“China Boy” was written in 1922 by Dick Winfree and Phil Boutelje. Winfree was a member of the west coast dance band led by Art Hickman, and Boutelje was a pianist and author who arranged for and played with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra before becoming director of Paramount Pictures and United Artists Studios. He scored for films and was twice nominated for Academy Awards.
The song was introduced in vaudeville by Henry E. Murtagh and became very popular with Dixieland groups, such as the McKenzie/Condon Chicagoans, Stephane Grappelli’s Hot Four, and Muggsy Spanier. Paul Whiteman’s 1929 recording, which was arranged by Lenny Heyton and featured a solo by Bix Beiderbecke, popularized the tune. The song lost favor for a while but was revived by Benny Goodman’s trio in 1935 and performed by Goodman’s big band at their famous Carnegie Hall Concert in 1938. Teddy Wilson recorded it as a piano solo in 1941. The song appeared in the 1940 film Strike Up the Band and in 1955’s The Benny Goodman Story
2009年4月27日星期一
Biography tells secrets of Joseph Needham's China love
LONDON -- In China, Li Yuese, the Chinese name for an English intellectual Joseph Needham, is at least a household name among the well-educated -- his Science and Civilization in China, a twenty-four-volume masterpiece, is known as the most important books telling the west what Chinese have contributed to the world.
The 17th-century philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon declared that nothing had changed the world more profoundly than three great inventions: gunpowder, printing and the compass. But what the philosopher didn't know was that all the three had already been conceived of and successfully employed by a single people -- the Chinese.
Joseph Needham And it was not until over 300 years later, that one young man in Cambridge gave these people the credit they rightly deserved. The man was Joseph Needham, or better known in China, Dr. Li Yuese.
"Needham was the first bridge builder between China and the rest of the world," Simon Winchester, writer of the biography on Needham said on Tuesday in London.
In his book titled Bomb, Book & Compass -- Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China, Simon is trying as he said "to bring the human side of the great man to the world, and let the world know better what Needham was as a human being."
As a charismatic young biochemist, working towards a glittering career at Cambridge, he fell in love with a young Chinese student and his passion for his mistress, Lu Gwei-djen, led quickly to a fascination with her country's language and history and soon he developed an astonishing reputation as a self-taught, albeit eccentric, scholar of Chinese culture, Simon said.
When in 1943, the British government sent him on a diplomatic mission to help save China's universities from the occupying Japanese forces, Needham began the research that would occupy him for the rest of his life and which ended up to create the greatest work on China ever created in the Western world, the biography said.
The cover of Bomb, Book & Compass -- Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China. None have succeeded in finding out what the first ever Chinese characters Needham learnt under Lu Gwei-djen, Simon said on the launching of his biography in central London's British Library, revealing that "cigarette" was first Chinese words the heavy smoker learned under the Chinese lady.
Lu Gwei-djen, a brilliant biochemist from Nanjing, married Needham in 1989, more than half a century after they first met.
Two years after the half-century delayed wedding, Lu died, but Needham's work on Chinese culture continued, and is still going on, Simon said to the audience-packed conference room in British Library.
Needham's 24-volume Science and Civilization in China, remains an unrivaled account of the nation's astonishing history of invention and technology, and Simon's book on the Cambridge scholar is a story of the man and the "extraordinary rise of the Chinese nation that continues to this day."
The Chinese version of Needham's biography is to be published in Shanghai in January 2009
The 17th-century philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon declared that nothing had changed the world more profoundly than three great inventions: gunpowder, printing and the compass. But what the philosopher didn't know was that all the three had already been conceived of and successfully employed by a single people -- the Chinese.
Joseph Needham And it was not until over 300 years later, that one young man in Cambridge gave these people the credit they rightly deserved. The man was Joseph Needham, or better known in China, Dr. Li Yuese.
"Needham was the first bridge builder between China and the rest of the world," Simon Winchester, writer of the biography on Needham said on Tuesday in London.
In his book titled Bomb, Book & Compass -- Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China, Simon is trying as he said "to bring the human side of the great man to the world, and let the world know better what Needham was as a human being."
As a charismatic young biochemist, working towards a glittering career at Cambridge, he fell in love with a young Chinese student and his passion for his mistress, Lu Gwei-djen, led quickly to a fascination with her country's language and history and soon he developed an astonishing reputation as a self-taught, albeit eccentric, scholar of Chinese culture, Simon said.
When in 1943, the British government sent him on a diplomatic mission to help save China's universities from the occupying Japanese forces, Needham began the research that would occupy him for the rest of his life and which ended up to create the greatest work on China ever created in the Western world, the biography said.
The cover of Bomb, Book & Compass -- Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China. None have succeeded in finding out what the first ever Chinese characters Needham learnt under Lu Gwei-djen, Simon said on the launching of his biography in central London's British Library, revealing that "cigarette" was first Chinese words the heavy smoker learned under the Chinese lady.
