I don’t recognize the song, but that was very nice.
That was an impressive vocal range she did there in the middle of the song – really impressive. There are at least a few professionals I’m sure that would like to be able to do those transitions as cleanly as she did.
It always amazes me how different some people singing voice is from their speaking voice. My own has a drastic change too – it goes from normal to (literally) some dogs howl when I sing.
For certain types of singing (say opera) her looks and age wouldn’t even get in the way – indeed depending on the character it could very well be a plus.
I’m not one to watch these shows – never been interested in watching the train wrecks in the early parts and just feel sorry for the later contestants. I would have told them off long before they would boot me off (well, assuming I actually had some talent that would not make me part of those train wrecks). However it will be interesting to see if that voice holds up to more than just a cherry picked song and *really* has the ability displayed there (impressive as that one song was she still did VERY well).
Oooh, I have to be snarky too – she is the anti-Obama: no looks but full of ability.
Hey, I linked to this too earlier today. Fabulous.
Blimey! Think she was a ringer?
Oh. Wow.
It wasn’t just the vocal talent she displayed so well there, it’s that once she started singing, she had TOTAL control of that room. She may not have even realized it, but she did. She about brought the judges to tears. Good on her.
I love the way this is spreading. Susan Boyle auditioned on Saturday and that video has been zipping around the globe at an unbelievable pace since then. I found it last night, posted it myself on a family blog, and e-mailed it to a few friends. Later in the evening, other friends e-mailed it to me. Haven’t looked at my e-mail this morning but I’ll bet when I do, I’ll find more messages with subject headings like “Listen to this!”
Just out of curiosity, last night I Googled “Susan Boyle Britain’s Got Talent”. The search found 16,000 hits. I just did it again a moment ago and got 51,900. How many hits do you suppose there will be by this time tomorrow?
Douglas, exactly. And in addition, there’s the lovely, dumbfounding, assumption-destroying contrast between how she looks and how she sounds. If not for the visual aspect of this video, it wouldn’t be clobbering people quite the way it does.
Goosebumps!
You may not know this but the ad you published is one of the most successful ads in direct marketing history.
While at dinner with him once he claimed that the headline in that ad was the best ever written. He would know.
Not that it was easy before, but since MTV it’s been nearly impossible for female vocalists to make it in popular music without being beautiful.
I can’t imagine Janis Joplin or Patti Smith coming up today. The bar has even been raised for guys.
As a biography, Susan Boyle was born in 1961. She is 47 years old, and will soon turn 48. She is from Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland. She lives in the same four bedroom council house where she grew up with her nine brothers and sisters which she now shares with only her ten-year-old cat, Pebbles. She is presently unemployed.
She was born with a disability and as a result was teased in school because of her learning difficulties and her fuzzy hair. She has been singing since age five as she found solace in singing and teachers encouraged in her music pursuits by giving her singing parts in school plays.
She was enrolled in a drama course at Edinburgh, but had to stop her studies when her father, Patrick Boyle, died and she returned home to care for her mother, Bridget Boyle.
According to her own words, in a recent interview, she has never had a boyfriend and has “never even been kissed.”
Susan Boyle says she was inspired to compete in the talent competition after seeing the success of Andrew Muir, a singing plumber from nearby Fauldhouse whom she personally knows and has sung with at local talent shows and charity events….
In another interview, Susan Boyle revealed that her performance on the talent show were her first public performances since her mother, Bridget Boyle, died two years ago at age 91 and that her mother had always encouraged her to compete on the program.
“It was a very dark time and I suffered depression and anxiety. But out of the darkness came light. I realised I wanted to make her proud of me and the only way to do that was to take the risk and enter the show.”
She also confirmed in the interview that she is in talks with Simon Cowell and Sony BMG about a possible record deal.
They laughed when I sat down. How was I to know the bathroom door was open?
I’m not much for just listening to music– it usually has to *do* something for my interest to be snagged.
That said, I actually got a reaction from her singing– at one point, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
The last time that happened was with Dolly Parton’s “He’s Alive.”
I don’t know why everyone is on about her looks– she doesn’t look that much different from a lot of the old Irish ladies at my mom’s home town. Maybe whatever is odd is more obvious in larger size, I don’t know….
Can I hope that this will get more folks who can really SING into music? Radio star revival?
The I have a Dream from Les Miserables really did capture the emotional impact of her musicality.
