Bonnie Raitt's Cover of Randall Bramlett's "Used To Rule the World"

A great blues ode to the fall of aged winners:

Then listen to his intro anecdote about her request to change one line:

I heard Raitt's cover first. Interestingly, the line I think is best is the one Bonnie Raitt changed. Original: Miss Cocktail Dress, looking in the bathroom sink, did anybody find the ring? Raitt's: Miss Cocktail Dress, standing at the bathroom sink, looking for a back way out. The new line is so much more pathetic and desperate, the difference between misplacing something (first version and a theme in the song) and an unfortunate/bad choice (the second), a potent image that suggests a hope gone wrong set within an implied bigger failure. Subtle, but some serious lyric chops there.

KKK Child and African American State Trooper (1992 Photo)

Poynter has the background on the photo HERE. [click to enlarge]

Music in Nursing Home

Geezer Rock

Rising narcissism in popular song lyrics?

NYT
April 25, 2011
A Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Lyrics
By JOHN TIERNEY

A couple of years ago, as his fellow psychologists debated whether narcissism was increasing, Nathan DeWall heard Rivers Cuomo singing to a familiar 19th-century melody. Mr. Cuomo, the lead singer and guitarist for the rock band Weezer, billed the song as “Variations on a Shaker Hymn.”

Where 19th-century Shakers had sung “ ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,” Mr. Cuomo offered his own lyrics: “I’m the meanest in the place, step up, I’ll mess with your face.” Instead of the Shaker message of love and humility, Mr. Cuomo sang over and over, “I’m the greatest man that ever lived.”

The refrain got Dr. DeWall wondering: “Who would actually sing that aloud?” Mr. Cuomo may have been parodying the grandiosity of other singers — but then, why was there so much grandiosity to parody? Did the change from “Simple Gifts” to “Greatest Man That Ever Lived” exemplify a broader trend?

Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

“Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,” Dr. DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent the results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.

Defining the personality of a generation with song lyrics may seem a bit of a reach, but Dr. DeWall points to research done by his co-authors that showed people of the same age scoring higher in measures of narcissism on some personality tests. The extent and meaning of this trend have been hotly debated by psychologists, some of whom question the tests’ usefulness and say that young people today aren’t any more self-centered than those of earlier generations. The new study of song lyrics certainly won’t end the debate, but it does offer another way to gauge self-absorption: the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Read the full story HERE in the NYT.

Music Helps Aging Adults' Movement

NYT
November 26, 2010
Aging: Unsteady on Your Feet? Try Moving to Music
By RONI CARYN RABIN

Elderly people in a new study cut their risk of falling by more than half after they took classes in eurhythmics, an exercise-and-music program designed for young children.

The 12-month trial recruited 134 people, average age 75, who were unsteady on their feet. Half were randomly assigned to weekly hourlong eurhythmics classes for the first six months, and the other half took no classes until the following six months.

The program, developed by the early-20th-century Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, teaches movement in time to music, from Mozart minuets to jazz improvisations. Participants have to walk and turn around, stay in step with changing tempos, learn to shift their weight and balance, handle objects while walking, and make exaggerated upper-body movements while walking.

The two groups were monitored to determine how many times they fell. In the first group, there were just 24 falls over the first six months, compared with 54 among those who were not in the classes.

Even after the classes ended, the participants maintained their improvements in balance, walked with a more regular gait and were better able to walk while doing other things. The study was published online in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Read the full article HERE.

NPR on a New Kind of Christianity (book)

NPR

Jesus, Reconsidered: Book Sparks Evangelical Debate
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
March 26, 2010

..........
Rethinking Christianity

Who is Brian McLaren, and what has he done to make these people so angry?

It turns out that McLaren is considered one of the country's most influential evangelicals, and his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, takes aim at some core doctrinal beliefs. McLaren is rethinking Jesus' mission on Earth, and even the purpose of the crucifixion.

"The view of the cross that I was given growing up, in a sense, has a God who needs blood in order to be appeased," McLaren says. "If this God doesn't see blood, God can't forgive."

McLaren believes that version of God is a misreading of the Bible.

"God revealed in Christ crucified shows us a vision of God that identifies with the victim rather than the perpetrator, identifies with the one suffering rather than the one inflicting suffering," he says.

McLaren says modern evangelicalism underplays that Jesus — who spent most of his time with the poor, the sick and the sinners — saved his wrath primarily for hard-core religious leaders.

Others, such as Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, say McLaren's view of Jesus and the crucifixion is like a shot to the heart of Christian beliefs.

"Did Jesus go to the cross as a mere victim? If so, then we have no Gospel, we have no hope of everlasting life," Mohler says. "Did Jesus go merely as a political prisoner, executed because he had offended the regime? Well, if so, that's a very interesting chapter of human history, but I'm not going to stake my life on it, much less my hope for eternity."

Discrepancies Between Old And Young Believers

Mohler says McLaren and others like him are trying to rewrite the Christian story. And what alarms Mohler is that young believers are attracted to this message.

That's absolutely right, says McLaren. Consider the core evangelical belief that only Christians are going to heaven and everyone else is doomed. That may have rung true for his grandparents' generation, he says, but not now.

"A young evangelical, Roman Catholic [or] mainline Protestant growing up in America today, if he goes to college, his roommate might be Hindu," he says. "His roommate might be Muslim. His roommate might be Buddhist or atheist. So, suddenly the 'other' is sleeping across the room."

McLaren is onto something here, says David Campbell, a professor at Notre Dame and co-author of American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives. His surveys show that nearly two-thirds of evangelicals under age 35 believe non-Christians can go to heaven, but only 39 percent of those over age 65 believe that. That's because young evangelicals have grown up in a religiously plural society.

"And, it's really hard to condemn someone to eternal damnation on the basis of their religion when you know them well and have come to love them," he says.

Campbell adds that young believers are more flexible about Christian doctrine in general.

"We also know that — particularly within the evangelical community — the younger you are, the less likely you are to take the Bible literally, to believe that the Bible is the inerrant 'word of God,' as compared to a book of moral precepts," he says.

Surveys by Campbell and others show young evangelicals differ from their elders in a lot of ways. They pray less often, read the Bible and go to church less often. And they're more open to culture and social issues, such as evolution and gay rights.

.........

Listen to or read the story or read an book excerpt HERE.

Ganguro Girls: Japan's Teenage Brownface Valley Girl Wannabees

Think of Japanese teens trying to emulate stereotypical tanned American Valley Girls, and this is what you get. Check out the post at the very well named blog WTF Japan Seriously. And I'm sure this was a narrow little over-hyped trend (though not a single case for sure) but seriously, WTF?

Muslim-Hindu punk rock bands in America

AP/Yahoo

Muslim-Hindu punk rock bands part of new movement
By RUSSELL CONTRERAS, Associated Press Writer Russell Contreras, Associated Press Writer 1 min ago

WAYLAND, Mass. – Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement — cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings — 25-year-old Arjun Ray is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani-American bandmates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, The Kominas, is trying to record a punk rock version of the classic Bollywood song, "Choli Ke Peeche" (Behind the Blouse).

"Yeah," said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band's guitarists, "there are a lot of contradictions going on here."

Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, The Kominas have helped launched a small, but growing, South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants and drawing scorn from some traditional Muslims who say their political, hard-edged music is "haraam," or forbidden.

The movement, an anti-establishment subculture borne of religiously conservative communities, is the subject of two new films and a hot topic on social-networking sites.

The artists say they are just trying to reconcile issues such as life in America, women's rights and homosexuality with Islam and old East vs. West cultural clashes.

"This is one way to deal with my identity as an Arab-American," said Marwan Kamel, the 24-year-old lead guitarist in Chicago-based Al-Thawra. "With this music, I can express this confusion."

The movement's birth is often credited to the novel "The Taqwacore," by Michael Muhammad Knight, a Rochester, N.Y.-raised writer who converted to Islam.

Knight coined the book's title from the Arabic word "Taqwa," which means piety or God-fearing, and the word hardcore. The 2003 book portrayed an imagined world of living-on-the-edge Muslim punk rockers and influenced real-life South Asians to form their own bands.

South Asian and Middle Eastern punk bands soon were popping up across America and communicating with each other via MySpace.

At the time of book's release, Basim Usmani and Khan already were experimenting with punk and building the foundation for The Kominas, which loosely means "scoundrels" in various South Asian languages. When Usmani, now 26, came across the book, he was writing songs and sporting a mohawk — just like the punk rocker on the novel's cover.

Usmani contacted Knight, who agreed to buy a bus on eBay for $2,000 to help launch the nation's first "Muslim punk rock tour" in 2007. Kamel, the son of a Syrian father and Polish mother, bought a one-way ticket to Boston to join the tour, and Canadian drag-queen singer Sena Hussain met up with them along the way.

The musicians performed at various venues but were notably kicked off stage during an open mic performance at the Islamic Society of North America convention in Chicago. Traditional Muslims at the convention decried the electric guitar-based music as un-Islamic while others were upset a woman dared sing on stage. The episode was documented by Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed in his new documentary "Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam."

"These guys are not prophetizing or preaching anything specific about Islam," said Majeed, whose film is set for release in the United States in 2010. "They just happen to be young and Muslim, and they write songs and do art that expresses that idea."

Imam Talal Eid, executive director of the Islamic Institute of Boston, said some traditional Muslims may object to such music because they focus on its sexual attraction rather than its use for spiritual enjoyment. "But I think we can come up with a moderate opinion that distinguished what is forbidden from what is not," said Eid. "It's a new issue among Muslims."

The musical style of each group varies. Some songs on The Kominas' album "Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay" lean toward the humorous and ironic, including "Suicide Bomb the Gap." In their song "Sharia Law in the USA," the lyrics mock the portrayal of Islamists: "I am an Islamist/I am the anti-Christ/most squares can't make a most-wanted list/but my-my how I stay in style." Their sound mixes hard-edged punk, ska and funk.

Meanwhile, Al-Thawra sings about political events in the Middle East with songs like "Gaza: Choking on the Smoke of Dreams." Their music is closer to heavy metal.

Other bands include the Washington, D.C.-based Sarmust and the Texas group Vote Hezbollah.

Like most punk groups, bands produce their own albums and sell them at shows and online.

.....

The groups have toured since that first Taqwacore trip, playing in small clubs, in basements at parties and in Hispanic cultural centers. Typically, The Kominas and Al-Thawra say they play in front of 50 to 80 people.

The bands have noticed Latino punks getting into their music. Al-Thawra recently picked up a guitarist from Mexico City named Mario Salazar. The cover of Al-Thawra's next album will feature the image of the U.S.-Mexico border fused with the Palestinian-Israeli wall.

Alan Waters, an anthropology professor at University of Massachusetts-Boston, said it should come as no surprise that young Muslim and Hindu immigrants are expressing themselves through rock or that their music would strike a chord with other "disenfranchised" populations in the U.S., such as Latinos and other children of recent immigrants.

"If they're touching or singing about identity, it's going to make a connection," said Waters. "Punk rock is very American, and this is assimilation through a back door."

He called the bands "a good opportunity for stereotype-smashing."

The Kominas, who sing mostly in English, now are trying to break the image they are just a "Muslim punk band," especially since one of their founders, Ray, is Hindu. On their next album, Ray said the band will have songs in Hindi.

.....

Usmani said he grew up as a "nonreligious" Muslim-American so his journey into punk caused few problems, although he admits his family doesn't like the drinking and smoking that pervade the music scene. Khan and Kominas drummer Imran Malik, 25, also said they aren't as observant as their families might like.

"I mean, if you put a sword to us," said Usmani, "one of us might pray."

.....

Read the full story and related links HERE.

Japan's Rebellious Cultural "Herbavores" [slate]

SLATE
[click on original for hyperlinks]

foreigners
The Herbivore's Dilemma
Japan panics about the rise of "grass-eating men," who shun sex, don't spend money, and like taking walks.
By Alexandra Harney
Posted Monday, June 15, 2009, at 2:04 PM ET

Ryoma Igarashi likes going for long drives through the mountains, taking photographs of Buddhist temples and exploring old neighborhoods. He's just taken up gardening, growing radishes in a planter in his apartment. Until recently, Igarashi, a 27-year-old Japanese television presenter, would have been considered effeminate, even gay. Japanese men have long been expected to live like characters on Mad Men, chasing secretaries, drinking with the boys, and splurging on watches, golf, and new cars.

Today, Igarashi has a new identity (and plenty of company among young Japanese men) as one of the soushoku danshi—literally translated, "grass-eating boys." Named for their lack of interest in sex and their preference for quieter, less competitive lives, Japan's "herbivores" are provoking a national debate about how the country's economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men's behavior.

Newspapers, magazines, and television shows are newly fixated on the herbivores. "Have men gotten weaker?" was one theme of a recent TV talk show. "Herbivores Aren't So Bad" is the title of a regular column on the Japanese Web site NB Online.

In this age of bromance and metrosexuals, why all the fuss? The short answer is that grass-eating men are alarming because they are the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anemic consumption. Herbivores represent an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy. Media Shakers, a consulting company that is a subsidiary of Dentsu, the country's largest advertising agency, estimates that 60 percent of men in their early 20s and at least 42 percent of men aged 23 to 34 consider themselves grass-eating men. Partner Agent, a Japanese dating agency, found in a survey that 61 percent of unmarried men in their 30s identified themselves as herbivores. Of the 1,000 single men in their 20s and 30s polled by Lifenet, a Japanese life-insurance company, 75 percent described themselves as grass-eating men.

Japanese companies are worried that herbivorous boys aren't the status-conscious consumers their parents once were. They love to putter around the house. According to Media Shakers' research, they are more likely to want to spend time by themselves or with close friends, more likely to shop for things to decorate their homes, and more likely to buy little luxuries than big-ticket items. They prefer vacationing in Japan to venturing abroad. They're often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they're in no rush to get married themselves, according to Maki Fukasawa, the Japanese editor and columnist who coined the term in NB Online in 2006.

