NPR
[soundfiles on NPR]
Bolivia's Rap: Protest Songs And Windpipes
By Juan Forero
Day to Day, October 1, 2008 - Visitors to the harsh, cold, windswept Andes of South America are familiar with the traditional music there — it's almost all windpipes, with the occasional haunting lyric. It's been that way for centuries in the remote country of Bolivia, but there are many more kinds of music there, from folkloric to protest to even baroque. The latest trend, generated by indigenous youths, is rap, and it's catching on in Latin America's largest indigenous city.
Bolivian music also comes from the far eastern lowlands — guitar-laden cruceno, music made for dancing. In the south, there's Enriqueta Ulloa and her folkloric songs. Now, a new kind of music has spread across the gritty cinderblock city of El Alto, which is 14,000 feet up in the highlands, home to hundreds of thousands of Aymara Indians.
The music is rap, and it's hard and fast, railing against consumerism and money, and promising to "break the chains of oppression" and spark revolution. The music is, in some cases, sung in Aymara, the predominant tongue among highland Indians in this region of Bolivia.
Newfound Power
The lyrics stem from Bolivia's tradition of protest music — condemning the Yankees, while celebrating the newfound power and influence that have buoyed indigenous people here ever since Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, won the presidency in 2005.
One young rapper is Abraham Bojorquez. Bojorquez explains that one of his songs, "We're Going to Rise Up," tells the story of Bolivia's native people — children of the great warrior Tupacatari — and the Aymara's long struggle. He says that his music tries to speak for the people, to denounce injustice and to honor indigenous communities for what he calls "the recuperation of indigenous identity."
'The Abyss Of Racism'
Alvaro Montenegro, who teaches at the National Conservatory of Music, also produces rap music at his home studio. One song he has worked on, "The Abyss of Racism" by Bojorquez, says that racism is here, there and everywhere — when will it stop? Montenegro says it's a theme familiar to many Bolivians, and that it ranks among the hard social themes that spawned and continue to inspire Bolivian rap.
"The youth of El Alto was looking for a particular personal expression in order to find a vehicle to put forward their own ideas, their own ways of thinking, their own ways of challenging society," Montenegro says.
Montenegro says that young Altenos, as they're called, began rapping in 2003, when Bolivian troops shot several dozen demonstrators. That event helped propel Morales to power.
As Bolivia's first indigenous president, Morales has promised to overturn the old social order. That gave rappers even more to sing about. Many of them fine-tune their work in a radio station in El Alto: Wayna Tambo. Under bare light bulbs, squeezed into a small room, Bojorquez and his two fellow musicians practice. The next day, they're off for a concert in Ecuador.
Freddy Limanchi runs the tracks — the heavy beat at the base of rap music. He says there's clearly American hip-hop in the music, but there's also a fusion with trumpets, bongos and windpipes. That gives it a Bolivian twist.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino Reunion
NPR [with sound files]
Grupo Folklorico: A Classic Reunites
By Latino USA
KUT, October 1, 2008 - On a recent Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C., Latin music history was made. A handful of original members of a seminal Afro-Caribbean band reunited to play music that, after three decades, still has the power to move hearts and hips.
Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino played its first gig at the Smithsonian Institution's Folk Life Festival 33 years ago. Back then, Grupo Folklorico, as the band became known, was about to shake up the Latin music world with two albums of jazz-influenced explorations of Cuban and Puerto Rican folk rhythms. Grupo Folklorico was a collective of younger musicians brought up on the music of Afro-Cuban masters, as well as a few of those legends themselves.
On this humid day, some of those masters have died, and those once-younger musicians are now considered the guardians of Afro-Cuban musical tradition and history.
A Long Time Coming
In the back of a giant outdoor tent, just blocks from the Capitol on the National Mall, musicians take their horns out of their cases, tune up congas and reminisce. While sound technicians set up the band's equipment on stage, just across the mall the rest of the group is escaping the heat in a small air-conditioned trailer. Quietly sitting across from each other amid the chaos of younger musicians excited to be part of history are two original members, timbalero Manny Oquendo and bassist Andy Gonzalez, who says the reunion has been a long time coming.
"We had been planning it for a while," Gonzalez says. "We realized that we made quite an impact when we made our original recordings."
Out Of The '70s
Gonzalez says that the music on those recordings got its start in jam sessions in the basement of his parents' home in the Bronx. Andy and his brother Jerry, who plays congas and trumpet, were already performing in the vibrant New York City salsa scene of the early '70s with musicians such as Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barreto and even jazz master Dizzy Gillespie.
But the Gonzalez brothers and other musicians felt something was missing in the salsa that was taking the world by storm back then. The music they made in those basement jam sessions became their musical statement — a look to the past to move the music forward.
"It really reflected the kind of stuff we were interested in in New York," Gonzalez says, "which was Afro-Cuban folklore and Puerto Rican folklore, and not just trying to be truthful to those roots. More like using that as a starting point and experimenting with it."
Home Schooling
Those experiments were the lab work for the home schooling they were getting in Afro-Caribbean music from Rene Lopez. Lopez was an amateur ethnomusicologist who was taking notes on his own Afro-Caribbean culture with a massive collection of historic Cuban and Puerto Rican recordings. He held listening sessions at his home, but Gonzalez says that they were much more than social visits.
"We had rules," Gonzalez says. "No talking during the playing of the record. We would talk after the record, but while they were being played, not talking. If anybody opened their mouth, we would say, 'Shut up.' We really put our minds to listening with more care than usual. It was a casual thing, [but] we were going to school. This was a classroom."
High Water Marks
In 1975, Grupo Folklorico released Concepts in Unity, which was followed a year later by Lo Dicen Todo. Both records are considered high water marks of Latin music — not only for the music, but also for the extensive liner notes written by Rene Lopez, who also produced the albums.
Lopez says that the recording sessions were just as organic as the jam sessions that spawned them.
"Fifteen people without music, they didn't believe it," Lopez says. "We did all except one on first take."
But the logistics of trying to book a band of sidemen who were making a living in recording studios and on the road led to the demise of Grupo Folklorico as a working band.
Anticipation And Nostalgia
Thirty-three years later, at the same festival where it all started, nostalgia is mixed with eager anticipation. Trombonist Reynaldo Jorge and percussionist Gene Golden were here 34 years ago.
"First time I played here, I was 26," Jorge says. "Now, I'm 56."
"It's beyond words," Golden adds.
Andy Kaufman, who co-produced the Grupo Folklorico albums with Lopez, is here to celebrate and to reminisce.
"We had the time of our lives, and we wouldn't trade it for anything," Kaufman says.
Sweaty And Joyous
After a brief ceremony, during which the Smithsonian honored Rene Lopez for his work documenting Afro-Caribbean music and culture, the band kicks off and doesn't stop for a sweaty, joyous and inspired 90 minutes.
At the end, longtime fans and newcomers rush the stage to congratulate the musicians and Rene Lopez. Tres player Nelson Gonzalez is greeting friends just outside of the massive tent where the concert was held. He was also part of the basement jam sessions three decades ago, and he's at a loss for words to describe the emotions of today's reunion. So he turns to one of the Afro-Cuban masters to explain why they've come together again.
"Imagine, after over 30 years of not playing together," Gonzalez says. "This is an incredible thing. It feels like the old times. It's like Cachao used to say: 'We cannot let tradition die.' It's up to us to continue this tradition, but to also move it forward."
Andy Gonzalez and Rene Lopez have already booked Grupo Folklorico in New York for a gig in November. And, for a band with such a formidable past, there is now news about the future: Gonzalez and Lopez say there are plans for an album of new material.
Grupo Folklorico: A Classic Reunites
By Latino USA
KUT, October 1, 2008 - On a recent Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C., Latin music history was made. A handful of original members of a seminal Afro-Caribbean band reunited to play music that, after three decades, still has the power to move hearts and hips.
Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino played its first gig at the Smithsonian Institution's Folk Life Festival 33 years ago. Back then, Grupo Folklorico, as the band became known, was about to shake up the Latin music world with two albums of jazz-influenced explorations of Cuban and Puerto Rican folk rhythms. Grupo Folklorico was a collective of younger musicians brought up on the music of Afro-Cuban masters, as well as a few of those legends themselves.