People heard the song from many levels. Simon’s been a past master at emotional manipulation, aka drama, so it is no surprise. And it doesn’t even matter whether he heard her rehearse before the show, either, he has seen enough of these surprises to know how the audience will react and he plays his part dutifully.
I am not a master at reading facial language, but the female judge looked genuinely surprised and the other male judge only looked moderately surprised but got himself in check very fast when it came time for comments to the effect that I didn’t read any surprise latent in his mannerisms once he started talking.
The first thing people heard was the audience’s amusement at this middle age woman who has a quirky mannerism and a subtle, not pronounced, accent. The image and expectation with singing devas and stars were too incongruous for the audience and some of the particularly younger members (including one foolish and inexperienced young female who rolled her eyes and was caught on camera). THen the audience heard the expectation and the fear, their own and each other’s. People feared a train wreck, others expected one, and still others were hoping for an underdog extreme success. One girl was holding her hand against her mouth, cause she was so gripped with expectation and dread of a embarassing moment. Still others were envious and admired her for her pluck and determination in front of such an audience reaction, something most of the audience knew in their heart of heart’s that they could never ever withstand such a thing as she has been doing.
And then the song. First the surprise reaction and the applause. Not sure who they were applauding, as she was here to show her talent and she hasn’t finished just yet. I surmise the audience was applauding fate or serendipity or luck that had them be the audience to see such a thing at such a moment in such a show.
THen after the relief and the joy and the various other emotions started cropping up in the audience gripping them, came the musicality. People started actually hearing the words and it interspersed with what they heard from her auto-biographical details and some of Obama’s Hope and Change mantra that has filtered into the dull wits of the young and the foolish cynical minds of the old.
They saw her success and heard the words of the song and knew she was living her dream. Her hope. And they then started applauding that.
I could not have planned a better propaganda event had I the resources of an entire government and I had been given the charge of improving morale for an existential war effort.
(The song, BTW, is I Dreamed A Dream, from Les Miserables, still the finest musical produced in the last four decades in my humble opinion.) And for sure this sounded to be a magnificent performance in terms of artistic interpretation and sheer vocal power. Mix in the background story and she rises to stellar heights of human accomplishment. Hope we see and hear much more of her… thanks for this novel, inspiring post. “They laughed when she sat down at the piano,” indeed.
I rewatched the judge’s expressions during the song and here are my more conclusive judgments.
The other male judge on the left didn’t hear her first rehearsal so he was surprised. Neither did the female judge. Simon, however, I suspect, did know. If not by actually hearing it then at least because he was told by those that did hear her before her stage performance.
Btw, the female judge, while very attractive before, became stunning once you started seeing the interplay of emotions on her face.
And, of course, not everybody was against Susan. That was just a judge’s projection or displacement or theatre act. There are those like me, I am sure, who watched the reactions of others far more than we watched the actions of Susan on stage. And this would have been true even had we been tipped off that this was something special, spectacular, or spectral.
Simon, of course, was perhaps surprised only in the sense of how powerful the words of her song was combined with SUsan’s singing voice and the reaction of the audience. You could see Simon enjoying the audience’s reactions and even once started glancing around before he caught himself.
Okay, I just heard Simon’s comments for the first time and he admitted he knew. Which is as I surmised.
The female judge commented that “we were cynical”. I wouldn’t phrase it that way, actually. Rather, it is more like when cynics don’t believe in things, they will then believe in anything produced by a good con man, as Obama has testified and demonstrated.
I would term it this way. The people are fools not because of what they believe or do not believe, they are fools because they do not pay attention to the emotions and reactions of others. THey are not vigilant. Whatever they feel and whatever they think, they are unable to control because they don’t even notice what causes it in others, how can they notice what causes it in themselves?
They do not understand the power of emotional manipulation or psychological adjustments. THey do not understand the basis of power or what moves the masses. They are not a Simon or a Reagan or even an Obama.
They do not respect work because it has been drilled in our society that 1. either you are born with talent and genetic benefits like intelligence or 2. you are relegated to the bottom classes, economically or otherwise. Social Equality is such a big deal because people believe that things cannot be balanced any other way except through the all powerful government, which they have been taught brought the US out of a World Wide recession and won a world war in the bargain. They want that kind of comfort. THey want to be able to say “I am not responsible for this, therefore I need not feel any guilt for the government will take care of the inequalities for me”.