Grass-eating boys' commitment phobia is not the only thing that's worrying Japanese women. Unlike earlier generations of Japanese men, they prefer not to make the first move, they like to split the bill, and they're not particularly motivated by sex. "I spent the night at one guy's house, and nothing happened—we just went to sleep!" moaned one incredulous woman on a TV program devoted to herbivores. "It's like something's missing with them," said Yoko Yatsu, a 34-year-old housewife, in an interview. "If they were more normal, they'd be more interested in women. They'd at least want to talk to women."

Shigeru Sakai of Media Shakers suggests that grass-eating men don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. He attributes their poor communication skills to the fact that many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked. "Because they had TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms, it became more common for them to shut themselves in their rooms when they got home and communicate less with their families, which left them with poor communication skills," he wrote in an e-mail. (Japan has rarely needed its men to have sex as much as it does now. Low birth rates, combined with a lack of immigration, have caused the country's population to shrink every year since 2005.)

It may be that Japan's efforts to make the workplace more egalitarian planted the seeds for the grass-eating boys, says Fukasawa. In the wake of Japan's 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law, women assumed greater responsibility at work, and the balance of power between the sexes began to shift. Though there are still significant barriers to career advancement for women, a new breed of female executive who could party almost as hard as her male colleagues emerged. Office lechery, which had been socially acceptable, became stigmatized as seku hara, or sexual harassment.

But it was the bursting of Japan's bubble in the early 1990s, coupled with this shift in the social landscape, that made the old model of Japanese manhood unsustainable. Before the bubble collapsed, Japanese companies offered jobs for life. Salarymen who knew exactly where their next paycheck was coming from were more confident buying a Tiffany necklace or an expensive French dinner for their girlfriend. Now, nearly 40 percent of Japanese work in nonstaff positions with much less job security.

"When the economy was good, Japanese men had only one lifestyle choice: They joined a company after they graduated from college, got married, bought a car, and regularly replaced it with a new one," says Fukasawa. "Men today simply can't live that stereotypical 'happy' life."

Yoto Hosho, a 22-year-old college dropout who considers himself and most of his friends herbivores, believes the term describes a diverse group of men who have no desire to live up to traditional social expectations in their relationships with women, their jobs, or anything else. "We don't care at all what people think about how we live," he says.

Many of Hosho's friends spend so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing. And the Internet, he says, has helped make alternative lifestyles more acceptable. Hosho believes that the lines between men and women in his generation have blurred. He points to the popularity of "boys love," a genre of manga and novels written for women about romantic relationships between men that has spawned its own line of videos, computer games, magazines, and cafes where women dress as men.

Fukasawa contends that while some grass-eating men may be gay, many are not. Nor are they metrosexuals. Rather, their behavior reflects a rejection of both the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West's "commercialization" of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman's affection. Some Western concepts, like going to dinner parties as a couple, never fit easily into Japanese culture, she says. Others never even made it into the language—the term "ladies first," for instance, is usually said in English in Japan. During Japan's bubble economy, "Japanese people had to live according to both Western standards and Japanese standards," says Fukasawa. "That trend has run its course."

Japanese women are not taking the herbivores' indifference lightly. In response to the herbivorous boys' tepidity, "carnivorous girls" are taking matters into their own hands, pursuing men more aggressively. Also known as "hunters," these women could be seen as Japan's version of America's cougars.

While many Japanese women might disagree, Fukasawa sees grass-eating boys as a positive development for Japanese society. She notes that before World War II, herbivores were more common: Novelists such as Osamu Dazai and Soseki Natsume would have been considered grass-eating boys. But in the postwar economic boom, men became increasingly macho, increasingly hungry for products to mark their personal economic progress. Young Japanese men today are choosing to have less to prove.

Alexandra Harney is the author of The China Price and a regular commentator on Japanese television.

BBC has a 13-year-old iPod owner review the original Sony Walkman

BBC

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.

He had told me it was big, but I hadn't realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

When I saw it for the first time, its colour also struck me. Nowadays gadgets come in a rainbow of colours but this was only one shade - a bland grey.
LISTEN UP TEENAGERS... THE CLASSIC WALKMAN EXPLAINED
# 1: Clunky buttons
# 2: Switch to metal (that's a type of cassette, not heavy rock music)
# 3: Battery light - usually found flickering in its death throes
# 4: Double headphone jack (not to be found on an iPod)
# 5: Door ejects - watch out for flying tapes and eye injuries

So it's not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing choice of music player. If I was browsing in a shop maybe I would have chosen something else.

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

As I boarded the school bus, where I live in Aberdeenshire, I was greeted with laughter. One boy said: "No-one uses them any more." Another said: "Groovy." Yet another one quipped: "That would be hard to lose."

My friends couldn't imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked.

In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
“ I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down 'rewind' and releasing it randomly ”

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day.

Digital relief

Throughout my week using the Walkman, I came to realise that I have very little knowledge of technology from the past. I made a number of naive mistakes, but I also learned a lot about the grandfather of the MP3 Player.

You can almost imagine the excitement about the Walkman coming out 30 years ago, as it was the newest piece of technology at the time.

Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis.

Personally, I'm relieved I live in the digital age, with bigger choice, more functions and smaller devices. I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can't imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.

Having said all that, portable music is better than no music.

Now, for technically curious readers, I've directly compared the portable cassette player with its latter-day successor. Here are the main cons, and even a pro, I found with this piece of antique technology.

SOUND

This is the function that matters most. To make the music play, you push the large play button. It engages with a satisfying clunk, unlike the finger tip tap for the iPod.

When playing, it is clearly evident that the music sounds significantly different than when played on an MP3 player, mainly because of the hissy backtrack and odd warbly noises on the Walkman.

The warbling is probably because of the horrifically short battery life; it is nearly completely dead within three hours of firing it up. Not long after the music warbled into life, it abruptly ended.

CONVENIENCE

With the plethora of MP3 players available on the market nowadays, each boasting bigger and better features than its predecessor, it is hard to imagine the prospect of purchasing and using a bulky cassette player instead of a digital device.

Furthermore, there were a number of buttons protruding from the top and sides of this device to provide functions such as "rewinding" and "fast-forwarding" (remember those?), which added even more bulk.

As well as this, the need for changing tapes is bothersome in itself. The tapes which I had could only hold around 12 tracks each, a fraction of the capacity of the smallest iPod.

Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?

"I remembered it fondly as a way to enjoy what music I liked, where I liked," he said. "But when I see it now, I wonder how I carried it!"

WALKMAN 1, MP3 PLAYER 0

But it's not all a one-way street when you line up a Walkman against an iPod. The Walkman actually has two headphone sockets, labelled A and B, meaning the little music that I have, I can share with friends. To plug two pairs of headphones in to an iPod, you have to buy a special adapter.

Another useful feature is the power socket on the side, so that you can plug the Walkman into the wall when you're not on the move. But given the dreadful battery life, I guess this was an outright necessity rather than an extra function.

Scott Campbell co-edits his own news website,



M & C comment: I always liked the fact that the President of Sony came up with the idea, not some low-level engineer or development guy.

American Teens Text Nearly 80 messages per day

American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

Whoa!

