Billy Strayhorn

Billy Wilder’s classic film from 1944, entitled Double Indemnity displays many of the traditional traits of Film Noir. During the opening scene an extremely dramatic silhouette of a mysterious man on crutches limps towards the viewer. You can’t help but wonder who this character could be. Ultimately Walter Neff betrays his superior, Barton Keys. Keys thinks very highly of Neff and believes he has what it takes to become a great investigator for the insurance company. Neff is an insurance…

Marilyn Monroe is dead. (Dramatic pause) I am Lee Strasberg, Marilyn's acting teacher. I'm delivering this speech because she had no close family whatsoever. Only me. (Gesture to myself) Although my Marilyn had the "perfect life" (hand motions for quotations), it drove her to the extremities of ending it. Her lifeless body was found face-down in her bed on Sunday, August 5, 1962. Monroe had her telephone in one hand, and sleeping pills placed around her body. Marilyn had…

miserably working in horrific mining conditions. He could have easily gotten involved in the rioting and become a bitter person, but dancing gave him something to put his passions into. Dancing gave him an alternate path; it was crazy symbolic when Billy went off to London to attend school and his father and brother are shown being locked in the elevator and sent back into the mines on the same day. Dance made that world of difference for him. Leisure is, in my opinion, a wonderful tool to…

to emphasize the importance of life and significance ofdeath. Kurt Vonnegut uses a mix of social satire, black humor, autobiography and moral philosophy to explain a powerful antiwar message (Vonnegut and Ludwig). Through the characterization of Billy Pilgram and his experiences in World War II, Vonnegut uses his own background from the firebombing of Dresden, Germany to explore the psychological effects of war on the average soldier in Slaughterhouse-Five. The air raid upon Dresden,…

Norma Jeane Mortensen, also known as Marilyn Monroe was born on June 1, 1926 in Los Angeles, California. In the beginning Marilyn had a rough start at life. She didn’t know her father, and her mother Glady Pearl Bakers developed psychiatric problems and was placed in an institution. Monroe spent a lot of her time in foster care and in an orphanage. In 1937, Doc and Grace Goddard took care of Monroe for only a few years. At seven years old Marilyn was placed back in a foster home where she had…

BUD NOT BUDDY JOURNAL #5 I think that Bud often makes impulsive decisions, making him jump to conclusions. There are quite a few examples of this, different parts of the book. For example, Bud assumed that there was a vampire bat in the shed and created a mess and got hurt. In another part of the book, he though Lefty Lewis was a vampire because of the blood case in his car and judged him. Last of all, he assumed that Herman E. Calloway was his father using arbitrary evidence that did not…

reading this book, I believed that Billy Pilgrim was a pseudonym for Kurt Vonnegut, and that this story was told so well because he wrote about his own experiences in life and as a prisoner of war. I learned later on that this was not the case; that Billy Pilgrim had been based off of a man that Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war with in World War II. This book was a commentary by Kurt Vonnegut on the effects of war and, specifically, the Dresden bombing. Billy Pilgrim survives this bombing,…

“Flesh impact, her face was her fortune as much as her voluptuous figure. The luminosity of her face!” (billy wilder). Her image was sometimes considered as sexual greed and postwar male expectations. Her sexuality and VULNERABILITY originally gave her an image. “Half child, but not the part that shows.” “dangerous” sexuality in her acting. “Dumb blonde” transcended…

Have you ever heard of the song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel? “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel is a song released in 1989 that touched upon topics from 1949 to 1989. This song was a very well-known song by Billy Joel. He also wrote this song to express his long lost love for History. Billy Joel wanted to be a high school history teacher before he started his singing career. Six history topics from this song have been picked to inform you about a little bit of history. Those…

The Sirens VS. Poison Ivy: Bet Your Guess If you don’t commit crimes, kill, or back stab people (I mean not figuratively and figuratively) are you a villain? A villain is a a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime. Although some people imagine that the Sirens, who are from the Odyssey, really use trickery, murder, and power, they are really villainous, yet, one can also argue that they are only doing this for fun or to survive. Where’s the villain trait in…