Dirty Jobs has already proven that there has been a war on honest work in favor of “intellectual pursuits”. But the cost of that is a further handicap on people, young or old, to misinterpret their reality.
Similar to the Paul Potts phenomenon a few years back, from the same show
One other lovely thing to notice in that video is Simon’s delighted, unguarded smile. It’s so unusual for him and such a contrast to his normal on-stage persona that it’s very engaging. He looks downright likeable — who knew??
Also – this is what makes live performance qualitatively different from recording. She’ll sell some CD’s now, but if she’d tried to make it on voice alone she would not have. There are better singers. But the contrast between expectation and perormance, her ability to remain unfazed despite moving up about five leagues at one go, the underdog triumph – these are what make the moment.
Absolutely phenomenal.
in western media. its the pretty people that have abilities. while that is true of prima ballerinas, in the real world the talented are not so pretty.
the bias is so strong that we no longer see singers that look like roy orbison, as the image is more important than the art.
the biases are programatical. you can write them down and no one would believe you till they sat and noticed it once mentioned. between puberty and adult life, fathers loose their brains and abilities, they are father knows worst, is one constant example.
when art stopped being art, and it became image and message for politics (or anticulture), it lost all its real meaning and substance. socialist realism, and modern movements are devoid of creativity and instead substitute inventiveness (along the lines of what hasnt someone done before – a banal race to the bottom like the joke the aristocrats), marketing and image.
merit and skill were out and average skill but performance and image were in. especially if the person you were USING had less morals than a chimpanzee and their ‘success’ would push others to behave the same way, not realizeing that its artificial.
we havent realized that we really havent created original art since around the 70s (the last of it dying out then).
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
is it any wonder if you read that above and believed it in the late 50s, early 60s you woudl notice that the new paragons of art fit all that. from the discussion here about sharks in formaldehyde, and so on. we lost what art really is, means, and serves us.
applying artistic mentality to something doesnt mean what your doing is creating art. odd shaped sculptures are rarely art. as are amorphous blobs of color on large canvas. yeah, i can do something with an eye to an artistic process, but thats easy, in fact so easy that if your smart and talented enough, you will not sink so low. and if you arent, then the ‘art’ becomes accessible to you and you can be a giant, not because yoru good, but because the collective loves you for proving that there is no real art.
more interesting in art is to look of the lineage of who is famous or not. who did georgia okeefe screw? and who cheated on whom, and you start to figure out that since you werent born near that lineage, and they want scrub from a pretty face with low morals and easy to manipulate, is fun at the parties, doesnt say the wrong thing… etc.
you basically find that as kostabi series on how to be a famous artist is valid, because the art world is invalid. or rather the open mass art world is. for the really old money and high wealth does not bother with such much. in fact they like that we no longer try to be like them, and are less able to.
anyway… someone like her would not have had a chance to show her stuff… because they would look at her with a marketing eye, not a pinnicle of art and creative ability eye.
its like the old saw about the talking dog, its great he can talk, but does he do any other tricks?
this is why art sucks today, why music sucks, why all of it is narcissistic, masochistic, helpless, and full of driviled themes with unending messages but no real message.
since our world around us is made by our values maintained over time, it should be pretty easy to see that socialist grey is what mixing all the colors and all the ideas, and all the cultures together makes. gray, gray, and more gray… nothing isnt black, or white, nothingness is grey from which black and white are separated and dance for us.
look around you… they changes our values and the world is sinking more and more into a hurtful, cold, sick, literally dog eat dog world… not because thats the way it is, but because thats the way they paint it.
real art would move us from there.
like sargents portraits, it uplifts the ordinary.
her story reveals a lot about us, and who we let serve us, and how willing we are to forgoe crap and select better… (or even tell its crap).
reminds me of pink floyds music.
So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
That print ad, “They All Laughed” was old when Ginger Rogers made fun of it:
“They laughed at me wanting you –
said it would be hello, good-bye –
but oh! You came through –
now they’re eating humble pie!
They all said we’d never get together –
they laughed at us, and how –
But ho! Ho! Ho!
Who’s got the last laugh now?”
Ira Gershwin
It’s never too late! People who had lost all hope of using their talents later in life just got a shot of encouragement!
I don’t recognize the song, but that was very nice.
That was an impressive vocal range she did there in the middle of the song – really impressive. There are at least a few professionals I’m sure that would like to be able to do those transitions as cleanly as she did.