Eric Carle: The Surprising Dark Side of the Very Hungry Caterpillar

Newsweek
The Surprising Dark Side of the Very Hungry Caterpillar

Once upon a time, Eric Carle wrote a children's book that was so comfy, it came with its own cocoon. Turns out that cute little bug went through a very big metamorphosis.
Ramin Setoodeh
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Mar 23, 2009

Eric Carle has made millions from the efforts of a certain Very Hungry Caterpillar, but when it comes to hungry crabs—well, that's another story. Behind Carle's home near Key Largo, Fla., there's a tidy garden perched on the edge of the Florida Straits with a view that seems to stretch all the way to Cuba. Carle doesn't really know what he's put in the ground—"I know nothing about plants," he says—but he's created a vibrant quilt nonetheless, thanks to an unusual template. "I lay my garden out like my books," he says. "I want a patch of green here, a patch of red here, pink in between." Also like his books—which include "The Very Busy Spider," "The Mixed-Up Chameleon" and Carle's biggest hit, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"—his garden is full of animals. On a normal sunny day, pelicans flock overhead, iguanas crawl around and you can sometimes see dolphins in the ocean on the horizon. We meet a harmless spider and a stray cat named Whitey. Then there are the crabs. Beneath the surface of this little patch of heaven, a colony of crustaceans has taken up residence, and like you-know-who, they're burrowing into everything in sight, especially a coconut palm tree near the water. "They dig from both sides and the roots are exposed to the air," says Carle, with a disheartened look on his face. "My garden is dying."

It's a surprising down note for a man whose 70-plus collected works are the kid-lit version of a ray of sunshine. In truth, Carle, 80, has plenty to smile about. His 200-word story about a caterpillar who devours a sausage, a cupcake, a watermelon and more—there are holes drilled into the book to represent all that nibbling—celebrates its 40th anniversary this week. "Caterpillar" has sold 29 million copies, making it the most successful picture book this side of "Peter Rabbit"—more popular than "Goodnight Moon" or "The Cat in the Hat." The empire of caterpillar pajamas, board games, cell-phone accessories and other Carle creations takes in $50 million a year. "My friends, my family, my editors, my publisher, we all wondered why it's been so successful," Carle says. "It is a book about hope. If you're an insignificant caterpillar, you can grow up to be a big butterfly in the world." But what most of Carle's fans don't know is that, like those crabs gnawing away at his garden, there's something dark lurking underneath his colorful bug book.

Carle was born in 1929 in Syracuse, N.Y., to immigrant parents from Germany. He remembers his first six years fondly: Mickey Mouse and Flash Gordon, family camping trips, the big windows in his kindergarten class. When he was 6, his mother got homesick and the family moved back to Stuttgart. They lived in a big, four-story house with many of his relatives. "My grandmother had nine sisters," Carle says. "I had an interesting, wacky family. They're all liars but wonderful storytellers." Carle had trouble adjusting to his new country. His first-grade teacher still haunts, especially because Carle once picked up a ringing phone, and the teacher lashed his palms with a bamboo switch in front of the class. "I was this free American kid," Carle says, "but I was careful after that."

When World War II broke out, Carle's father was drafted by the Germans and his family was engulfed in the chaos of war. "We spent many hours in our cellar," he says, his voice breaking a bit. "It was scary at times. The nearest bomb was maybe 20 feet away, and it shook the house. [The bombs] came closer and closer, and when it passed, my mother took my head and put it in her lap. I will never forget that. There was no panic. It was over." He developed a special bond at school with his art teacher, Herr Krauss, who secretly showed him the works of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, all banned by Hitler. He remembers wading in the Rhine when a warplane flew by and shot at him. The bullets missed him by a few feet. He also remembers an unexpected knock at his family's house, days before the Germans surrendered. "Some Nazi official came to the door and said to my mother, 'Your son tomorrow morning has to report to the railroad station, we'll give him a bazooka.' I thought it would be exciting to get a bazooka. But she didn't let me go."

The Americans saved him, in more ways than one. He went to work as a file clerk in the denazification department of the United States military government. After years of starving, he was allowed access to the troops' kitchen. In his autobiography, "The Art of Eric Carle," he remembers swiping "peanut-butter sandwiches, lumps of butter, cubes of sugar, leftover bits of steak" for his family. It took two and a half more years for Carle's father to return home; he'd been sent to a Russian prison camp. The man whom Carle met at the trolley looked like an 80-pound ghost. "He was different, and I was different," Carle says. "I was going to art school. I was into art and girls." And Carle still wanted to go back to America. He finally returned in 1952, with only $40 and dreams of a brighter future.

Carle didn't publish his first book until he was 38, and that was just the illustrations for the now classic "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" He had spent the first half of his professional career in advertising and graphic design, and he was able to woo a book editor named Ann Beneduce after he sent her his one-of-a-kind business card. "It was wonderful," Beneduce says. "It had a big whale folded around and inside, there was a ladybug. I had been kind of looking for somebody who could do illustrations that were appealing to children. It was so visually appealing." Carle created his art using a technique of layering colored tissue paper on a white board. In person, they're kind of like Matisse's enormous cutouts. One of the first ideas he suggested to Beneduce—he had so many, he kept them in a brown cardboard box—was a week in the life of a worm named Willi. Beneduce didn't think a worm was sympathetic enough. "We talked about other animals," Carle says, "and eventually she said, 'How about a caterpillar?' And I said, 'butterfly.' " There was just one last problem: "We couldn't find a manufacturer who could guarantee the holes would line up," says Beneduce, who had to go all the way to Japan to get the first printing of the "Caterpillar" books made. It became an instant bestseller.

Carle acknowledges, somewhat obliquely, how much his life in Germany affected his art. "With my books," Carle says, "I try to recapture a period I should've had and didn't—for more fun, more nonsense, more humor." But when you know his background it's almost impossible not to look at his work without seeing echoes from his past. Despite the colorful hopefulness of his stories, they're suffused with a sense of loneliness—that solitary caterpillar, making its way in the world. In fact, the opening of "Willi the Worm" read: "This is Willi Worm. He is very hungry. He hasn't eaten through anything for a long time." There's even something about the way he describes the caterpillar's diet ("On Saturday he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese … ") that evokes the way he describes what he ate after the war when he went to work for the Americans. His own favorite book is "Do You Want to Be My Friend?" about a mouse that ventures on his own, in search of companionship, while a green snake slithers nearby. Carle says in his mind he dedicated the story to his best childhood friend from back in Syracuse. "He has the memory of one year in kindergarten in the United States, where he had every kind of color available," Beneduce says, "and all the things he didn't have when he got to Germany."

It's hard not to wonder if he hasn't constructed his life to purge those dark childhood memories. In person, he is the antithesis of dour. "He looks very much like Santa Claus," says his assistant, Motoko Inoue, and with his deep laugh and raspy voice, he sounds like Santa, too. He's a delightful host whose stories are punctuated by affectionate smiles. His house in Florida is bathed in color. The sun pours into the kitchen and big windows peer out to the blue coast. His desk is covered in scraps of rainbow tissue paper. He makes sure that every fan who writes to him gets a response. He also spends a great deal of time maintaining the country's first picture-book museum, which opened six years ago in Amherst, Mass. A friend designed the 40,000-square-foot building, but painting a housefly in each urinal was Carle's impish idea. "You have 80 percent less spillage because guys aim at it," he says. He hasn't written a book in two years, but he says that's only because he's content with taking it easy. He likes to sleep in, play solitaire and go for walks. Carle seems to have reached a sweet spot in his life—he posted a picture on his blog recently of him eating breakfast with a spoonful of his favorite food: Black Forest honey. "I'm very happy," he says. "In fact, I told my wife I've never been so happy." It might have taken him 40 years, but Eric Carle is finally as free as a butterfly.