On this humid day, some of those masters have died, and those once-younger musicians are now considered the guardians of Afro-Cuban musical tradition and history.
A Long Time Coming
In the back of a giant outdoor tent, just blocks from the Capitol on the National Mall, musicians take their horns out of their cases, tune up congas and reminisce. While sound technicians set up the band's equipment on stage, just across the mall the rest of the group is escaping the heat in a small air-conditioned trailer. Quietly sitting across from each other amid the chaos of younger musicians excited to be part of history are two original members, timbalero Manny Oquendo and bassist Andy Gonzalez, who says the reunion has been a long time coming.
"We had been planning it for a while," Gonzalez says. "We realized that we made quite an impact when we made our original recordings."
Out Of The '70s
Gonzalez says that the music on those recordings got its start in jam sessions in the basement of his parents' home in the Bronx. Andy and his brother Jerry, who plays congas and trumpet, were already performing in the vibrant New York City salsa scene of the early '70s with musicians such as Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barreto and even jazz master Dizzy Gillespie.
But the Gonzalez brothers and other musicians felt something was missing in the salsa that was taking the world by storm back then. The music they made in those basement jam sessions became their musical statement — a look to the past to move the music forward.
"It really reflected the kind of stuff we were interested in in New York," Gonzalez says, "which was Afro-Cuban folklore and Puerto Rican folklore, and not just trying to be truthful to those roots. More like using that as a starting point and experimenting with it."
Home Schooling
Those experiments were the lab work for the home schooling they were getting in Afro-Caribbean music from Rene Lopez. Lopez was an amateur ethnomusicologist who was taking notes on his own Afro-Caribbean culture with a massive collection of historic Cuban and Puerto Rican recordings. He held listening sessions at his home, but Gonzalez says that they were much more than social visits.
"We had rules," Gonzalez says. "No talking during the playing of the record. We would talk after the record, but while they were being played, not talking. If anybody opened their mouth, we would say, 'Shut up.' We really put our minds to listening with more care than usual. It was a casual thing, [but] we were going to school. This was a classroom."
High Water Marks
In 1975, Grupo Folklorico released Concepts in Unity, which was followed a year later by Lo Dicen Todo. Both records are considered high water marks of Latin music — not only for the music, but also for the extensive liner notes written by Rene Lopez, who also produced the albums.
Lopez says that the recording sessions were just as organic as the jam sessions that spawned them.
"Fifteen people without music, they didn't believe it," Lopez says. "We did all except one on first take."
But the logistics of trying to book a band of sidemen who were making a living in recording studios and on the road led to the demise of Grupo Folklorico as a working band.
Anticipation And Nostalgia
Thirty-three years later, at the same festival where it all started, nostalgia is mixed with eager anticipation. Trombonist Reynaldo Jorge and percussionist Gene Golden were here 34 years ago.
"First time I played here, I was 26," Jorge says. "Now, I'm 56."
"It's beyond words," Golden adds.
Andy Kaufman, who co-produced the Grupo Folklorico albums with Lopez, is here to celebrate and to reminisce.
"We had the time of our lives, and we wouldn't trade it for anything," Kaufman says.
Sweaty And Joyous
After a brief ceremony, during which the Smithsonian honored Rene Lopez for his work documenting Afro-Caribbean music and culture, the band kicks off and doesn't stop for a sweaty, joyous and inspired 90 minutes.
At the end, longtime fans and newcomers rush the stage to congratulate the musicians and Rene Lopez. Tres player Nelson Gonzalez is greeting friends just outside of the massive tent where the concert was held. He was also part of the basement jam sessions three decades ago, and he's at a loss for words to describe the emotions of today's reunion. So he turns to one of the Afro-Cuban masters to explain why they've come together again.
"Imagine, after over 30 years of not playing together," Gonzalez says. "This is an incredible thing. It feels like the old times. It's like Cachao used to say: 'We cannot let tradition die.' It's up to us to continue this tradition, but to also move it forward."
Andy Gonzalez and Rene Lopez have already booked Grupo Folklorico in New York for a gig in November. And, for a band with such a formidable past, there is now news about the future: Gonzalez and Lopez say there are plans for an album of new material.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
A Lovely Rememberance of Paul Newman
SLATE
obit
Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992 introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them.
Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarter-billion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in 1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice boxes.
But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world—he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would.
Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201116/
obit
Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992 introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them.
Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarter-billion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in 1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice boxes.
But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world—he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would.
Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201116/
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Turkish bus driver jailed for playing Kurdish recording
The brief news item and the song in question (translated) at Freemuse. Also, read a story about a ten-month sentence Turkey gave to a Kurdish musician because he performed a Kurdish song in Turkey.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
MacArthur "Genius Award" Winner Walter Kitundu
He is an amazing instrument maker, composer, turntablist, and sculptor. Here is a sample of his work: the phonokora, a hybrid of a West Africa kora, a turntable, and electronics (congrats to him!):
More:
More:
Saturday, September 20, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt: When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong
SLATE [audio at original post site]
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt: When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong.
By Nate DiMeo
Updated Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, at 11:15 AM ET
M&C NOTE: This article gets into my archive for the phrase "audio blackface."
For all the column inches downloaded to Kindles this year about how electronic books will someday replace traditional ones, little has been made of the steady rise of another rival to the printed word: audiobooks. Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves.
Today's recorded book has come a long way from its humble, federal origins. In 1931, Sen. Reed Smoot (he of the arguably Depression-spurring Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) helped bring forth the Books for the Adult Blind Project—a bit of progressive do-goodery intended to give the gift of literature to the sightless. The result was audiobooks with a vaguely institutional air, employing bland, monotone narrations thought appropriate for the incapacitated. They remained this way through the 1970s, until the gas crisis brought over more fuel-efficient Japanese cars and their standard-issue cassette decks. Soon commuters in their Datsun B210s discovered the time-killing properties of audiobooks.
The industry came of age in the '80s: Sales grew, and the listening experience improved. Nowadays, narrators are recruited from the ranks of top-notch voice-over talent, big-name authors, renowned stage actors, and Hollywood stars. Audiobooks can be spectacular. But too many fine books are still being turned into bad audiobooks; worse still, their producers are making the same mistakes over and over. What follows are the three most common pitfalls—and how to avoid them.
The Perils of Genre Rigidity
Genre fiction can make for great audiobooks. Detective novels come to life when read by a well-cast, hard-boiled narrator, and the smoky-voiced actresses of Great Britain are Play Mediakept very busy these days by the demand for erotic audiobooks. But producers get flummoxed when a title bumps up against the confines of genre. Take Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon's nonfiction account of the year he spent shadowing the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. Simon's remarkably well-observed account is written in matter-of-fact prose that destabilizes the reader who has previously encountered city police only through Hollywood stereotypes. The audiobook is read by actor Reed Diamond, a regular on the TV series inspired by Simon's book. Diamond's tough-guy noir narration is dissonant with the text: The dismal reality of Simon's work gets undercut by the unreality of Diamond's heavy-handed line readings.
A similar fate befalls Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. Ross' history of Classical composition in the age of mechanical reproduction, atonality, and world wars is written with a passion and urgency that helps make the esoteric relatable. Appropriately, it reads like a really long New Yorker article, and in a more perfect world the audio version would sound like a really long episode of public radio's Studio 360—smart, witty, and intimate. Instead, audiobook veteran Grover Gardner comes off like a tweedy prat holding court at a dinner party. The stentorian, lecture-hall tone is off-key; just as Homicide is miscast as a potboiler, The Rest Is Noise is miscast as a dusty dissertation in an unvisited corner of a university library. With Gardner reading, Ross' vibrant book about Life and Art and Passion becomes a book about Classical Music.
