CSM
In modern Cameroon polygamy doesn’t pay
When life is more complex than just fields to tend, a passel of wives is more a financial strain than a status symbol.
By Alexis Grant | Contributor / November 13, 2008 edition
Fongo-Ndeng, Cameroon
Benoit Ndi Wamba didn’t know exactly how many children were in his family. Like most Cameroonians born into large polygamous families, he never had a reason to count.
But with money tight after the death of his father, the 23-year-old was partly responsible for finding money to pay this year’s public school fees for his siblings. So he ticked off their names, one by one. There was lanky Jean, 21. Sylvain, 18, a top student. Janvier, an 11-year-old who wears, in this French-speaking province, a T-shirt that reads “Fabulous.” And Mr. Ndi Wamba himself was entering his first year of university.
Those were just his mother’s children. Then there were his other brothers and sisters, born to his late father’s other three wives. A handful of grandchildren and cousins also lived with the family, complicating the count. All referred to one another as brother and sister, explaining only after much prodding who, as Cameroonians say, has the “same mother, same father.”
Yet one thing was clear: With more than a dozen children who hoped to attend school this year, the Ndi Wamba family faced a pile of fees.
It was a problem Ndi Wamba swore his own children would never face; he would marry just one woman, he said, and have significantly fewer children than his father.
“If it was just my three brothers and me, we would not be having this problem,” Ndi Wamba said sternly, a folder of university enrollment forms tucked under his arm.
An increasing number of men in this central African nation are coming to the same conclusion, rejecting the polygamous lifestyles of their fathers and opting for monogamy instead. With the rising costs of school, healthcare, and food, it’s simply too expensive to have a large family, they say.
• • •
I met the Ndi Wamba family six years ago, when I was a college student studying polygamy. They were supposed to serve as a case study, but instead became my second family during the three weeks I lived with them in the village of Fongo-Ndeng, in western Cameroon.
When I returned this September for a visit, their lives had much changed. Nearly a year after the death of their 78-year-old husband, the four wives still donned all black, mourning not only his spirit but also the loss of his government pension. With the help of friends and family back home, I paid tuition for the women’s children and others who live on the compound, 18 in all.
Again I chatted with the women as they cooked over open fires on the ground in their kitches, alternating among the four dirt-floor houses that, along with their husband’s empty house, created a semicircle around an often-muddy yard. When he was alive, the husband, too, split his time among his wives, spending one night with one woman, the next with another.
Traditionally, polygamy has been a symbol of wealth and status, particularly in rural areas. Village chiefs until recently married as many as 25 women, while other men typically wed between two and eight wives.
The lifestyle has its advantages, mainly the production of a labor force to cultivate fields of corn, beans, and root crops like manioc. But modernity has taken its toll, even on families like the Ndi Wambas who have shunned other changes such as electricity and running water. Crops can feed many mouths, but only hard currency pays school fees, which start in secondary school around the equivalent of $45 annually and mount for higher grades.
“Before, maybe polygamy was good,” explains Charlotte Nguimfack, who has four children with her monogamous husband. “Life wasn’t difficult like it is now.”
While those economic difficulties are driving polygamy’s decline, other factors also are at play, including the spread of Christianity, which prohibits polygamy. And as more women become college-educated, some have begun to demand monogamy.
In the early 1990s, a quarter of married men in Cameroon had more than one wife, according to the country’s National Institute of Statistics. By 2004, just 11 percent were polygamous.
Likewise, the percentage of women who had at least one co-wife dropped to 30 percent in 2004 compared with 39 percent in 1991, institute data show.
Similar decreases are occurring in other countries across central and western Africa, says Savage Njikam, who oversees the University of Douala’s anthropology department.
“The more educated people are, the less likely they are to have the same household as their grandfather,” says Mrs. Njikam, a social anthropologist. “But you still will find educated women who will accept being second wives.”
Monogamous men and women cite another reason to avoid polygamy, one their polygamous counterparts are reluctant to discuss. Some multiwife households suffer from jealousy and conflict.
Sallahou Aboubakar, who grew up in Cameroon’s Muslim north in a two-wife home, says his mother’s disputes with her co-wife influenced him to choose monogamy.
“The wives don’t stay peaceful,” says Mr.. Aboubakar, who lives with his wife and their newborn baby in Yaounde, the capital. “It always causes problems.”
His wife’s aunt, Adamou Patou, overhearing the conversation speaks up to illustrate the point, telling a tale that has her family, all sitting on mats on the floor, roaring with laughter.