NPR: Never Too Late to Learn an Instrument

Never Too Late To Learn An Instrument
By Brigid McCarthy

Weekend Edition Saturday, December 27, 2008 - Taking up an instrument for the first time can be daunting for adults, both because of hectic schedules and perhaps the wiring of the brain. But those who do try to learn the piano, the trumpet or violin later in life discover that the biggest obstacles have nothing to do with innate ability or IQ.

Listen to the story HERE.

The N-Word Is Flourishing Among Generation Hip-Hop Latinos

Village Voice
The N-Word Is Flourishing Among Generation Hip-Hop Latinos
Why should we care now?
By Raquel Cepeda
published: October 22, 2008

"Yo, my nigga, that nigga's crazy," declares a young Dominican guy in his late teens, early twenties. "Yeah, my nigga, that nigga was buggin' last night, my nigga," responds another hermano. Chatter like this floated in the air like the whiff of days-old garbage smoldering in the heat while I took my frequent summer jaunts along Vermilyea Avenue way uptown in Inwood, with my 11-year-old daughter in tow.

Initially, you'd find mostly Caribbean Latinos dropping n-bombs into rap lyrics—"Pigs," off Cypress Hill's classic self-titled 1991 debut, is just one example—but nearly two decades later, the profusion of the word into the New York City Latino vocabulary is reaching an almost caricaturist quality. In Spanish Harlem, el Bronx, and the Lower East Side, it's enthusiastically deployed in an almost faddish manner, as if it's going out of style literally tomorrow. With Nas threatening to name his latest album Nigga (he relented, eventually, but most fans still call it that anyway) a few months ago, and iconic Latino artists from the authentic urban native Fat Joe to one of my favorite internationalists, Immortal Technique, still flinging it about freely, the word, its meaning, and our sense of who can and cannot use it still dominates public conversation. The palpable racial tension that's been rearing its head this historic presidential election, the subject of race and who is truly considered black or white in this black-and-white race, is something Latinos need to pay attention to. For many of us, especially those of Caribbean descent who make up a sizable chunk of New York Latinos, race should matter, and so should that one particular word.

Personal feelings, premonitions, and politics aside, I took the two young boys' exchange as an interesting opportunity, an exercise in thinking about Afro-Latino identity in an unlikely way: through a hip-hop lens. Aside from the fact that we're in the thick of a predominantly Dominican enclave (for now) in our beloved Uptown Manhattan, and the first guy I'd overheard wore an oversized white T-shirt emblazoned with our motherland's flag, homeboy could've passed for an African-American man on any other stretch of blocks stateside. By comparison, his comrade looked more like Fat Joe's skinnier brother, with light eyes and pale skin. Was it OK, or more OK, for the darker-skinned kid to use the term?

As many times as I've heard it yelled across the streets and in playgrounds lately, it doesn't take away the sting. But it's naive to think Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban kids in New York City aren't calling each other and themselves the n-word, especially in 2008. (It's a global phenomenon, too: In West African cities like Freetown and Accra, heads that find out you're from the States and part of the hip-hop community will find creative ways to work the word into a conversation.) For us, the word usually surfaces in the same context that arises among young African-Americans: as a term of inclusion and solidarity. "It's just a code of communication to us, a 'hood word people throw around frequently," says half-African-American, half-Dominican rapper AZ, who released his "rap thesis" on the subject, titled N.4.L. (Niggaz 4 Life), last month. "I guess people want to use it now for press and all that; I don't understand what's all the big fuss about."

Somehow, the n-word has found its way back into hip-hop's critical zeitgeist: I'm interested in exploring, as a Dominican New Yorker, how we as a community have propagated it. Recently, due to the mounting criticism of Boricua rapper Fat Joe's use of the term eight albums deep into his career (including his latest, The Elephant in the Room), Latinos are being challenged to introspect. But I can see why an impulse to laser-focus on the issue now would bewilder a veteran rapper like Joe; he's used the word consistently since emerging in 1993, as have the Beatnuts, Hurricane G, and his late Puerto Rican cohort Big Pun, to name a few. In an interview with Chicago-based WGCI radio personality Leon Rogers, Joe said that while he didn't know exactly when Latinos started using the n-word, he felt that "somehow it became a way to embrace each other." He added: "Crazy shit is, my man Reverend Al Sharpton, whenever I see him, he'll be like, 'Wassup Joe, my nigga,' and he's the dude that protests 'my nigga.' He's my friend, so he says it to me as a term of endearment."

"It draws the racial differentiations into the Latino community, which I agree with," says New York University Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Juan Flores, who regularly teaches courses on Afro-Latino identity here and abroad. "It's just an opportunity to check the power that Black Latinos reflect off each other and the Latino population." In other words, Latino artists use the n-word as a reminder that they too have been oppressed and are products of the transatlantic slave trade.

There may be a reason for the lack of attention: Many Caribbean Latinos are, to Americans at least, ethnically ambiguous products of miscegenation. Regardless of what we've learned in grade school, our history extends past Columbus and our Spanish conquistadores. "The European Spaniards have left a legacy of self-hatred and racism among the Latino population; without acknowledging that, we will not evolve past our own inequity," says Immortal Technique, an Afro-Peruvian hip-hop artist who also uses the n-word. "Racism in America, as horrible and ugly as it may be, still isn't as bad as what it is in Latin America, and the sad part is that we are being racist against ourselves."

Maybe, in a way, that's the statement Dania Ramirez intended to make when, as part of Nas's Grammy-night entourage earlier this year, the dark-brown Dominican actress sported a black T-shirt emblazoned with the n-word. Many folks in our parents' generation have rejected their blackness—I have older Latino neighbors who won't vote for Barack Obama simply because he's black—but those generations more informed by hip-hop are embracing their Afro-Latino identity and evolving past our own self-hatred. Perhaps. "One fallacy is that [the n-word is] blasé, like, 'Ah well, everyone can use it now that it has a different meaning,' because it's not completely meaningless," says Professor Flores. "The other extreme, though, is the absolutist who thinks no one can use it because it's taboo, under any circumstances. That's a problem, too, because every expression has the potential for ulterior meanings, depending on the circumstances of the person."

Crystal, a 13-year-old fair-skinned Dominican girl attending eighth grade in an Inwood public school, remembers first hearing the n-word in a song while hanging out with her aunt. "So then, we got on the computer and we looked it up, and it had the meaning and everything," she recalls. "I was like, 'Why would you say it in a song?' From there, you started hearing everybody on the street saying it, and then everybody started getting used to it." To be fair, parents aren't always able to interfere because they speak little to no English; those reared by hip-hop culture in the last two decades often use it themselves.