One Reader + Multiple Voices = Multiple Problems
The audiobook experience descends from that of the old radio-plays, but full-cast dramatizations are rare (though, typically, rad; Max Brooks' smarter-than-it-has-any-right-to-be zombie novel, World War Z, and Phillip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy are great listens in large part due to their full casts). Usually, the listener gets one reader who uses tone and inflection to distinguish between the narrator and the book's characters. The best readers aren't necessarily great at "voices"; they're able to differentiate between characters without resorting to showy parlor tricks. British actor Jim Dale has achieved a deserved rock-star status (of the peculiar, audiobooky sort) for his work on the Harry Potter series, modulating between Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, and Gilderoy Lockheart with a nimbleness that should be the model for all school librarians and bedtime-story readers.
But too often, an overreaching reader ruins a book. Nothing is less intimidating than a noir tough guy voiced by a hammy female narrator, and nothing is less sexy than a literary seductress voiced by a dude in falsetto. Too often a narrator will opt for bad audio drag when "she said" would suffice.
While gender bending can grate, racial drag can offend. Consider Columbia sociologist (and occasional Slate contributor) Sudhir Venkatesh's best-seller, Gang Leader for a Day. The book recounts the author's decade-plus immersion in a decaying Chicago housing project. His observations about the social and economic lives of crack dealers, prostitutes, project-squatters, and poor strivers reveal a side of American life few readers—including academics and policymakers—have ever experienced. The book humanizes characters that most of America has encountered only through crime statistics. The audiobook does something quite the opposite.
The reader, actor Reg Rogers, is a white guy. Every character but the Indian-American narrator is black. This is always tricky audiobook territory, but here, not only has Rogers unwisely chosen to bring a little "sound of the street" to his characters, he's opted to bring the sound of the street from movies of the 1960s. JT, a twentysomething gang lieutenant, sounds like Sydney Poitier circa In the Heat of the Night. Ex-gang members in their 50s veer toward Fred Sanford at best, Uncle Remus at worst.
After forcing us to suffer through seven hours of Rogers, the producers of the Gang Leader audiobook make an interesting choice: The book's final hour is read by the author. In that hour, the lives that Venkatesh worked so hard to bring to the page become real lives. He's no professional voice actor—he doesn't always punch the right words for emphasis, the art of the dramatic pause eludes him—but he tells a straightforward story in a straightforward fashion. No outrageous accents. No audio blackface. And the listener, and his subjects, are better off for it.
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt
Actors can often find in the audiobook realm a stardom that has eluded them on stage and screen. Roles such as "Deputy" in the direct-to-video The Killing Grounds have not made Scott Brick a household name, but the man has narrated more than 200 books—he has a devoted following and is one of the most in-demand readers in the business. (His tone is cultured with a dash of swagger—he's brought an enjoyable air of righteous indignation to books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.)
Lately, with the audiobook business booming, actual Hollywood stars are frequently stepping behind the mic. Kevin Spacey has read Bob Woodward. Oprah reads White Oleander. Matt Damon reads A People's History of the United States. While a big-name Hollywood actor may help sell a title, using a big star can backfire on the listener. I can't listen to Sean Penn read Bob Dylan's autobiography without thinking, "That's Sean Penn reading Bob Dylan's autobiography."
You can't help but wonder if the demands of celebrity prevent the Hollywood star from taking the time with the source material that an audiobook star would. Whether it's a clumsy cadence or a preponderance of retakes (which jump out at you when listening on headphones), there seems to be an inverse proportionality between the size of the star and the quality of the experience. Here, Brad Pitt shows off his español while reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.
But we can't really blame Brad Pitt or, for that matter, any of the mis- or overmatched narrators who keep good books from becoming good audiobooks. The unsatisfied listener should direct her complaints to the producers making the casting and directing decisions, who keep making the same mistakes. As Brad might put it, no más.
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt: When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong.
By Nate DiMeo
Updated Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, at 11:15 AM ET
M&C NOTE: This article gets into my archive for the phrase "audio blackface."
For all the column inches downloaded to Kindles this year about how electronic books will someday replace traditional ones, little has been made of the steady rise of another rival to the printed word: audiobooks. Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves.
Today's recorded book has come a long way from its humble, federal origins. In 1931, Sen. Reed Smoot (he of the arguably Depression-spurring Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) helped bring forth the Books for the Adult Blind Project—a bit of progressive do-goodery intended to give the gift of literature to the sightless. The result was audiobooks with a vaguely institutional air, employing bland, monotone narrations thought appropriate for the incapacitated. They remained this way through the 1970s, until the gas crisis brought over more fuel-efficient Japanese cars and their standard-issue cassette decks. Soon commuters in their Datsun B210s discovered the time-killing properties of audiobooks.
The industry came of age in the '80s: Sales grew, and the listening experience improved. Nowadays, narrators are recruited from the ranks of top-notch voice-over talent, big-name authors, renowned stage actors, and Hollywood stars. Audiobooks can be spectacular. But too many fine books are still being turned into bad audiobooks; worse still, their producers are making the same mistakes over and over. What follows are the three most common pitfalls—and how to avoid them.
The Perils of Genre Rigidity
Genre fiction can make for great audiobooks. Detective novels come to life when read by a well-cast, hard-boiled narrator, and the smoky-voiced actresses of Great Britain are Play Mediakept very busy these days by the demand for erotic audiobooks. But producers get flummoxed when a title bumps up against the confines of genre. Take Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon's nonfiction account of the year he spent shadowing the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. Simon's remarkably well-observed account is written in matter-of-fact prose that destabilizes the reader who has previously encountered city police only through Hollywood stereotypes. The audiobook is read by actor Reed Diamond, a regular on the TV series inspired by Simon's book. Diamond's tough-guy noir narration is dissonant with the text: The dismal reality of Simon's work gets undercut by the unreality of Diamond's heavy-handed line readings.
A similar fate befalls Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. Ross' history of Classical composition in the age of mechanical reproduction, atonality, and world wars is written with a passion and urgency that helps make the esoteric relatable. Appropriately, it reads like a really long New Yorker article, and in a more perfect world the audio version would sound like a really long episode of public radio's Studio 360—smart, witty, and intimate. Instead, audiobook veteran Grover Gardner comes off like a tweedy prat holding court at a dinner party. The stentorian, lecture-hall tone is off-key; just as Homicide is miscast as a potboiler, The Rest Is Noise is miscast as a dusty dissertation in an unvisited corner of a university library. With Gardner reading, Ross' vibrant book about Life and Art and Passion becomes a book about Classical Music.
One Reader + Multiple Voices = Multiple Problems
The audiobook experience descends from that of the old radio-plays, but full-cast dramatizations are rare (though, typically, rad; Max Brooks' smarter-than-it-has-any-right-to-be zombie novel, World War Z, and Phillip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy are great listens in large part due to their full casts). Usually, the listener gets one reader who uses tone and inflection to distinguish between the narrator and the book's characters. The best readers aren't necessarily great at "voices"; they're able to differentiate between characters without resorting to showy parlor tricks. British actor Jim Dale has achieved a deserved rock-star status (of the peculiar, audiobooky sort) for his work on the Harry Potter series, modulating between Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, and Gilderoy Lockheart with a nimbleness that should be the model for all school librarians and bedtime-story readers.
But too often, an overreaching reader ruins a book. Nothing is less intimidating than a noir tough guy voiced by a hammy female narrator, and nothing is less sexy than a literary seductress voiced by a dude in falsetto. Too often a narrator will opt for bad audio drag when "she said" would suffice.
While gender bending can grate, racial drag can offend. Consider Columbia sociologist (and occasional Slate contributor) Sudhir Venkatesh's best-seller, Gang Leader for a Day. The book recounts the author's decade-plus immersion in a decaying Chicago housing project. His observations about the social and economic lives of crack dealers, prostitutes, project-squatters, and poor strivers reveal a side of American life few readers—including academics and policymakers—have ever experienced. The book humanizes characters that most of America has encountered only through crime statistics. The audiobook does something quite the opposite.
The reader, actor Reg Rogers, is a white guy. Every character but the Indian-American narrator is black. This is always tricky audiobook territory, but here, not only has Rogers unwisely chosen to bring a little "sound of the street" to his characters, he's opted to bring the sound of the street from movies of the 1960s. JT, a twentysomething gang lieutenant, sounds like Sydney Poitier circa In the Heat of the Night. Ex-gang members in their 50s veer toward Fred Sanford at best, Uncle Remus at worst.
