Posts Tagged ‘fame’
“Who I am on stage is very, very different to who I am in real life”*…
Beyoncé’s father (pictured above with his daughter at the 2004 Grammy Awards) can make you a star…
It is 10am, and the lights in Houston’s Hobby Center theater dim to black.
“Mathew Knowles was born on January 9, 1951,” a voice booms over the sound system. “Excelling at education and sports,” it continues, he went on to become the “No 1 salesman in the world at Xerox”.
The 75 people in the audience, who have spent up to $320 for a day-long “bootcamp” with Knowles – titled “The entertainment industry: how do I get in?”– might well be wondering what they have paid for.
A video begins to play. We see a series of images of Beyoncé and hear some of her most famous songs. Now we know why we are here. This is a seminar with Beyoncé’s dad. Her former manager.
This is the man who created Destiny’s Child. The man who, according to the voiceover, “took a risk that changed history”. The man who also managed his other daughter Solange. The man whose new book, The DNA of Achievers, is available for purchase in the lobby for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, a price which includes the opportunity to have your photo taken with him at the end of the day…
Partake of the secrets of success at “Can Beyoncé’s dad make me a star? Inside a one-day fame ‘bootcamp’.”
* Beyoncé Knowles
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As we reach inside ourselves to make contact with the passion that will propel us, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that the Country Music Festival in Nashville kicked off its annual celebration of the form, at which Patsy Cline was named “Queen of Country Music.” Cline, a stalwart of the early 1960s Nashville sound known for such now-standards as “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces,” was one of the first Country artists to cross-over, and was one of the most influential, successful and acclaimed vocalists of the 20th century. The following year (at the age of 30) she died in the crash of of manager’s private plane.
Tricks of (Historical) Perspective, Part 72…
These days, the name Henry Ward Beecher conjures, if at all, only in that it evokes his better-remembered sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. But in his time Beecher (pictured above, in a Matthew Brady portrait) was a much more prominent presence.
The first pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, Beecher shared his sister’s commitment to social causes; in particular, to abolition. But at the same time he turned a gift for tempering self-improvement advice with dialect and humor into a fabulously-successful career on the lecture circuit. (Click here to read a wonderful example of Beecher’s helpful homilies, as reported in the Falkirk Herald in 1871.)
Such was Beecher’s standing that, the following year, when Beecher was outed (then subsequently tried) for adultery (with Theodore Tilton’s wife Elizabeth), it “drove Reconstruction off the front pages for two and a half years” and became “the most sensational ‘he said, she said’ in American history” (quoth Walter McDougall). Indeed, French author George Sand planned a novel about the affair, but died before it could be written.
In his time, Beecher was arguably The Most Famous Man in America.
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As we look to our Ps and Qs, we might send a birthday verse to Henry Charles Bukowski; he was born on this date in 1920. The “laureate of American lowlife,” Bukowski discovered his muse as a young teen, when a friend introduced him to drinking (as recounted in Ham on Rye). “This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time”, he later wrote, describing the genesis of what was chronic alcoholism– or, as he saw it, the genesis of a method for making his way through life as a writer.
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human– “Beasts Bounding Through Time”
In the end, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. As Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker observed, “the secret of Bukowski’s appeal. . . [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.”
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