It always amazes me how different some people singing voice is from their speaking voice. My own has a drastic change too – it goes from normal to (literally) some dogs howl when I sing.
For certain types of singing (say opera) her looks and age wouldn’t even get in the way – indeed depending on the character it could very well be a plus.
I’m not one to watch these shows – never been interested in watching the train wrecks in the early parts and just feel sorry for the later contestants. I would have told them off long before they would boot me off (well, assuming I actually had some talent that would not make me part of those train wrecks). However it will be interesting to see if that voice holds up to more than just a cherry picked song and *really* has the ability displayed there (impressive as that one song was she still did VERY well).
Oooh, I have to be snarky too – she is the anti-Obama: no looks but full of ability.
Hey, I linked to this too earlier today. Fabulous.
Blimey! Think she was a ringer?
Oh. Wow.
It wasn’t just the vocal talent she displayed so well there, it’s that once she started singing, she had TOTAL control of that room. She may not have even realized it, but she did. She about brought the judges to tears. Good on her.
I love the way this is spreading. Susan Boyle auditioned on Saturday and that video has been zipping around the globe at an unbelievable pace since then. I found it last night, posted it myself on a family blog, and e-mailed it to a few friends. Later in the evening, other friends e-mailed it to me. Haven’t looked at my e-mail this morning but I’ll bet when I do, I’ll find more messages with subject headings like “Listen to this!”
Just out of curiosity, last night I Googled “Susan Boyle Britain’s Got Talent”. The search found 16,000 hits. I just did it again a moment ago and got 51,900. How many hits do you suppose there will be by this time tomorrow?
Douglas, exactly. And in addition, there’s the lovely, dumbfounding, assumption-destroying contrast between how she looks and how she sounds. If not for the visual aspect of this video, it wouldn’t be clobbering people quite the way it does.
Goosebumps!
You may not know this but the ad you published is one of the most successful ads in direct marketing history.
I once worked for this man:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Wunderman
While at dinner with him once he claimed that the headline in that ad was the best ever written. He would know.
Not that it was easy before, but since MTV it’s been nearly impossible for female vocalists to make it in popular music without being beautiful.
I can’t imagine Janis Joplin or Patti Smith coming up today. The bar has even been raised for guys.
As a biography, Susan Boyle was born in 1961. She is 47 years old, and will soon turn 48. She is from Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland. She lives in the same four bedroom council house where she grew up with her nine brothers and sisters which she now shares with only her ten-year-old cat, Pebbles. She is presently unemployed.
She was born with a disability and as a result was teased in school because of her learning difficulties and her fuzzy hair. She has been singing since age five as she found solace in singing and teachers encouraged in her music pursuits by giving her singing parts in school plays.
She was enrolled in a drama course at Edinburgh, but had to stop her studies when her father, Patrick Boyle, died and she returned home to care for her mother, Bridget Boyle.
According to her own words, in a recent interview, she has never had a boyfriend and has “never even been kissed.”
Susan Boyle says she was inspired to compete in the talent competition after seeing the success of Andrew Muir, a singing plumber from nearby Fauldhouse whom she personally knows and has sung with at local talent shows and charity events….
In another interview, Susan Boyle revealed that her performance on the talent show were her first public performances since her mother, Bridget Boyle, died two years ago at age 91 and that her mother had always encouraged her to compete on the program.
“It was a very dark time and I suffered depression and anxiety. But out of the darkness came light. I realised I wanted to make her proud of me and the only way to do that was to take the risk and enter the show.”
She also confirmed in the interview that she is in talks with Simon Cowell and Sony BMG about a possible record deal.
http://celebrity.rightpundits.com/?p=5827
They laughed when I sat down. How was I to know the bathroom door was open?
I’m not much for just listening to music– it usually has to *do* something for my interest to be snagged.
That said, I actually got a reaction from her singing– at one point, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
The last time that happened was with Dolly Parton’s “He’s Alive.”
I don’t know why everyone is on about her looks– she doesn’t look that much different from a lot of the old Irish ladies at my mom’s home town. Maybe whatever is odd is more obvious in larger size, I don’t know….
Can I hope that this will get more folks who can really SING into music? Radio star revival?
The I have a Dream from Les Miserables really did capture the emotional impact of her musicality.
