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SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

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Picture of a musician: Robert Johnson
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Music
Robert Johnson

Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was an American blues musician and songwriter. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. Although his recording career spanned only 7 months, he is now recognized as a master of the blues, particularly the Delta blues style, and is also one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as being "the first ever rock star".

As a traveling performer who played mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances, Johnson had little commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime. He participated in only two recording sessions, one in San Antonio in 1936, and one in Dallas in 1937, that produced 29 distinct songs (with 13 surviving alternate takes) recorded by famed Country Music Hall of Fame producer Don Law. These songs, recorded solo in improvised studios, were the totality of his recorded output. Most were released as 10-inch, 78 rpm singles from 1937–1938, with a few released after his death. Other than these recordings, very little was known of him during his life outside of the small musical circuit in the Mississippi Delta where he spent most of his life; much of his story has been reconstructed after his death by researchers. Johnson's poorly documented life and death have given rise to much legend. The one most closely associated with his life is that he sold his soul to the devil at a local crossroads to achieve musical success.

Picture of a musician: Johann Sebastian Bach
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Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.

The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After being orphaned at the age of 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, after which he continued his musical education in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Köthen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St Thomas's) in Leipzig. There he composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university's student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened during some of his earlier positions, he had difficult relations with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by his sovereign, Augustus III of Poland in 1736. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.

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Picture of a movie: Night Will Fall
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Movies
Night Will Fall
2014
April 1945. In Germany, as World War II was drawing to a close and the Allied Forces were swarming into Berlin, groups of freshly trained combat cameramen documented the gruesome scenes behind the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps. Named "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey", the 1945 documentary for the British government was produced by Sidney Bernstein, with Alfred Hitchcock's participation. For nearly seven decades, the film was shelved in the British archives and was abandoned without a public screening--for either political reasons or shifted Government priorities--to be ultimately completed by a team of historians and film scholars of the British Imperial War Museum, who meticulously restored the original footage. Intertwined with interviews of both survivors and liberators, as well as short newsreel films and raw footage from the original film, the 2014 documentary chronicles the atrocities that occurred in the concentration and labour camps of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau, and Buchenwald, also including footage from Soviet cameramen. Without shying away, the camera pans on the German SS officers, lingering on the bony, emaciated faces of the piled-up-like-dolls bodies of men and women who were mercilessly thrown into pits during the mass-grave digging operations. However--even though the film documents a world of nightmare, exposing the undeniable truth of what has been going on within these camps--it also focuses on the healing process of the completely dehumanised survivors, in an attempt not only to serve as a testimony of the Nazi crimes, but also as an important lesson for all mankind.
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Picture of a book: Much Ado About Nothing
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Books
Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing, abridged. CLAUDIO: So, um, Hero, I sorta maybe like you a whole lot will you go to the prom with me?HERO: We should get married! Squeeeeeee!BEATRICE: Pfft. Love is for stupid losers who are stupid. BENEDICK: You know, you might get laid more often if you weren’t such a cynical bitch all the time.BEATRICE: Fuck you. BENEDICK: Get in line, sugartits.*audience is beaten over the head by sexual tension*DON PEDRO: Hey everybody, I had a great idea! Let’s make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love!EVERYONE: YAY! MEDDLING! PRINCE JOHN: So, I think I’m going to break up Claudio and Hero.BORACHIO: Really? That’s your dastardly scheme? How do we possibly benefit from that?PRINCE JOHN: No, see, I don’t like Claudio because my half-brother likes him, and I hate my half brother, so…wait. Okay, so it’s actually a really pointless plan that only serves to create conflict. But it’s the only way I get any good scenes in this thing, so MISCHIEF AHOY! BORACHIO AND CONRADE: YAY! BEATRICE: Hey Benedick, you still suck donkey balls. BENEDICK: I fart in your general direction! Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!BEATRICE: I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper! PRINCE JOHN: So guess what Claudio? Your woman totally cheated on you. I saw, I was there.CLAUDIO: OMG I HATE THAT WHORE. DON PEDRO: Despite the fact that he’s a bastard in all senses of the word and has no reason to be helping me or my friends, I think we should believe John without proof or even asking Hero’s side of the story. CLAUDIO: Hero, you’re a shameless whore and I hate your stupid face! EVERYONE: WTF?! PRIEST: Great job, now Hero’s dead from sad. CLAUDIO: OMG I AM SO REMORSEFUL. FORGIVE ME, DEAD HERO!HERO: Pysche! I’m really okay!BEATRICE: Luckily THIS time the priest’s idea to fake a girl’s death to solve all her problems actually worked, instead of backfiring horribly. BENEDICK: Hey, that’s pretty funny. You know, I guess you’re not that bad. I think I love you, and stuff. BEATRICE: Yeah, I guess I kind of love you too. ANTONIO: Close enough. Now off to kill Prince John!EVERYONE: YAY! THE END.