The similar term cocolo—most popularly used as an insult against Haitians by Dominicans, and by Puerto-Ricans against Dominican immigrants who look Haitian—is another word gradually being assigned a new meaning here among Latinos. Other words that translate to mean "black" among Caribbean Latinos are moreno/a and negrito/a, almost always used as terms of endearment. However, because none of these words have had the fraternal stamp of hip-hop approval, they have yet to receive their proverbial ghetto passes; speaking of which, Jennifer Lopez might've surrendered hers when she left the Bronx eons ago. While it's a fact that men in the hip-hop industry can get away with murder, women are held to impossibly high standards, and the question of authenticity played a role in how negatively the public reacted to J. Lo's use of the n-word on the remix for her 2001 single "I'm Real."

"I think with that, it was really based more upon class than anything else," Immortal Technique says. "Many people saw Fat Joe as technically black even though he was a light-skinned Puerto Rican, and he had affiliations with the streets that Jennifer Lopez probably lost on the way to Hollywood."

With few exceptions within our community—Raquel Rivera's 2003 book New York Ricans From the Hip Hop Zone devoted prime real estate to the discussion of Latino identity in hip-hop—this is a conversation we've failed to have, whatever our personal feelings. "It really don't matter if you're white, you're black, you're brown, or from the Boogie Down—it irks me to death," says Alain "KET" Maridueña, 37, an entrepreneur and artist. "Latinos in our neighborhood use it a lot—like every other word—and I'm trying to check people because I find that we're suffering, we're going through our thing, times are hard, there aren't enough opportunities out there, and I want us to rise up." But we won't rise up if we can't talk about the reasons why we haven't quite gotten there yet, and the words that've risen in prominence as a result.

Don't let them eat cake, Saudi cleric says: Birthdays in Saudi Arabia

LAT
Don't let them eat cake, Saudi cleric says
Birthday celebrations are banned as un-Islamic. But that doesn't stop people from throwing parties.
The Associated Press

November 9, 2008

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — When Hala Masaad invited her girlfriends over to celebrate her 18th birthday with cake and juice, the high school student was stepping into an unusual public debate. Is celebrating birthdays un-Islamic?

Saudi Arabia's most senior Muslim cleric recently denounced birthday parties as an unwanted foreign influence, but another prominent cleric declared they were OK.

That has left Masaad with mixed feelings about her low-key celebration last month. She loves birthday parties, she says, because they make her feel that she has "moved from one stage of life to another."

"But I sometimes feel I'm doing something haram," she said sheepishly, using the Arabic word for "banned."

The Saudi ban on birthdays is in line with the strict interpretation of Islam followed by the conservative Wahhabi sect adhered to in the kingdom. All Christian and even most Muslim feasts are also prohibited because they are considered alien customs the Saudi clerics don't sanction.

Only the Muslim feasts of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, which follows the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, are permitted.

Elsewhere in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, Dubai, Lebanon and Iran, people routinely celebrate birthdays, especially for children. Among middle-class and affluent families, parties can be elaborate, with cakes, toys, clowns, ponies and many presents. In Egypt, the prophet Muhammad's birthday is celebrated by handing out special sweets -- in the shape of a doll for girls and a horse for boys.

Even in Saudi Arabia, it's not hard to find Saudis who celebrate birthdays or stores that cater to putting on parties, despite the ban.

What makes the latest controversy notable is that it started when a prominent cleric, Salman Awdah, said on a popular satellite TV program in August that it was OK to mark birthdays and wedding anniversaries with parties as long as the Arabic word that describes the events -- eid, or "feast" -- is not used.

That prompted a quick denunciation by Saudi Arabia's grand mufti and top religious authority, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Sheik, who said such celebrations had no place in Islam and gave a list of foreign customs he suggested were unacceptable.

"Christians have Mother's Day, an eid for trees and an eid for every occasion," said Al Sheik, who also heads the Presidency for Scientific Research and Religious Edicts, speaking to Al Madina newspaper. "And on every birthday, candles are lit and food is given out."

There is no question that the television remarks by Awdah, who is not employed by the country's religious establishment, contradicted several fatwas, or religious edicts, issued by senior Saudi clerics over the years.

One such ruling, by the previous mufti, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Baz, said Muslims should not emulate the West by celebrating birthdays -- even that of Muhammad, which is marked in most other Middle Eastern countries as a holiday.

"It's not permissible to take part in them," he said. "Birthday parties are an innovation . . . and people are in no need of innovations."

Still, some Saudis welcomed a loosening of the prohibition.

"Allowing such celebrations can be an element that can strengthen ties among people and contribute to an increase in the happy occasions in our society," wrote Ibrahim Dawood in a column in the newspaper Al Eqtisadiah.

Others, including several prominent Muslim scholars, issued statements backing the ban and denouncing Awdah.

Sheik Abdullah Manie, a member of the Council of Senior Scholars, said Awdah's remarks were a "slip of the tongue that he should retract."

"We Muslims should have our identity that sets us apart and makes us proud," he said in a statement.

Some Saudis worry the controversy will be used by conservative members of the religious establishment, including the religious police, as a green light to crack down on all celebrations.

Despite the continuous fatwas against them, it's not hard to find merchandise for celebrating birthdays, anniversaries or even Western holidays like Valentine's Day. But importing the items can be tricky for shop owners.

One store owner said it's hard to say when shipments will be intercepted. A month ago, an order of balloons, hats and banners was confiscated, said the owner, who did not want to be identified.

Still, business was brisk at one gift store recently, where parties might cost from $4,000 to $32,000, depending on the decorations, giveaways and number of guests.

Customers can browse albums of wall decorations, table settings and cakes, and order party bags with coloring books and school supplies.

But one Jidda resident, Riham Ahmed, 20, said she didn't like birthdays. "It's enough to have two eids," said the economics major. "My birthday is a normal day. Even my parents don't congratulate me."

Her sister Arwa agreed.

"I missed my 25th birthday by two days [in August] and only remembered it when I checked the calendar for prayer times," she said. "I don't like it when someone tells me, 'Happy birthday.' It's like a reminder that I'm getting closer to death."

Book: "Hip Hop Speaks to Children"

NYT
November 8, 2008
Child’s Garden of Hip-Hop (for Mom to Love, Too)
By MOTOKO RICH

By now, hip-hop has become a mainstream part of the cultural landscape for children on shows like “Sesame Street,” “Yo Gabba Gabba!” on Nickelodeon and “Choo-Choo Soul” and “Handy Manny” on the Disney Channel. But when Rona Brinlee, a bookseller in Atlantic Beach, Fla., first heard about “Hip Hop Speaks to Children,” an illustrated anthology of poems and song lyrics, she worried that prospective buyers might shy away.

With previous volumes of poetry for children, she had noticed that the books were popular among grandparents looking for gifts. “I didn’t know if these same loving grandparents were going to say, ‘Wow, hip-hop,’ ” said Ms. Brinlee, who owns the BookMark, an independent bookstore. “Because some are going to make assumptions that this is violent, or they just don’t know anything about it.”

Ms. Brinlee quickly sold out of the initial six copies she stocked, and she has 10 more on order. “I’m thrilled to say that I was wrong,” she said.

“Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry With a Beat,” which features lyrics by Mos Def, Kanye West and Queen Latifah, as well as poems by Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks, has become a modest hit, rising to No. 3 among picture books on The New York Times children’s best-Seller list last Sunday .