After forcing us to suffer through seven hours of Rogers, the producers of the Gang Leader audiobook make an interesting choice: The book's final hour is read by the author. In that hour, the lives that Venkatesh worked so hard to bring to the page become real lives. He's no professional voice actor—he doesn't always punch the right words for emphasis, the art of the dramatic pause eludes him—but he tells a straightforward story in a straightforward fashion. No outrageous accents. No audio blackface. And the listener, and his subjects, are better off for it.
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt
Actors can often find in the audiobook realm a stardom that has eluded them on stage and screen. Roles such as "Deputy" in the direct-to-video The Killing Grounds have not made Scott Brick a household name, but the man has narrated more than 200 books—he has a devoted following and is one of the most in-demand readers in the business. (His tone is cultured with a dash of swagger—he's brought an enjoyable air of righteous indignation to books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.)
Lately, with the audiobook business booming, actual Hollywood stars are frequently stepping behind the mic. Kevin Spacey has read Bob Woodward. Oprah reads White Oleander. Matt Damon reads A People's History of the United States. While a big-name Hollywood actor may help sell a title, using a big star can backfire on the listener. I can't listen to Sean Penn read Bob Dylan's autobiography without thinking, "That's Sean Penn reading Bob Dylan's autobiography."
You can't help but wonder if the demands of celebrity prevent the Hollywood star from taking the time with the source material that an audiobook star would. Whether it's a clumsy cadence or a preponderance of retakes (which jump out at you when listening on headphones), there seems to be an inverse proportionality between the size of the star and the quality of the experience. Here, Brad Pitt shows off his español while reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.
But we can't really blame Brad Pitt or, for that matter, any of the mis- or overmatched narrators who keep good books from becoming good audiobooks. The unsatisfied listener should direct her complaints to the producers making the casting and directing decisions, who keep making the same mistakes. As Brad might put it, no más.
Saudi Women Find an Unlikely Role Model: Oprah
NYT
September 19, 2008
Dammam Journal
Saudi Women Find an Unlikely Role Model: Oprah
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
DAMMAM, Saudi Arabia—Once a month, Nayla says, she writes a letter to Oprah Winfrey.
A young Saudi homemaker who covers her face in public might not seem to have much in common with an American talk show host whose image is known to millions. Like many women in this conservative desert kingdom, Nayla does not usually socialize with people outside her extended family, and she never leaves her house unless chaperoned by her husband.
Ms. Winfrey has not answered the letters. But Nayla says she is still hoping.
“I feel that Oprah truly understands me,” said Nayla, who, like many of the women interviewed, would not let her full name be used. “She gives me energy and hope for my life. Sometimes I think that she is the only person in the world who knows how I feel.”
Nayla is not the only Saudi woman to feel a special connection to the American media mogul. When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.
In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai’a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.
Some women here say Ms. Winfrey’s assurances to her viewers — that no matter how restricted or even abusive their circumstances may be, they can take control in small ways and create lives of value — help them find meaning in their cramped, veiled existence.
“Oprah dresses conservatively,” explained Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, a co-owner of a women’s spa in Riyadh called Yibreen and a daughter of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States. “She struggles with her weight. She overcame depression. She rose from poverty and from abuse. On all these levels she appeals to a Saudi woman. People really idolize her here.”
Today, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” with Arabic subtitles, is broadcast twice each weekday on MBC4, a three-year-old channel developed by the MBC Group with the Arab woman in mind. The show’s guests, self-improvement tips, and advice on family relationships — as well as Ms. Winfrey’s clothes and changing hairstyles — are eagerly analyzed by Saudi women from a wide range of social backgrounds and income levels.
The largest-circulation Saudi women’s magazine, Sayidaty, devotes a regular page to Ms. Winfrey, and dog-eared copies of her official magazine, O, which is not sold in the kingdom, are passed around by women who collect them during trips abroad.
The particulars of Ms. Winfrey’s personal story have resonated with a broad audience of Saudi women in a way that few other Western imports have, explained Mazen Hayek, a spokesman for the MBC Group.
Saudi Arabia was an impoverished desert country before it was transformed by oil money and, in just a couple of generations, into a wealthy consumer society. Saudi women readily identify with “this glamorous woman from very modest beginnings,” Mr. Hayek said, in a phone interview from Dubai.
Maha al-Faleh, 23, of Riyadh, said, “Oprah talks about issues that haven’t really been spoken about here openly before.
“She talks about racism, for example,” she said. “This is something that Saudis are very concerned about, because many of us feel that we’re judged for the way we veil or for our skin color. I have a friend whose driver touched her in an inappropriate way. She was very young at the time, but she felt very guilty about it — and Oprah helped her to speak about this abuse with her mother.”
MBC edits some “Oprah” episodes to remove content banned by censors in the region, officials at the channel say. It does not broadcast segments on homosexuality, for example. But the officials say they make most episodes available to their regional viewers uncensored, including some about relations between Arabs and Westerners and about living with the threat of Islamic terrorism.
Saudi women say they are drawn to Ms. Winfrey not only because she openly addresses subjects considered taboo locally, but also because she speaks of self-empowerment and change.
Wafa Muhammad, 38, a mother of five from Riyadh, said she believed that, in their adoration of Ms. Winfrey, Saudi women are expressing a hesitant sense of longing for real change in their country.
“Many of us feel that the solutions for our problems have to come from outside,” Ms. Muhammad said. When President Bush visited Saudi Arabia in January, she continued, as an example, his presence briefly became a locus of hope for Saudi women. “A lot of women were saying that they wished they could talk to Bush about problems like forced marriage, about how our children are taken away if our husbands divorce us.”
In a country where women are forbidden to vote, or to travel without the permission of a male guardian, a sense of powerlessness can lead women to look for unlikely sources of rescue, Ms. Muhammad explained. “If women here have problems with their fathers or their brothers, what can they do but look to Oprah?” she asked. “The idea that she will come and help them is a dream for them.”
Nayla, the homemaker in Dammam, a Persian Gulf port city, says Ms. Winfrey helps her cope with a society that does not encourage her to have interests. “The life of a woman here in Saudi — it makes you tired and it makes you boring,” she said, sighing.
Like many Saudi women, Nayla struggles with obesity, a major issue in the kingdom because many women are largely confined to their homes and local custom often prevents them from participating in sports or even walking around their neighborhoods.
She says that Ms. Winfrey has inspired her to lose weight and to pursue her education through an online degree course, a method acceptable to her husband since she will not have to leave home.
As she spoke, Nayla sat on the floor of the women’s sitting room of her mother-in-law’s house. A battered wooden bureau, its top littered with hairbrushes, plastic figurines, and perfume bottles, was the only piece of furniture.
Several female relatives sat with Nayla, and the door was kept slightly ajar so that their small children, chasing one another in the hall outside, could enter. But at the sound of heavier, male footfalls approaching, the women all jumped to their feet and scurried to hide their faces behind the bureau. It would be shameful if a brother-in-law accidentally caught a glimpse of their uncovered faces, Nayla explained.
“Oprah is the magic word for women here who want to scream out loud, who want to be heard,” Ms. Muhammad said. “Look at what happened to the girl from Qatif,” she said, referring to the infamous case of a young woman who was gang-raped, then sentenced to flogging because she had been in a car with an unrelated man.
The young woman from Qatif received a royal pardon last year after her case became an international media cause célèbre.
“The Qatif girl was heard outside the country, and she was helped,” Ms. Muhammad said. “But we need to have Saudi women who help women here. We need to have women social workers, women judges.”
“We have a very male-dominated society, and it’s very hard sometimes,” Ms. Muhammad said. “But for now I have my coffee, and sit, and I watch Oprah.
It’s my favorite time of day.”
September 19, 2008
Dammam Journal
Saudi Women Find an Unlikely Role Model: Oprah
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
DAMMAM, Saudi Arabia—Once a month, Nayla says, she writes a letter to Oprah Winfrey.
