Word: binging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Even in 1956, it was still a swell party for Bing: "True Love," another song from "High Society," gave him a No. 3 hit and a gold record (his 21st). And in his duet with Sinatra, he teaches Young Blue Eyes a thing or two about the ease of musical and movie-star mastery. "Well, Did You Evah," an old Cole Porter tune dusted off for the occasion, is a clever thrust-and-parry duet, and Crosby effortlessly gets in the best jabs. In one bridge he ends the phrase "baba au rhum" with his trademark...
...none of these asides appears in the published text (as printed in "The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter"). Like so many of the "ad libs" in the "Road" movies, these were doubtless carefully devised by Bing and his writing team. But the point was never that the gags should be spontaneous; it was that they should seem spontaneous - the little inspiration that springs from conviviality, a modernist, ironic commentary on trivial proceedings, a way to keep the performers fresh and make the audience believe they were in on a verbal jam session - improvs that achieve a casual perfection. And that...
...Most In 1956, then, Crosby was in the late summer of perhaps the most popular and enduring career of any American entertainer of the 20th century. As Gary Giddins notes in his comprehensive critical biography "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years, 1903-1940" (Little, Brown; $30) Crosby notched an unequaled number of milestones: most No. 1 records ever; and most records on the American pop charts (nearly twice as many as Sinatra...
...Visions of Jazz: The First Century" and the commentator who logs the most time on the recent Ken Burns project - to spend a decade researching and writing a 728-page study that takes Crosby only 15 years into a half-century career. (The book ends with "Road to Singapore," Bing's first movie with Bob Hope; volume two will cover the big movie years, "White Christmas," his second family and charges of son-whupping, which in interviews Giddins has minimized...
...Crosby's importance in the history of pop singing, his talent for vocal nuance and lyric-reading; rather than a bland stylist, the first easy-listening star, Crosby is promoted as, in Artie Shaw's words, "the first hip white person born in the United States." To Giddins, Bing was more. He embodied an attractive prototype: the casual, unflappable American, at ease in his eminence, who faces life with equanimity, win or lose - but who always wins. Giddins also dares to admire the fullness, longevity and ease of Crosby's success: "He taught the world what it meant to live...