People heard the song from many levels. Simon’s been a past master at emotional manipulation, aka drama, so it is no surprise. And it doesn’t even matter whether he heard her rehearse before the show, either, he has seen enough of these surprises to know how the audience will react and he plays his part dutifully.
I am not a master at reading facial language, but the female judge looked genuinely surprised and the other male judge only looked moderately surprised but got himself in check very fast when it came time for comments to the effect that I didn’t read any surprise latent in his mannerisms once he started talking.
The first thing people heard was the audience’s amusement at this middle age woman who has a quirky mannerism and a subtle, not pronounced, accent. The image and expectation with singing devas and stars were too incongruous for the audience and some of the particularly younger members (including one foolish and inexperienced young female who rolled her eyes and was caught on camera). THen the audience heard the expectation and the fear, their own and each other’s. People feared a train wreck, others expected one, and still others were hoping for an underdog extreme success. One girl was holding her hand against her mouth, cause she was so gripped with expectation and dread of a embarassing moment. Still others were envious and admired her for her pluck and determination in front of such an audience reaction, something most of the audience knew in their heart of heart’s that they could never ever withstand such a thing as she has been doing.
And then the song. First the surprise reaction and the applause. Not sure who they were applauding, as she was here to show her talent and she hasn’t finished just yet. I surmise the audience was applauding fate or serendipity or luck that had them be the audience to see such a thing at such a moment in such a show.
THen after the relief and the joy and the various other emotions started cropping up in the audience gripping them, came the musicality. People started actually hearing the words and it interspersed with what they heard from her auto-biographical details and some of Obama’s Hope and Change mantra that has filtered into the dull wits of the young and the foolish cynical minds of the old.
They saw her success and heard the words of the song and knew she was living her dream. Her hope. And they then started applauding that.
I could not have planned a better propaganda event had I the resources of an entire government and I had been given the charge of improving morale for an existential war effort.
(The song, BTW, is I Dreamed A Dream, from Les Miserables, still the finest musical produced in the last four decades in my humble opinion.) And for sure this sounded to be a magnificent performance in terms of artistic interpretation and sheer vocal power. Mix in the background story and she rises to stellar heights of human accomplishment. Hope we see and hear much more of her… thanks for this novel, inspiring post. “They laughed when she sat down at the piano,” indeed.
I rewatched the judge’s expressions during the song and here are my more conclusive judgments.
The other male judge on the left didn’t hear her first rehearsal so he was surprised. Neither did the female judge. Simon, however, I suspect, did know. If not by actually hearing it then at least because he was told by those that did hear her before her stage performance.
Btw, the female judge, while very attractive before, became stunning once you started seeing the interplay of emotions on her face.
And, of course, not everybody was against Susan. That was just a judge’s projection or displacement or theatre act. There are those like me, I am sure, who watched the reactions of others far more than we watched the actions of Susan on stage. And this would have been true even had we been tipped off that this was something special, spectacular, or spectral.
Simon, of course, was perhaps surprised only in the sense of how powerful the words of her song was combined with SUsan’s singing voice and the reaction of the audience. You could see Simon enjoying the audience’s reactions and even once started glancing around before he caught himself.
Okay, I just heard Simon’s comments for the first time and he admitted he knew. Which is as I surmised.
The female judge commented that “we were cynical”. I wouldn’t phrase it that way, actually. Rather, it is more like when cynics don’t believe in things, they will then believe in anything produced by a good con man, as Obama has testified and demonstrated.
I would term it this way. The people are fools not because of what they believe or do not believe, they are fools because they do not pay attention to the emotions and reactions of others. THey are not vigilant. Whatever they feel and whatever they think, they are unable to control because they don’t even notice what causes it in others, how can they notice what causes it in themselves?
They do not understand the power of emotional manipulation or psychological adjustments. THey do not understand the basis of power or what moves the masses. They are not a Simon or a Reagan or even an Obama.
They do not respect work because it has been drilled in our society that 1. either you are born with talent and genetic benefits like intelligence or 2. you are relegated to the bottom classes, economically or otherwise. Social Equality is such a big deal because people believe that things cannot be balanced any other way except through the all powerful government, which they have been taught brought the US out of a World Wide recession and won a world war in the bargain. They want that kind of comfort. THey want to be able to say “I am not responsible for this, therefore I need not feel any guilt for the government will take care of the inequalities for me”.
Dirty Jobs has already proven that there has been a war on honest work in favor of “intellectual pursuits”. But the cost of that is a further handicap on people, young or old, to misinterpret their reality.