A young Saudi homemaker who covers her face in public might not seem to have much in common with an American talk show host whose image is known to millions. Like many women in this conservative desert kingdom, Nayla does not usually socialize with people outside her extended family, and she never leaves her house unless chaperoned by her husband.
Ms. Winfrey has not answered the letters. But Nayla says she is still hoping.
“I feel that Oprah truly understands me,” said Nayla, who, like many of the women interviewed, would not let her full name be used. “She gives me energy and hope for my life. Sometimes I think that she is the only person in the world who knows how I feel.”
Nayla is not the only Saudi woman to feel a special connection to the American media mogul. When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.
In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai’a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.
Some women here say Ms. Winfrey’s assurances to her viewers — that no matter how restricted or even abusive their circumstances may be, they can take control in small ways and create lives of value — help them find meaning in their cramped, veiled existence.
“Oprah dresses conservatively,” explained Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, a co-owner of a women’s spa in Riyadh called Yibreen and a daughter of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States. “She struggles with her weight. She overcame depression. She rose from poverty and from abuse. On all these levels she appeals to a Saudi woman. People really idolize her here.”
Today, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” with Arabic subtitles, is broadcast twice each weekday on MBC4, a three-year-old channel developed by the MBC Group with the Arab woman in mind. The show’s guests, self-improvement tips, and advice on family relationships — as well as Ms. Winfrey’s clothes and changing hairstyles — are eagerly analyzed by Saudi women from a wide range of social backgrounds and income levels.
The largest-circulation Saudi women’s magazine, Sayidaty, devotes a regular page to Ms. Winfrey, and dog-eared copies of her official magazine, O, which is not sold in the kingdom, are passed around by women who collect them during trips abroad.
The particulars of Ms. Winfrey’s personal story have resonated with a broad audience of Saudi women in a way that few other Western imports have, explained Mazen Hayek, a spokesman for the MBC Group.
Saudi Arabia was an impoverished desert country before it was transformed by oil money and, in just a couple of generations, into a wealthy consumer society. Saudi women readily identify with “this glamorous woman from very modest beginnings,” Mr. Hayek said, in a phone interview from Dubai.
Maha al-Faleh, 23, of Riyadh, said, “Oprah talks about issues that haven’t really been spoken about here openly before.
“She talks about racism, for example,” she said. “This is something that Saudis are very concerned about, because many of us feel that we’re judged for the way we veil or for our skin color. I have a friend whose driver touched her in an inappropriate way. She was very young at the time, but she felt very guilty about it — and Oprah helped her to speak about this abuse with her mother.”
MBC edits some “Oprah” episodes to remove content banned by censors in the region, officials at the channel say. It does not broadcast segments on homosexuality, for example. But the officials say they make most episodes available to their regional viewers uncensored, including some about relations between Arabs and Westerners and about living with the threat of Islamic terrorism.
Saudi women say they are drawn to Ms. Winfrey not only because she openly addresses subjects considered taboo locally, but also because she speaks of self-empowerment and change.
Wafa Muhammad, 38, a mother of five from Riyadh, said she believed that, in their adoration of Ms. Winfrey, Saudi women are expressing a hesitant sense of longing for real change in their country.
“Many of us feel that the solutions for our problems have to come from outside,” Ms. Muhammad said. When President Bush visited Saudi Arabia in January, she continued, as an example, his presence briefly became a locus of hope for Saudi women. “A lot of women were saying that they wished they could talk to Bush about problems like forced marriage, about how our children are taken away if our husbands divorce us.”
In a country where women are forbidden to vote, or to travel without the permission of a male guardian, a sense of powerlessness can lead women to look for unlikely sources of rescue, Ms. Muhammad explained. “If women here have problems with their fathers or their brothers, what can they do but look to Oprah?” she asked. “The idea that she will come and help them is a dream for them.”
Nayla, the homemaker in Dammam, a Persian Gulf port city, says Ms. Winfrey helps her cope with a society that does not encourage her to have interests. “The life of a woman here in Saudi — it makes you tired and it makes you boring,” she said, sighing.
Like many Saudi women, Nayla struggles with obesity, a major issue in the kingdom because many women are largely confined to their homes and local custom often prevents them from participating in sports or even walking around their neighborhoods.
She says that Ms. Winfrey has inspired her to lose weight and to pursue her education through an online degree course, a method acceptable to her husband since she will not have to leave home.
As she spoke, Nayla sat on the floor of the women’s sitting room of her mother-in-law’s house. A battered wooden bureau, its top littered with hairbrushes, plastic figurines, and perfume bottles, was the only piece of furniture.
Several female relatives sat with Nayla, and the door was kept slightly ajar so that their small children, chasing one another in the hall outside, could enter. But at the sound of heavier, male footfalls approaching, the women all jumped to their feet and scurried to hide their faces behind the bureau. It would be shameful if a brother-in-law accidentally caught a glimpse of their uncovered faces, Nayla explained.
“Oprah is the magic word for women here who want to scream out loud, who want to be heard,” Ms. Muhammad said. “Look at what happened to the girl from Qatif,” she said, referring to the infamous case of a young woman who was gang-raped, then sentenced to flogging because she had been in a car with an unrelated man.
The young woman from Qatif received a royal pardon last year after her case became an international media cause célèbre.
“The Qatif girl was heard outside the country, and she was helped,” Ms. Muhammad said. “But we need to have Saudi women who help women here. We need to have women social workers, women judges.”
“We have a very male-dominated society, and it’s very hard sometimes,” Ms. Muhammad said. “But for now I have my coffee, and sit, and I watch Oprah.
It’s my favorite time of day.”
Thursday, September 18, 2008
People in Need Ads
Some rather effective and striking donation solicitation photographs (by Carl Stolz) from the Dutch charity Cordaid Mensen in Nood (People in Need). Wow.
Take It Off, Brünnhilde: On Opera and Nudity
New York Times
September 18, 2008
Music
Take It Off, Brünnhilde: On Opera and Nudity
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Correction Appended
It had to happen. Nudity is coming to opera.
In recent years, with all the talk from general managers, stage directors and go-for-broke singers about making opera as dramatically visceral an art form as theater, film and modern dance, traditional boundaries of decorum have been broken. Opera productions have increasingly showcased risk-taking and good-looking singers in bold, sexy and explicit productions.
How explicit? On Tuesday the soprano Karita Mattila returns to the Metropolitan Opera to portray the title character in Strauss’s “Salome,” a revival of the modern-dress Jürgen Flimm production created for Ms. Mattila and introduced at the Met in 2004.
Ms. Mattila’s emotionally intense, vocally molten and psychologically exposed portrayal four years ago made her seem born to this daunting role. And yes, during her uninhibited and kinetically choreographed performance of the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she shed item after item of a Marlene Dietrich-like white tuxedo costume until, in an exultant — and brief — final flourish, she twirled around half-crazed and totally naked. Expect the same this time.
On Sept. 7, for the Los Angeles Opera’s American premiere production of Howard Shore’s new opera “The Fly,” the young Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch bared all. During the crucial final scene in the first act of the opera — based mostly on the 1986 David Cronenberg film and directed by Mr. Cronenberg — the scientist Seth Brundle impulsively decides to use himself as a guinea pig in his invention, which molecularly breaks down a human body and transports it through space. Mr. Okulitch stripped naked, climbed into one brightly lighted telepod, closed the door, and moments later emerged from another telepod, facing the audience with his arms spread, looking transformed, a moment of radiant self-benediction. (There are two more performances, on Saturday and Sept. 27.)
It could be argued that since opera is theater, anything goes. Opera buffs have seen plenty of alluring sopranos in skimpy dresses and handsome bare-chested baritones. Is actual nakedness, if the dramatic situation justifies it, such a big leap?
Maybe not. Still, if opera ventures increasingly down this path, it will have to grapple with the same questions of relevance, gimmickiness and sensationalism that have dogged theater, film and dance.
Dance has broken this barrier the most boldly, which makes sense, since its instrument is the human body in all its beauty and expressivity. Yet choreographers have to be careful not to use naked dancers to inject an easy jolt of eroticism into a mediocre piece.