One of the selling points of the book, which was edited by the poet Nikki Giovanni, is that it comes with a CD of recordings by many of the poets and artists performing their work, including an excerpt from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Ham ’N’ Eggs” and “Dream Variations,” by Langston Hughes. The book and CD conclude with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, followed by a hip-hop interpretation of the speech by Ms. Giovanni and the performers Oni Lasana and Val Gray Ward.

“We wanted to connect some dots, but in a very light way,” said Ms. Giovanni, who contributed three poems to the book, as well as an introduction. “I wanted to find that hip-hop voice that allows children to enter it, because they are listening to it anyway.”

Ms. Giovanni said she also wanted to reach back to what she sees as the roots of hip-hop in older poems by mainly African-American poets, like Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as to use the familiar vernacular of hip-hop to lure children to more established literary voices.

“I wanted them to see that there are, for lack of a better word, some train tracks with stops and stations along the way,” Ms. Giovanni said. “If you like Queen Latifah and ‘Ladies First,’ you’re going to love Langston Hughes and ‘Dream Boogie.’ ”

For that reason teachers and librarians have welcomed the book. “This is poetry in a form that really appeals to them,” Diane Chen, the librarian at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Nashville, said of her students. Ms. Chen said she played the CD regularly in the library and had ordered 15 copies of the book for the school.

While hip-hop has become ubiquitous on the radio and on television, its verbal component is increasingly embraced as a literary form. “There is a growing sensibility that is recognizing that hip-hop is where poetry lives today in so many ways,” said Adam Bradley, assistant professor of African-American literature at Claremont McKenna College in California, who is an editor of a coming anthology of rap lyrics for Yale University Press.

Professor Bradley added that for children, hip-hop was a natural way to learn the basics of poetry. “The kinds of word games that children naturally create really mirror hip-hop in its most basic forms,” he said.

Ms. Giovanni has been doing readings at bookstores and schools since the book came out early last month. Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, hosted an event for about 225 students. “Every school in the area was calling to see if they could come and bring their kids,” said Dara La Porte, manager of the store’s children’s and young adult department. “Schools are really looking for a way to interest kids in poetry. This is their poetry, and Nikki knows that.”

Barnes & Noble has selected the book as one it will feature on picture-book walls in the children’s departments of all its stores throughout November and December in the hopes that it will be a popular holiday gift. Sales could be difficult, though. As Leonard S. Riggio, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, recently warned in an internal memo, the chain was “bracing for a terrible holiday season” over all.

The book is the second foray into poetry for children by Sourcebooks, a small independent publisher in Chicago. Three years ago the company had a best seller with “Poetry Speaks to Children,” a collection of favorites by the likes of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson and Ms. Giovanni, who contributed four poems. That volume also came with a CD and featured historic recordings by poets like Frost and Sandburg.

Dominique Raccah, who withdrew $17,000 from a 401(k) retirement account to found Sourcebooks 21 years ago, started out publishing books for the financial services industry. In 2001 the company moved into poetry with “Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work From Tennyson to Plath,” a book-and-three-CD package for adults.

Although Ms. Raccah said that each of the company’s previous books of poetry had sold more than 150,000 copies, she said the publisher had difficulty persuading booksellers to take on many copies of “Hip Hop Speaks to Children.”

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has now sold about 3,000 copies. Ms. Raccah said that figure did not account for sales in some African-American bookstores or at group events. She added that there were now about 25,000 copies in bookstores.

Both the publisher and Ms. Giovanni are hopeful that the anthology will have quiet traction. For her part, Ms. Giovanni said she believed the book would help counteract persistent negative images of hip-hop.

“I just didn’t want to see it hijacked by half-naked girls and boys doing bling-bling,” she said. “I just wanted to try to help remind youngsters out there that this is a good expression.”

The Porning of America and What's at Stake for Youth

Newsweek

The Pornification Of A Generation

A new book traces the migration of porn culture from adult theaters to the mainstream—and asks what that means for kids.
Jessica Bennett
NEWSWEEK

The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter's soul."

In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn't take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.

But it isn't just sex that Scott is worried about. He's more interested in how we, as a culture, often mimic the most raunchy, degrading parts of it—many of which, he says, come directly from pornography. In "The Porning of America" (Beacon), which he has written with colleague Carmine Sarracino, a professor of American literature, the duo argue that, through Bratz dolls and beyond, the influence of porn on mainstream culture is affecting our self perceptions and behavior—in everything from fashion to body image to how we conceptualize our sexuality.

read the rest of the story HERE

We Are the Dog (Aging, Nostalgia, Music)

NYT
September 18, 2008, 6:36 pm
Domestic Disturbances

Judith Warner

We Are the Dog

Tags: middle age, pop music, weddings

Chronicles of Middle Age, Chapter II (At Least): In Which I Attend a Wedding

Do you know what the youth of today are doing?

They’re listening to ’80s music.

R.E.O. Speedwagon, and Madonna, and Michael Jackson and Journey.

“Living on a Prayer” sounds just great to them, and “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” is a fist-flying, foot-stomping generational anthem. (Though you might be interested to know, in this age of idiocracy, that the original title on the 1981 album “Escape,” included the “g” at the end.)

I know all this; indeed, I am an expert in the Youth of Today, because I’ve attended two weddings of twentysomethings in the past year.

They were the first weddings of twentysomethings that I’d attended since the early 1990s, when the twentysomethings in question were my cousins and friends. The wedding I went to this past weekend was a first in a more remarkable way as well: it was the very first time I was invited as a friend of the parents.

Yes – a friend of the parents. One of those staid, faded people you remember from your own wedding, the vaguely known or (in our case this weekend) almost never-before-seen interlopers toward whom you tried not to show your utter lack of interest before slinking off to enjoy yourself with your friends.

“You don’t know who we are,” my husband, Max, said to the bride on Saturday night, “but thank you for inviting us.”

“Thank you for coming,” she answered, with a smile.

This was an impressive exchange. But then, I am generally much impressed with the youth of today. They strike me as earnest. Forward-looking. And sincerely, almost unbelievably nice.

According to surveys, they drink less, do fewer drugs and experience less anomie than today’s fortysomethings did at their age.

And, most shocking of all, they appear to like their parents.

They seem not to have the general disgust for older people and the distrust of their institutions — like marriage — that people of my generation did in the 1980s.

In fact, as Max and I lounged on a loveseat, watching the young people dance and whispering sweet nothings (“What?” I would honk. “Shout directly into the ear horn!”), a few of them cocked their heads sideways at us, and found us adorable.

“Awww,” they cooed.

It was nice to get this validation from the youth. Part of me thought, though, that we should do something along the lines of showing them How It Was Done, and get up to dance to “Billie Jean,” “The Breaks” or “Like a Prayer,” which were, after all, our songs. But another part of me was tired, having had a whole half glass of champagne over the course of the evening, and many other parts felt like they were being gouged by plastic flexicuffs, so tight and complicated were the supports holding my cantilevered body in place in my ambitious party attire.

Besides that, I remembered all too well the abject horror I used to feel, in my twenties, when people in their forties tried to dance. I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Least of all, me.