Similar to the Paul Potts phenomenon a few years back, from the same show
One other lovely thing to notice in that video is Simon’s delighted, unguarded smile. It’s so unusual for him and such a contrast to his normal on-stage persona that it’s very engaging. He looks downright likeable — who knew??
Also – this is what makes live performance qualitatively different from recording. She’ll sell some CD’s now, but if she’d tried to make it on voice alone she would not have. There are better singers. But the contrast between expectation and perormance, her ability to remain unfazed despite moving up about five leagues at one go, the underdog triumph – these are what make the moment.
Absolutely phenomenal.
in western media. its the pretty people that have abilities. while that is true of prima ballerinas, in the real world the talented are not so pretty.
the bias is so strong that we no longer see singers that look like roy orbison, as the image is more important than the art.
the biases are programatical. you can write them down and no one would believe you till they sat and noticed it once mentioned. between puberty and adult life, fathers loose their brains and abilities, they are father knows worst, is one constant example.
when art stopped being art, and it became image and message for politics (or anticulture), it lost all its real meaning and substance. socialist realism, and modern movements are devoid of creativity and instead substitute inventiveness (along the lines of what hasnt someone done before – a banal race to the bottom like the joke the aristocrats), marketing and image.
merit and skill were out and average skill but performance and image were in. especially if the person you were USING had less morals than a chimpanzee and their ‘success’ would push others to behave the same way, not realizeing that its artificial.
we havent realized that we really havent created original art since around the 70s (the last of it dying out then).
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
is it any wonder if you read that above and believed it in the late 50s, early 60s you woudl notice that the new paragons of art fit all that. from the discussion here about sharks in formaldehyde, and so on. we lost what art really is, means, and serves us.
applying artistic mentality to something doesnt mean what your doing is creating art. odd shaped sculptures are rarely art. as are amorphous blobs of color on large canvas. yeah, i can do something with an eye to an artistic process, but thats easy, in fact so easy that if your smart and talented enough, you will not sink so low. and if you arent, then the ‘art’ becomes accessible to you and you can be a giant, not because yoru good, but because the collective loves you for proving that there is no real art.
more interesting in art is to look of the lineage of who is famous or not. who did georgia okeefe screw? and who cheated on whom, and you start to figure out that since you werent born near that lineage, and they want scrub from a pretty face with low morals and easy to manipulate, is fun at the parties, doesnt say the wrong thing… etc.
you basically find that as kostabi series on how to be a famous artist is valid, because the art world is invalid. or rather the open mass art world is. for the really old money and high wealth does not bother with such much. in fact they like that we no longer try to be like them, and are less able to.
anyway… someone like her would not have had a chance to show her stuff… because they would look at her with a marketing eye, not a pinnicle of art and creative ability eye.
its like the old saw about the talking dog, its great he can talk, but does he do any other tricks?
this is why art sucks today, why music sucks, why all of it is narcissistic, masochistic, helpless, and full of driviled themes with unending messages but no real message.
since our world around us is made by our values maintained over time, it should be pretty easy to see that socialist grey is what mixing all the colors and all the ideas, and all the cultures together makes. gray, gray, and more gray… nothing isnt black, or white, nothingness is grey from which black and white are separated and dance for us.
look around you… they changes our values and the world is sinking more and more into a hurtful, cold, sick, literally dog eat dog world… not because thats the way it is, but because thats the way they paint it.
real art would move us from there.
like sargents portraits, it uplifts the ordinary.
her story reveals a lot about us, and who we let serve us, and how willing we are to forgoe crap and select better… (or even tell its crap).
reminds me of pink floyds music.
So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
That print ad, “They All Laughed” was old when Ginger Rogers made fun of it:
They All Laughed
I wish they wouldn’t disable the embedding.
“They laughed at me wanting you –
said it would be hello, good-bye –
but oh! You came through –
now they’re eating humble pie!
They all said we’d never get together –
they laughed at us, and how –
But ho! Ho! Ho!
Who’s got the last laugh now?”
Ira Gershwin
It’s never too late! People who had lost all hope of using their talents later in life just got a shot of encouragement!
She stole the show! Even Simon couldn’t deny it!
Very nice, but basically deja vu of Paul Potts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA
and I think I prefer Paul.
Alex: I think you are correct that it’s a similar phenomenon, but I prefer Susan.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this all-important issue.