Lu Gwei-djen, a brilliant biochemist from Nanjing, married Needham in 1989, more than half a century after they first met.
Two years after the half-century delayed wedding, Lu died, but Needham's work on Chinese culture continued, and is still going on, Simon said to the audience-packed conference room in British Library.
Needham's 24-volume Science and Civilization in China, remains an unrivaled account of the nation's astonishing history of invention and technology, and Simon's book on the Cambridge scholar is a story of the man and the "extraordinary rise of the Chinese nation that continues to this day."
The Chinese version of Needham's biography is to be published in Shanghai in January 2009
In All Things
In Australia and New Zealand April 25th is Anzac Day, a moment in which Australians and New Zealanders remember the sacrifice made by their soldiers in their ultimately failed attempt to overcome the Turks at Gallipoli during World War I. It's a day of solemnity in some way similar to our own Veterans' Day or Memorial Day.
This Anzac Day in the Australian Jesuit Magazine Eureka Street, rather than reflect specifically on the cost of that battle for Australia, author Nick Toscano looks instead at how Gallipoli functioned as the first step in the Turkish efforts to exterminate the Armenian people.
...At the Gallipoli landing, the Turks conscripted hundreds of Armenians in the momentous battle for nothing more than cannon fodder. As they ran unarmed into our troops' firing line, it was mass-exeuction.
The Ottoman government execut
ed 600 of the Armenian educated-elite in Istanbul on 24 April, the very day before the Gallipoli landing, and, immediately afterwards pursued the rest in the Anatolian highlands....
Toscano goes on to describe in detail the crimes perpetrated upon Armenians in the years that followed. It's a harrowing account. Click here for the full story.
Jim McDermott, SJ
This Anzac Day in the Australian Jesuit Magazine Eureka Street, rather than reflect specifically on the cost of that battle for Australia, author Nick Toscano looks instead at how Gallipoli functioned as the first step in the Turkish efforts to exterminate the Armenian people.
...At the Gallipoli landing, the Turks conscripted hundreds of Armenians in the momentous battle for nothing more than cannon fodder. As they ran unarmed into our troops' firing line, it was mass-exeuction.
The Ottoman government execut
ed 600 of the Armenian educated-elite in Istanbul on 24 April, the very day before the Gallipoli landing, and, immediately afterwards pursued the rest in the Anatolian highlands....
Toscano goes on to describe in detail the crimes perpetrated upon Armenians in the years that followed. It's a harrowing account. Click here for the full story.
Jim McDermott, SJ
The China Lover, By Ian Buruma
Reading Ian Buruma's novel is like your first visit to a sushi shop with a knowledgeable friend. Everything is unfamiliar, some of it unpalatable, but your companion ensures you finish sated, delighted and feeling that bit more knowledgeable yourself. Buruma is – with respect to veteran critic Donald Ritchie – our foremost cultural analyst of Japan. His list of non-fiction publications is as long as an izakaya menu, and just as varied. His study of postwar Germany and Japan, Wages of Guilt, is perhaps the finest analysis yet of how trauma shapes a nation's psyche.
Into The China Lover, Buruma has poured his decades of thinking about Japan. It should be a sure-fire recipe for indigestion, but, miraculously, it isn't. The novel is not exactly straightforward, though. It is one woman's story, told by a trio of men. Or is it the story of a country, told through the three phases of a woman's life? Is it about history, cinema, or their common denominator: illusion?
The story traces the real-life career of a Manchurian-born Japanese movie star, known variously as Ri Koran, Shirley Yamaguchi and Yoshiko Yamaguchi. Her three incarnations act before very different backdrops: the colonial experiment of "New Asia" in the 1930s and 1940s, the post-war MacArthur administration, culminating in the student protests of 1960; and the armed resistance of the Japanese Red Army in Palestine in the 1970s.
But Yamaguchi merely guest-stars in her own biopic, for each section is narrated by a different man: a China-loving mentor, a restless American expat, and a pornographer-turned-terrorist. These voices occasionally sound too alike – like Buruma himself, intelligent and analytical. But their worlds rise up vividly: Shinkyo, the elegant capital of the puppet-state of Manchukuo, and post-war Tokyo, rising from its rubble. For a book so obsessed with cinema, The China Lover would make an episodic film. Scenes flash before us, while a Who's Who of famous faces appears in cameo (Truman Capote, Pu Yi, the Last Emperor) or off-stage (Charlie Chaplin, Yasser Arafat).
The China Lover is a clever book, and knows it. Motifs are woven through each section: a slap delivered by one character to another at a pivotal moment, the recurrent metaphor of the frog in the well. Though mannered, these touches give the story a certain ritualistic dignity, like the characteristic gestures of classic kabuki roles.