Nudity in theater has provoked a more contentious debate. There is no question that in many plays explicit nude scenes have been used to compensate for shallow writing or simply to lure people into seats. But when nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.
There was, for example, Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” at the Public Theater in 2002, about a superstar baseball player who reveals that he is gay. The play could not have explored how the interpersonal dynamics of baseball’s locker-room culture are shaken by the star’s announcement without showing the players in the clubhouse showers.
But nudity in the theater can seem the most profound when the characters involved are vulnerable and unglamorous. A crucial, emotionally overpowering moment in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Wit,” first produced in 1995, comes when the actress playing the middle-aged main character, who is dying of cancer, exposes her gaunt, naked body.
Already in previews at the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway is Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” a new production from London of the 1973 play. Naturally, fans of the young Daniel Radcliffe will be enticed by the chance to see him, our adorable Harry Potter, in the buff. But nudity is essential to this wrenching scene. A young boy and a young girl, nervous, insecure and full of confused attractions, strip in a stable and approach each other. When the deeply troubled boy cannot get aroused in full view of the horse he worships, he angrily chases the girl away and viciously blinds the horses with a hoof pick.
Though this may be a minority point of view, to me it seems easier to make nudity seem natural in the theater than on film. In a movie, what you see is completely controlled by the director. In sex scenes, the director teases you with glimpses of flesh, letting you see just so much and not more, or sometimes making you see more than you want too. But the viewer cannot help feeling manipulated.
There has been nudity in opera, of course, but mostly involving extras, supernumeraries or dancers. In 1998 the New York City Opera presented the choreographer and director Martha Clarke’s staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” a co-production with the English National Opera. During the blissful scene when Orfeo enters the Elysian Fields, an ensemble of captivating dancers appeared in all their naked splendor, portraying the heroes and heroines who inhabit this heavenly realm. But it is another matter to ask opera singers in leading roles to disrobe onstage, artists who, after all, have much else to do.
Here is where opera may soon court trouble if things get too cavalierly explicit. First and foremost, opera is a vocal art form. Never underestimate the visceral dramatic impact of fine singing. A great voice can be very sexy. Listen to Birgit Nilsson’s recording of “Salome.” For sheer sensual power, it’s hard to match Nilsson’s incandescent singing.
The question of exposing flesh in opera to make up for subpar music hovered over “The Fly.” At both its world premiere this summer in Paris and its recent production in Los Angeles, critics found Mr. Shore’s music ponderous and undistinguished. But most reviewers praised cast members for giving their all to the production, especially Mr. Okulitch, a sensitive singer and dynamic actor with a warm and appealing if modest-size voice. That he also has a handsome physique takes nothing away from the courage it took to strip bare for the telepod scene. If only the music had matched the moment. Still, the dramatic situation absolutely called for Brundle to be naked, and Mr. Okulitch complied.
But with Ms. Mattila in “Salome,” we have one of the major sopranos of our time singing an indisputably and persistently shocking early-20th-century opera. Going back to the story’s New Testament source, you could argue the text implies that to get her way with Herod, Salome indeed removed all her of veils. This was clearly Mr. Flimm’s idea, and his glamorous star was game. As I commented at the time, Ms. Mattila’s nudity may have taken less courage to bring off than the psychological nakedness she revealed in her mesmerizing portrayal.
On the other hand, one thing opera buffs have always valued about their beloved art form is that so many excellent opera singers look like everyday people, like us. There is no reason that Rodolfo and Mimi have to look like supermodels. They need only convey that they are beautiful to each other. The music, if sung with tenderness and passion, does the rest.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 19, 2008
A music column on Thursday about nudity in opera, including Karita Mattila’s nude appearance in Richard Strauss’s “Salome,” misidentified the source of the story on which the opera is based. It is the New Testament, not the Hebrew Bible.
September 18, 2008
Music
Take It Off, Brünnhilde: On Opera and Nudity
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Correction Appended
It had to happen. Nudity is coming to opera.
In recent years, with all the talk from general managers, stage directors and go-for-broke singers about making opera as dramatically visceral an art form as theater, film and modern dance, traditional boundaries of decorum have been broken. Opera productions have increasingly showcased risk-taking and good-looking singers in bold, sexy and explicit productions.
How explicit? On Tuesday the soprano Karita Mattila returns to the Metropolitan Opera to portray the title character in Strauss’s “Salome,” a revival of the modern-dress Jürgen Flimm production created for Ms. Mattila and introduced at the Met in 2004.
Ms. Mattila’s emotionally intense, vocally molten and psychologically exposed portrayal four years ago made her seem born to this daunting role. And yes, during her uninhibited and kinetically choreographed performance of the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she shed item after item of a Marlene Dietrich-like white tuxedo costume until, in an exultant — and brief — final flourish, she twirled around half-crazed and totally naked. Expect the same this time.
On Sept. 7, for the Los Angeles Opera’s American premiere production of Howard Shore’s new opera “The Fly,” the young Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch bared all. During the crucial final scene in the first act of the opera — based mostly on the 1986 David Cronenberg film and directed by Mr. Cronenberg — the scientist Seth Brundle impulsively decides to use himself as a guinea pig in his invention, which molecularly breaks down a human body and transports it through space. Mr. Okulitch stripped naked, climbed into one brightly lighted telepod, closed the door, and moments later emerged from another telepod, facing the audience with his arms spread, looking transformed, a moment of radiant self-benediction. (There are two more performances, on Saturday and Sept. 27.)
It could be argued that since opera is theater, anything goes. Opera buffs have seen plenty of alluring sopranos in skimpy dresses and handsome bare-chested baritones. Is actual nakedness, if the dramatic situation justifies it, such a big leap?
Maybe not. Still, if opera ventures increasingly down this path, it will have to grapple with the same questions of relevance, gimmickiness and sensationalism that have dogged theater, film and dance.
Dance has broken this barrier the most boldly, which makes sense, since its instrument is the human body in all its beauty and expressivity. Yet choreographers have to be careful not to use naked dancers to inject an easy jolt of eroticism into a mediocre piece.
Nudity in theater has provoked a more contentious debate. There is no question that in many plays explicit nude scenes have been used to compensate for shallow writing or simply to lure people into seats. But when nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.
There was, for example, Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” at the Public Theater in 2002, about a superstar baseball player who reveals that he is gay. The play could not have explored how the interpersonal dynamics of baseball’s locker-room culture are shaken by the star’s announcement without showing the players in the clubhouse showers.
But nudity in the theater can seem the most profound when the characters involved are vulnerable and unglamorous. A crucial, emotionally overpowering moment in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Wit,” first produced in 1995, comes when the actress playing the middle-aged main character, who is dying of cancer, exposes her gaunt, naked body.
Already in previews at the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway is Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” a new production from London of the 1973 play. Naturally, fans of the young Daniel Radcliffe will be enticed by the chance to see him, our adorable Harry Potter, in the buff. But nudity is essential to this wrenching scene. A young boy and a young girl, nervous, insecure and full of confused attractions, strip in a stable and approach each other. When the deeply troubled boy cannot get aroused in full view of the horse he worships, he angrily chases the girl away and viciously blinds the horses with a hoof pick.
Though this may be a minority point of view, to me it seems easier to make nudity seem natural in the theater than on film. In a movie, what you see is completely controlled by the director. In sex scenes, the director teases you with glimpses of flesh, letting you see just so much and not more, or sometimes making you see more than you want too. But the viewer cannot help feeling manipulated.
There has been nudity in opera, of course, but mostly involving extras, supernumeraries or dancers. In 1998 the New York City Opera presented the choreographer and director Martha Clarke’s staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” a co-production with the English National Opera. During the blissful scene when Orfeo enters the Elysian Fields, an ensemble of captivating dancers appeared in all their naked splendor, portraying the heroes and heroines who inhabit this heavenly realm. But it is another matter to ask opera singers in leading roles to disrobe onstage, artists who, after all, have much else to do.
Here is where opera may soon court trouble if things get too cavalierly explicit. First and foremost, opera is a vocal art form. Never underestimate the visceral dramatic impact of fine singing. A great voice can be very sexy. Listen to Birgit Nilsson’s recording of “Salome.” For sheer sensual power, it’s hard to match Nilsson’s incandescent singing.