For some clever part of me knew that the twentysomethings’ embrace of all the worst music from my past was, in fact, ironic. I also knew that my reclaiming of it would not be. Not any longer.

It’s a funny thing I’ve noticed lately, listening to the “classic rock” stations that are now — unbelievably — broadcasting the soundtrack of my life: bad music sounds so good once it becomes the music of your youth. All the songs you hated, all the bands you mocked, all the pop clichés you spurned because you were so much cooler than all that now sound so soulful, so very real.

This nostalgia for self is quite a shocker, particularly for someone who — like most people, I imagine — spent much of her youth striving to escape from herself.

How silly it is to cling to non-existent memories. To smile dodderingly at “Sweet Caroline” when I’m not really old enough to remember it from the first time around. To wax sentimental for “Hotel California” when I found it sinister in the seventies. To grin with recognition at “Maneater,” when in fact it has always made me grimace with pain. How weird it is to suddenly morph from a person who looks out at life through the jaundiced eye of studied irony to one who – children growing older, parents older still – grasps at life, buying Hallmark greeting cards with great care and attention and crying at weddings of people I’d never met before.

Last month, when Max was away for two weeks at the Democratic and Republican conventions, I discovered E-cards. I was missing him, so I sent him cards with setting suns and flying birds and blooming flowers and equally flowery words of love. I sort of sent them as a joke.

“Sobbing now,” he sort of joked back, in an E-card thank you.

What has happened to us?

Middle age, that’s what.

On Sunday, I had a phrase lodged in my mind, as Max and I drove home to D.C. from the Connecticut wedding, listening to the classic rock stations in state after state.

“I am the dog,” I said it was.

“You are the dog,” Max insisted.

It was a phrase we both thought we remembered from an article we’d read, early in our marriage, in Rolling Stone magazine. Max said it had to do with smoking pot: the author had described how, when she was young and stoned with friends, a dog’s entering the room could seem improbably hilarious (a “whoa … fur” kind of a thing), whereas, once she reached her thirties, pot-smoking had led to the quickly sobering thought that “You are the dog.”

I said that it really was about age: “I am the dog” when I realize I am all that I once found ridiculous.

I hunted the story down this week, thanks to a kind Rolling Stone researcher, and found that, in fact, we both had been right. “The Dog Is Us” had been written in 1992 by Marcelle Clements, who was revisiting an earlier essay she’d written in 1982, charting the end of her sixties cohort’s romance with smoking pot. (“Now the dog is us. And it’s not funny.”)

And she had concluded that her dog semi-metaphor hadn’t been about pot-smoking at all. The dog, she’d realized in her forties, was “indeed, me.”

There is much that is good about being the dog. It is to be connected, engaged, centered, happy. But there is a worrisome aspect to it as well. Professionally, I find being the dog to be a terrifying prospect.

Being at peace with the world doesn’t lend itself well to polemics. What if contentment heralds the death of having anything interesting to say?

I obsessed about this all the way through New Jersey.

Thank god for anxiety, is all I can conclude. And thank god for the dog.

Music-Play Project Fosters ‘Response-ability’ in Children with Autism

FSU Newswise
Released: Tue 02-Sep-2008, 12:40 ET
Music-Play Project Fosters ‘Response-ability’ in Children with Autism

Newswise — In a room dubbed the E-WoMP (exploratory world-music playground) that serves as the centerpiece of the Music-Play Project housed at Florida State University’s College of Music, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are making impressive gains in creativity, emotional regulation and social participation.

FSU ethnomusicologist Michael B. Bakan likes to call such gains “response-ability.” He’s the director of the innovative medical ethnomusicology program, which uses an array of unusual musical instruments from around the world for improvisational music-play activities that help create a unique therapeutic environment.

“Our program emphasizes ability and personhood over disability and ‘treatment’ and accepts that there are different ways of interacting, just as there are different ways of making music in different cultures,” said Bakan, an associate professor in the College of Music. “The Music-Play Project fosters the growth of response-ability, and in turn, happiness, because it gives children the chance to contribute to the co-creation of culture who too often are characterized as being incapable of doing so.”

Bakan and FSU colleague Benjamin Koen, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology, developed, launched and now oversee the interdisciplinary project in collaboration with researchers at the university’s Center for Autism and Related Disabilities and College of Medicine.

The Music-Play Project welcomes children three at a time to the E-WoMP, where they can choose from among safety-modified world-music options such as Balinese gamelan instruments, a West Javanese angklung (tuned bamboo-tubes rattle), and a West African gyil (xylophone), among many others. Less exotic choices might include homemade shakers, small cymbals and slide-whistles. Soft, colorful rubber swimming-pool dive sticks are used as mallets. Bakan describes all the instruments as “high yield for low input” because they yield satisfying sounds with minimal effort and require little or no technical competence.

Children can freely explore the creative and social possibilities in the E-WoMP on their own terms or with one another, the parent accompanying them, or Bakan and Koen, who as expert improvisers trained in diverse world music traditions, serve as music-play facilitators.

“By supporting a child’s expression and creativity, following instead of leading, responding rather than directing, and integrating instead of teaching, our approach helps children on the autism spectrum in ways that more directive, skills development-based interventions, music-related or otherwise, may not,” Bakan said.

Participants in the Music-Play Project are first evaluated and then referred to the program by the FSU Center for Autism and Related Disabilities. To date, there have been three, six-week programs of weekly, hour-long sessions, which Bakan and colleagues aim to further develop and eventually expand.

For a comprehensive overview of the Music-Play Project there’s “Following Frank: Response-Ability and the Co-Creation of Culture in a Medical Ethnomusicology Program for Children on the Autism Spectrum,” a paper that is published in the current (Spring/Summer 2008) edition of the prestigious scholarly journal Ethnomusicology. Bakan was the lead author.

“Following Frank” also describes a 2006 study of the Music-Play Project that focused on a memorable six-year-old participant called “Frank” (not his real name), whose autism-related challenges were profound and pervasive compared to those of most of his music-play peers. Even so, Bakan observed remarkable, positive changes in the child’s response-ability during E-WoMP sessions that also were evident in his social interactions at home.

“The medium of free music-play can help children with ASD to gain confidence and self-esteem, and we are seeing this bear fruit not just in the E-WoMP but also at home, at school and in peer relationships,” Bakan said. “Both in what it achieves and what it reveals about what is already there, the Music-Play Project at FSU is providing a lens through which others can view these children as creative and social makers of culture.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that one in 150 U.S. children is affected by ASD, which encompasses a wide range of developmental challenges of varying degrees in verbal and non-verbal communication and social interaction.

With Bakan as lead author, co-authors of “Following Frank: Response-Ability and the Co-Creation of Culture in a Medical Ethnomusicology Program for Children on the Autism Spectrum” are Koen, FSU College of Music; Fred Kobylarz, M.D., former associate professor of geriatrics, FSU College of Medicine, now at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Lindee Morgan, director, Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, FSU; Rachel Goff (FSU, B.S. 2007), graduate student, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Sally Kahn (FSU, B.S. ’07), graduate student, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Vanderbilt University; Megan Bakan, research associate, Dyslexia Research Registry, FSU.