVP Awards in NBA history. At the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics, he won gold medals as a member of the USA national team. Because of his recent devastating injury Kobe Bryant's basketball career has come to an end. His new project is called "Kobe Bryant's Muse", a screening of his biography that will come out this autumn.