The question of exposing flesh in opera to make up for subpar music hovered over “The Fly.” At both its world premiere this summer in Paris and its recent production in Los Angeles, critics found Mr. Shore’s music ponderous and undistinguished. But most reviewers praised cast members for giving their all to the production, especially Mr. Okulitch, a sensitive singer and dynamic actor with a warm and appealing if modest-size voice. That he also has a handsome physique takes nothing away from the courage it took to strip bare for the telepod scene. If only the music had matched the moment. Still, the dramatic situation absolutely called for Brundle to be naked, and Mr. Okulitch complied.
But with Ms. Mattila in “Salome,” we have one of the major sopranos of our time singing an indisputably and persistently shocking early-20th-century opera. Going back to the story’s New Testament source, you could argue the text implies that to get her way with Herod, Salome indeed removed all her of veils. This was clearly Mr. Flimm’s idea, and his glamorous star was game. As I commented at the time, Ms. Mattila’s nudity may have taken less courage to bring off than the psychological nakedness she revealed in her mesmerizing portrayal.
On the other hand, one thing opera buffs have always valued about their beloved art form is that so many excellent opera singers look like everyday people, like us. There is no reason that Rodolfo and Mimi have to look like supermodels. They need only convey that they are beautiful to each other. The music, if sung with tenderness and passion, does the rest.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 19, 2008
A music column on Thursday about nudity in opera, including Karita Mattila’s nude appearance in Richard Strauss’s “Salome,” misidentified the source of the story on which the opera is based. It is the New Testament, not the Hebrew Bible.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Motown/Soul composer/producer Norman Whitfield (1941-2008)
LA Times
Norman Whitfield dies at 67; Motown producer and songwriter won two Grammy Awards
The producer for the Temptations and the writer of such hits as 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' had long struggled with diabetes and other ailments.
By Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 18, 2008
Norman Whitfield, the Grammy-winning songwriter and forward-thinking producer who helped shape the direction of R&B and soul music at Motown Records in the 1960s and '70s, died Tuesday. He was 67.
Whitfield, the co-writer of dozens of Motown hits, including Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and producer of most of the Temptations' recordings, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, reportedly of complications from his long struggle with diabetes. He also had a history of heart and kidney ailments.
"Norman Whitfield was one of the most prolific songwriters and record producers of our time," fellow Motown veteran Smokey Robinson said in a statement Wednesday. "He will live forever through his great music."
Whitfield wrote, usually with Barrett Strong, and produced such era-defining hits as "Grapevine," “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” The latter earned Whitfield one of his two Grammy Awards as a songwriter and composer.
His ambitious production work helped move Motown from the catchy love songs that typified the label's output in the early and mid-'60s into social commentary reflecting volatile issues that were at the heart of the civil rights movement.
"Of all the brilliant writer-producers that Motown has given to the world, I believe none was more brilliant than Norman Whitfield," the Temptations' longtime manager, Shelly Berger, said in a statement Wednesday.
"Most producers stick to basically one type of music," Berger added. "When you listen to Norman's body of work, from 'Beauty Is Only Skin Deep,' 'Ain't Too Proud to Beg,' 'Ball of Confusion,' 'Cloud Nine,' 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone,' two [hit] productions of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine,' then top it off with 'Just My Imagination' . . . Norman [is] in a class of his own."
Whitfield had a reputation as a tenacious songwriter and producer who extended the life of his songs by recording them with different artists and varying arrangements.
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" had been recorded with little success at Motown by the Isley Brothers and the Miracles -- and Gaye -- before Whitfield tried it with Gladys Knight & the Pips.
He recorded it with her in part out of frustration over Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.'s refusal to release Gaye's version as a single. Knight's record went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 2 on the pop chart, persuading Gordy to change his mind and put out Gaye's version, for which Whitfield had pushed him to the upper limit of his vocal range.
"While working on the songs for the 'M.P.G.' album, Norman set the songs in keys that were too high for Marvin so he could get Marvin to strain and hit the top of his tenor range without going into falsetto," said David Ritz, author of "Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye." "That drove Marvin crazy and they almost came to blows."
Gaye once told an interviewer that while recording "Grapevine": "I was reaching for notes that made my veins bulge. . . . Had I written the song myself, I would not have sung it at all like that, but there are many benefits in just singing other people's material and taking directions."
That 1968 recording spent seven weeks at No. 1 and pushed Gaye's career to a new peak. "When people heard 'Grapevine,' they said, 'This is a phenomenal artist -- he can do anything," Strong said in 2003.
That success also gave Motown renewed cachet at a time when the hits were slowing down from the label's earlier powerhouses such as the Supremes, Four Tops and the Miracles, before the Temptations got their second wind thanks to Whitfield's guiding hand in the studio.
Whitfield and Strong's "Psychedelic Shack" brought the sound of experimental rock into the halls of Motown in 1970 and became a Top 10 hit for the Temptations. They scored an even bigger hit with the follow-up, "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)," a sonic whirlwind that piled on topical lyrics and rhymes á la Bob Dylan or John Lennon.
"To me, he gave Motown another 10 years of life by coming up with this new attitude," said Ritz, who also collaborated on Robinson's autobiography.
"Smokey said the great thing about Norman -- and they were extremely competitive with each other -- was that he brought out the best in everybody," Ritz said. "It was almost like by being confrontational with the vocalist, he got them to not only sing their [best], he also got them to dig into their souls a little bit deeper."
Whitfield was born in 1941, according to voter registration records, in New York City and was a teenager when his family moved to Detroit, where Gordy had recently launched Motown Records.
As a teen, Whitfield produced recordings for local R&B acts at Thelma Records. He often hung around Motown, and in 1962 was hired as a songwriter, joining Gordy's growing stable of writers that included Harvey Fuqua and the team of Brian Holland-Lamont Dozier-Eddie Holland.
Gordy teamed Whitfield up with Strong, whose 1960 recording of his own song, "Money," gave Motown one of its first hits. After some early successes with their songs, Gordy recognized Whitfield's talent at production and put him in charge of the Temptations, who first reached No. 1 on the pop chart with "My Girl," written and produced by Robinson.
But starting with "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" in 1966, Whitfield wrote and produced more than two dozen hits for the group over the next eight years.
"We grew up together," original Temptations singer Otis Williams said Wednesday. "He was my lifelong friend [and] one of the best producers Motown ever had."
Whitfield also oversaw recordings by Edwin Starr, who hit No. 1 with Whitfield's thunderously produced single “War,” and the Undisputed Truth.
In the mid-1970s, Whitfield left Motown and started his own Whitfield Records, and went to No. 1 again with Rose Royce's disco-era hit “Car Wash.” The musical score for that 1976 film snagged Whitfield his second Grammy.
Said author Ritz: "I was working with Berry Gordy once and he told me 'Man, if the Motown Museum should have a whole wing dedicated to one person, it would be Norman Whitfield.' "
In 2005, Whitfield pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was fined $25,000 for failing to report more than $4 million in income. He was sentenced to home detention rather than prison because of his failing health.
Information on Whitfield's survivors or funeral services was not immediately available.
Norman Whitfield dies at 67; Motown producer and songwriter won two Grammy Awards
The producer for the Temptations and the writer of such hits as 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' had long struggled with diabetes and other ailments.
By Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 18, 2008
Norman Whitfield, the Grammy-winning songwriter and forward-thinking producer who helped shape the direction of R&B and soul music at Motown Records in the 1960s and '70s, died Tuesday. He was 67.
Whitfield, the co-writer of dozens of Motown hits, including Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and producer of most of the Temptations' recordings, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, reportedly of complications from his long struggle with diabetes. He also had a history of heart and kidney ailments.
"Norman Whitfield was one of the most prolific songwriters and record producers of our time," fellow Motown veteran Smokey Robinson said in a statement Wednesday. "He will live forever through his great music."
Whitfield wrote, usually with Barrett Strong, and produced such era-defining hits as "Grapevine," “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” The latter earned Whitfield one of his two Grammy Awards as a songwriter and composer.