When her husband was alive, she says, she and her co-wife fought endlessly, mostly over where the husband would sleep. One morning, after the husband had spent too many nights with Patou, her co-wife entered the bedroom to find the husband freshly showered and back in bed. She threw a bucket of charcoal dust into the room, covering the bed and her husband in gray powder.
Despite such stories, some young Cameroonians continue to keep polygamy alive. Bertrand Folepe, who married his girlfriend when she became pregnant six years ago, took a second wife two years later at the urging of his parents. His father, who had eight wives, wanted him to marry a woman from his village.
Mr. Folepe didn’t protest; he is proud to carry on the tradition. On display in his family’s sitting room, which he shares with both wives, are portraits of each couple, side by side.
“If in the future I have a lot of money, I’ll take more [wives],” says Folepe, who makes a living selling small livestock.
Folepe, who lives with his wives and seven children in the small city of Dschang, has urbanized the polygamous lifestyle. Instead of dwelling in separate, adjacent homes like his family in the village where he grew up, his entire family shares one house. Each wife has her own bedroom, but the two share an outdoor kitchen, swapping cooking duties each week.
Other city-dwelling men have modernized polygamy differently, by creating separate households of independent families that share a father.
Even as traditional polygamy declines, it’s still common for men and women to have multiple partners, by either going outside their marriage or divorcing one spouse before marrying another.
Martha Ngum, head of the sociology and anthropology department at the University of Buea in southwest Cameroon, calls the latter trend “serial monogamy.” Women are driving the shift, she says, because they now attend university, work outside the home and are financially independent more than ever before.
But outside Cameroon’s cities, it’s still a man’s decision whether to take more than one wife and a woman’s responsibility to accept his choice.
Decades after accepting their husband’s decision to engage in polygamy, the Ndi Wamba wives now face another duty: providing for their many children without his financial support.
On the few days when the women aren’t cultivating the fields, they earn petty cash selling snacks at local markets. The wives hope their eldest sons, like Benoit, contribute small income. They also look to relatives for help; several of the children already have left the village compound to live with an uncle or grandmother.
For this family, the years ahead will not be easy. But as the Ndi Wamba women often say, “We must endure.”
Friday, November 14, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
2007 interview of Sound Engineer/Drug Pioneer Owsley Stanley
SF Chronicle
For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Thursday, July 12, 2007
The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San Rafael, although he is one of the men who virtually made the '60s. Because Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs, few people would know what he looks like.
The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
For more than 20 years, Stanley -- at 72, still known as the Bear -- has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback of Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel sculptures and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.
As a planned two-week visit to the Bay Area stretched to three, four and then five weeks, Bear agreed to give The Chronicle an interview because a friend asked him. He has rarely consented to speak to the press about his life, his work or his unconventional thinking on matters such as the coming ice age or his all-meat diet.
Sporting a buccaneer's earring he got when he was in jail and a hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides of his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.
"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."
By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.
Less well known are Bear's contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.
Says the Dead's Bob Weir: "He's good for a different point of view at about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything."
Bear, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator, grew up in Los Angeles and Arlington, Va. He was thrown out of military school in the eighth grade for being drunk and dropped out of school altogether at 18. He managed to get accepted to the University of Virginia, where he spent a year studying engineering. By 1956, he was in the Air Force, specializing in electronics and radar.
Later, Bear studied ballet, acting and Russian, worked in jet propulsion labs as well as radio and television, and then entered UC Berkeley in 1963, but lasted less than a year.
Then he discovered acid.
He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library. Soon after, Bear began to cook acid.
The Berkeley police raided his first lab in 1966 and confiscated a substance that they claimed was methedrine. When it turned out to be something else -- probably a component of LSD -- Bear not only walked free but successfully sued the cops for the return of his lab equipment.
By the time he made a special batch called Monterey Purple for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival -- Owsley Purple was the secret smile on Jimi Hendrix's face that night -- "Owsley" was an underground legend.
In December 1967, agents arrested him at his secret lab in Orinda. The "LSD Millionaire" headline in The Chronicle prompted the Dead to write the song "Alice D. Millionaire." In 1970, after a pot bust in Oakland, a judge revoked Bear's bail, and he served two years at Terminal Island near the Los Angeles Harbor.
"If you make some, you've got to move some to get some money to make it," he says now. "But then you had to give a lot away to keep the street price down. So anyway, I'm sort of embedded in this thing that I'm tangled up in. ... Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation."
Bear, chemist to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, was involved with the Dead almost from the band's beginnings at Kesey's notorious Acid Tests. Bear was the Dead's first patron and, briefly, their manager. He bought the band sound equipment and began to use the Dead as a laboratory for audio research.