This is a book so deliberately Japanese it could only have been written by a Westerner. But Buruma has picked an extraordinary story and told it wonderfully well – as when he artfully, off-handedly, lets slip the fate of each narrator in the succeeding story-arc. At the heart of it, yet never quite centre-stage in her own story, is the captivating figure of Yamaguchi. Her impression lingers, an after-image on your retina after the movie has finished and the lights are still down.
Into The China Lover, Buruma has poured his decades of thinking about Japan. It should be a sure-fire recipe for indigestion, but, miraculously, it isn't. The novel is not exactly straightforward, though. It is one woman's story, told by a trio of men. Or is it the story of a country, told through the three phases of a woman's life? Is it about history, cinema, or their common denominator: illusion?
The story traces the real-life career of a Manchurian-born Japanese movie star, known variously as Ri Koran, Shirley Yamaguchi and Yoshiko Yamaguchi. Her three incarnations act before very different backdrops: the colonial experiment of "New Asia" in the 1930s and 1940s, the post-war MacArthur administration, culminating in the student protests of 1960; and the armed resistance of the Japanese Red Army in Palestine in the 1970s.
But Yamaguchi merely guest-stars in her own biopic, for each section is narrated by a different man: a China-loving mentor, a restless American expat, and a pornographer-turned-terrorist. These voices occasionally sound too alike – like Buruma himself, intelligent and analytical. But their worlds rise up vividly: Shinkyo, the elegant capital of the puppet-state of Manchukuo, and post-war Tokyo, rising from its rubble. For a book so obsessed with cinema, The China Lover would make an episodic film. Scenes flash before us, while a Who's Who of famous faces appears in cameo (Truman Capote, Pu Yi, the Last Emperor) or off-stage (Charlie Chaplin, Yasser Arafat).
The China Lover is a clever book, and knows it. Motifs are woven through each section: a slap delivered by one character to another at a pivotal moment, the recurrent metaphor of the frog in the well. Though mannered, these touches give the story a certain ritualistic dignity, like the characteristic gestures of classic kabuki roles.
This is a book so deliberately Japanese it could only have been written by a Westerner. But Buruma has picked an extraordinary story and told it wonderfully well – as when he artfully, off-handedly, lets slip the fate of each narrator in the succeeding story-arc. At the heart of it, yet never quite centre-stage in her own story, is the captivating figure of Yamaguchi. Her impression lingers, an after-image on your retina after the movie has finished and the lights are still down.
The North China Lover
An instant number-one best-seller in France, The North China Lover both shocks and entrances its readers. Initially written as notes toward a film script for The Lover, the book has the grainy, filmic qualities of a documentary. Far more daring and truthful than any book Duras has written before, The North China Lover emphasizes the realities of her youth in Indochina and reveals much that her earlier works concealed
The China Lover
A transfixing portrait of a woman and a nation eagerly burying the past to transform the future.In his enthralling new novel, Ian Buruma uses the life of the starlet Yamaguchi Yoshiko as a lens through which to understand the lure of erotic fantasies in the conquest of nations. The China Lover reveals the catastrophic results when theater and politics blend in a lethal manner.In her earliest days Ri Koran—a Japanese girl, born in Manchuria, who sang and acted in Japanese and Chinese—was forced to keep her Japanese identity a secret, to become a Manchurian singer and movie star playing Chinese beauties who fell in love with brave Japanese empire builders. In U.S.-occupied Tokyo, she returned to the screen as Yamaguchi Yoshiko, starring in films approved by American censors and designed to promote American-style democracy.Before long, she decided to reinvent herself yet again by moving to the United States. Three months after Japan and the United States signed a peace treaty in San Francisco, Yamaguchi rededicated herself to pursuing a career in American movies, this time as Shirley Yamaguchi, playing exotic Japanese beauties falling in love with American soldiers. But she was not just the subject of male fantasies on the cinema screen. She married the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who wanted her to be the perfect traditional Japanese woman. When her many roles, in life and in film, proved impossible to reconcile, Shirley left Noguchi, retired as an actress, and married a promising young Japanese diplomat.At the outset of the 1970’s, the life of Yamaguchi Yoshiko took another dramatic turn. As host of a Japanese television show for housewives, Yoshiko accepted an assignment in the Middle East, where she met Yassir Arafat and a prominent Palestinian terrorist. A member of her crew, affiliated with the Japanese Red Army, would return to commit a terrible crime while Yoshiko became a founding member of the Japanese- Palestinian Friendship Association, and ended her career as a politician in the right-wing ruling party of Japan.In Buruma’s reimagining of the life of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a Japanese torn among patriotism for her parents’ homeland, wordly ambition, and sympathy for the Chinese, she would reflect almost exactly the twists and turns in the history of modern Japan.
订阅：
博文 (Atom)