His ambitious production work helped move Motown from the catchy love songs that typified the label's output in the early and mid-'60s into social commentary reflecting volatile issues that were at the heart of the civil rights movement.
"Of all the brilliant writer-producers that Motown has given to the world, I believe none was more brilliant than Norman Whitfield," the Temptations' longtime manager, Shelly Berger, said in a statement Wednesday.
"Most producers stick to basically one type of music," Berger added. "When you listen to Norman's body of work, from 'Beauty Is Only Skin Deep,' 'Ain't Too Proud to Beg,' 'Ball of Confusion,' 'Cloud Nine,' 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone,' two [hit] productions of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine,' then top it off with 'Just My Imagination' . . . Norman [is] in a class of his own."
Whitfield had a reputation as a tenacious songwriter and producer who extended the life of his songs by recording them with different artists and varying arrangements.
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" had been recorded with little success at Motown by the Isley Brothers and the Miracles -- and Gaye -- before Whitfield tried it with Gladys Knight & the Pips.
He recorded it with her in part out of frustration over Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.'s refusal to release Gaye's version as a single. Knight's record went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 2 on the pop chart, persuading Gordy to change his mind and put out Gaye's version, for which Whitfield had pushed him to the upper limit of his vocal range.
"While working on the songs for the 'M.P.G.' album, Norman set the songs in keys that were too high for Marvin so he could get Marvin to strain and hit the top of his tenor range without going into falsetto," said David Ritz, author of "Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye." "That drove Marvin crazy and they almost came to blows."
Gaye once told an interviewer that while recording "Grapevine": "I was reaching for notes that made my veins bulge. . . . Had I written the song myself, I would not have sung it at all like that, but there are many benefits in just singing other people's material and taking directions."
That 1968 recording spent seven weeks at No. 1 and pushed Gaye's career to a new peak. "When people heard 'Grapevine,' they said, 'This is a phenomenal artist -- he can do anything," Strong said in 2003.
That success also gave Motown renewed cachet at a time when the hits were slowing down from the label's earlier powerhouses such as the Supremes, Four Tops and the Miracles, before the Temptations got their second wind thanks to Whitfield's guiding hand in the studio.
Whitfield and Strong's "Psychedelic Shack" brought the sound of experimental rock into the halls of Motown in 1970 and became a Top 10 hit for the Temptations. They scored an even bigger hit with the follow-up, "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)," a sonic whirlwind that piled on topical lyrics and rhymes á la Bob Dylan or John Lennon.
"To me, he gave Motown another 10 years of life by coming up with this new attitude," said Ritz, who also collaborated on Robinson's autobiography.
"Smokey said the great thing about Norman -- and they were extremely competitive with each other -- was that he brought out the best in everybody," Ritz said. "It was almost like by being confrontational with the vocalist, he got them to not only sing their [best], he also got them to dig into their souls a little bit deeper."
Whitfield was born in 1941, according to voter registration records, in New York City and was a teenager when his family moved to Detroit, where Gordy had recently launched Motown Records.
As a teen, Whitfield produced recordings for local R&B acts at Thelma Records. He often hung around Motown, and in 1962 was hired as a songwriter, joining Gordy's growing stable of writers that included Harvey Fuqua and the team of Brian Holland-Lamont Dozier-Eddie Holland.
Gordy teamed Whitfield up with Strong, whose 1960 recording of his own song, "Money," gave Motown one of its first hits. After some early successes with their songs, Gordy recognized Whitfield's talent at production and put him in charge of the Temptations, who first reached No. 1 on the pop chart with "My Girl," written and produced by Robinson.
But starting with "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" in 1966, Whitfield wrote and produced more than two dozen hits for the group over the next eight years.
"We grew up together," original Temptations singer Otis Williams said Wednesday. "He was my lifelong friend [and] one of the best producers Motown ever had."
Whitfield also oversaw recordings by Edwin Starr, who hit No. 1 with Whitfield's thunderously produced single “War,” and the Undisputed Truth.
In the mid-1970s, Whitfield left Motown and started his own Whitfield Records, and went to No. 1 again with Rose Royce's disco-era hit “Car Wash.” The musical score for that 1976 film snagged Whitfield his second Grammy.
Said author Ritz: "I was working with Berry Gordy once and he told me 'Man, if the Motown Museum should have a whole wing dedicated to one person, it would be Norman Whitfield.' "
In 2005, Whitfield pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was fined $25,000 for failing to report more than $4 million in income. He was sentenced to home detention rather than prison because of his failing health.
Information on Whitfield's survivors or funeral services was not immediately available.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator
Yep, now you can have a name like Track, Trig, or Piper. Behold, the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator!
Monday, September 15, 2008
Orlando "Puntilla" Rios (1947-2008)
Global Rhythm
Master batá drummer Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos, a seminal figure in the New York Latin music scene, died in a New York City hospital August 12 of complications from heart surgery. He was 60.
Ríos arrived from Cuba in 1980 with the Mariel boatlift and formed an Afro-Cuban folkloric group called Nueva Generación (New Generation) intent on preserving and disseminating both sacred Afro-Cuban music and secular forms such as rumba. He became a pillar of the religious Santería community in New York City as well as an in-demand session musician, recording with such luminaries as the Latin jazz pioneer Chico O’Farill.
Ríos relished his role as mentor and teacher to up and coming percussionists, transmitting what Cubans call “fundamento” (fundamentals) on the sacred, two-headed batá drum used in Santería ceremonies and increasingly in secular music. He was also renowned for his prowess on the conga drums and diverse percussion instruments. Ríos’ polyrhythmic performances and recordings such as 1996’s Spirit Rhythms: Sacred Drumming and Chants From Cuba are credited with exposing a wider audience to Cuban folkloric music. His last project was a tribute album honoring the guaguanco rumba legacy of the late Cuban singer-percussionist Gonzalo Asencio (“Tío Tom”). Released this year by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Ríos recorded the album in Havana’s legendary Egrem studios accompanied by El Conjunto Todo Rumbero.
Born in Havana in 1947 (Dec. 26?), Ríos was a teacher of percussion at the National School of Art in Cuba between 1971 and 1978. He went from performing in the city’s most exclusive hotels - storied cabarets such as the ones in Tropicana and the Hotel Riviera, to accompanying great Latin music figures of the stature of Celia Cruz and Tito Puente on the international stage. He is survived by his wife Ileana. - Lissette Corsa
Master batá drummer Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos, a seminal figure in the New York Latin music scene, died in a New York City hospital August 12 of complications from heart surgery. He was 60.
Ríos arrived from Cuba in 1980 with the Mariel boatlift and formed an Afro-Cuban folkloric group called Nueva Generación (New Generation) intent on preserving and disseminating both sacred Afro-Cuban music and secular forms such as rumba. He became a pillar of the religious Santería community in New York City as well as an in-demand session musician, recording with such luminaries as the Latin jazz pioneer Chico O’Farill.
Ríos relished his role as mentor and teacher to up and coming percussionists, transmitting what Cubans call “fundamento” (fundamentals) on the sacred, two-headed batá drum used in Santería ceremonies and increasingly in secular music. He was also renowned for his prowess on the conga drums and diverse percussion instruments. Ríos’ polyrhythmic performances and recordings such as 1996’s Spirit Rhythms: Sacred Drumming and Chants From Cuba are credited with exposing a wider audience to Cuban folkloric music. His last project was a tribute album honoring the guaguanco rumba legacy of the late Cuban singer-percussionist Gonzalo Asencio (“Tío Tom”). Released this year by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Ríos recorded the album in Havana’s legendary Egrem studios accompanied by El Conjunto Todo Rumbero.
Born in Havana in 1947 (Dec. 26?), Ríos was a teacher of percussion at the National School of Art in Cuba between 1971 and 1978. He went from performing in the city’s most exclusive hotels - storied cabarets such as the ones in Tropicana and the Hotel Riviera, to accompanying great Latin music figures of the stature of Celia Cruz and Tito Puente on the international stage. He is survived by his wife Ileana. - Lissette Corsa
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.
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.
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