"We'd never thought about high-quality PAs," says the Dead's Weir. "There was no such thing until Bear started making one."
Bear made the first public address system specifically dedicated to music in 1966. If he was the first concert sound engineer in rock music to take his job seriously, his habit of making tape recordings of the shows he mixed also gave the Dead an unprecedented archive of live recordings dating back to the band's first days. Many of Bear's tapes have been turned into albums.
Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. "He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level," says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. "I've seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson's."
His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in 1966 in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.
As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting that the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of psycho-acoustics.
"The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the dolphins. It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from everything else."
Bear left Northern California in the early '80s, convinced that a natural disaster was imminent. He predicted at the time that global warming would lead to a six-week-long ultra-cyclone that could cover the Northern Hemisphere with a new ice age. Determining that the tropical northern side of Australia would be the most likely region to survive, Bear made a beeline for Queensland and says he felt at home the moment he set foot on the new continent.
"I might be right about the ice age thing," he allows. "I might be wrong."
Old friends express shock that Bear would ever even admit to that possibility, but, if not exactly mellowed in his old age, he has found room to accommodate other points of view.
"He's come a long way," says Wavy Gravy, who visited Bear in Australia this year. "He used to be real snappy and grumpy. Now he can be actually sweet."
His four children are grown. He has five grandchildren, and his oldest son, Pete, in Florida, just became a grandfather, making Bear a great-grandfather for the first time. His other son, Starfinder, a veterinarian, hosted a party for him last month at his Oakland home attended by the old Dead crowd, a tortoise and a caged iguana. He has two daughters, Nina and Redbird, and maintains his own Web site (www.thebear.org) where he sells his sculpture and posts various diatribes and essays.
He keeps up with the music scene -- he singles out Wolfmother and the Arctic Monkeys as new bands he likes. "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD," he says.
Owsley Stanley (he legally dropped the "Augustus" 40 years ago) has also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on their experiences as youthful indiscretions.
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he says. "What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."
At the hilltop San Anselmo home where Bear had been house-sitting, pretty much all available space was taken over with his belongings. He squatted over the piles, trying to figure out what to ship and what to take with him. Two days before his flight, it looks like he'll need every minute.
This time, he was extending his stay to catch his old friends Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady of Hot Tuna play at the Fillmore. But when he left for the airport the next day, he got as far as Sausalito before he discovered that he had left the briefcase with the tickets back in San Anselmo, and the trip home was postponed for another week.
"I even said, 'I wonder what I'm leaving behind this time?' before I left," he says, somewhat sadly.
E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/12/MNGK0QV7HS1.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Thursday, July 12, 2007
The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San Rafael, although he is one of the men who virtually made the '60s. Because Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs, few people would know what he looks like.
The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
For more than 20 years, Stanley -- at 72, still known as the Bear -- has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback of Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel sculptures and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.
As a planned two-week visit to the Bay Area stretched to three, four and then five weeks, Bear agreed to give The Chronicle an interview because a friend asked him. He has rarely consented to speak to the press about his life, his work or his unconventional thinking on matters such as the coming ice age or his all-meat diet.
Sporting a buccaneer's earring he got when he was in jail and a hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides of his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.
"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."
By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.
Less well known are Bear's contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.
Says the Dead's Bob Weir: "He's good for a different point of view at about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything."
Bear, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator, grew up in Los Angeles and Arlington, Va. He was thrown out of military school in the eighth grade for being drunk and dropped out of school altogether at 18. He managed to get accepted to the University of Virginia, where he spent a year studying engineering. By 1956, he was in the Air Force, specializing in electronics and radar.
Later, Bear studied ballet, acting and Russian, worked in jet propulsion labs as well as radio and television, and then entered UC Berkeley in 1963, but lasted less than a year.
Then he discovered acid.
He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library. Soon after, Bear began to cook acid.
The Berkeley police raided his first lab in 1966 and confiscated a substance that they claimed was methedrine. When it turned out to be something else -- probably a component of LSD -- Bear not only walked free but successfully sued the cops for the return of his lab equipment.
By the time he made a special batch called Monterey Purple for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival -- Owsley Purple was the secret smile on Jimi Hendrix's face that night -- "Owsley" was an underground legend.
In December 1967, agents arrested him at his secret lab in Orinda. The "LSD Millionaire" headline in The Chronicle prompted the Dead to write the song "Alice D. Millionaire." In 1970, after a pot bust in Oakland, a judge revoked Bear's bail, and he served two years at Terminal Island near the Los Angeles Harbor.
"If you make some, you've got to move some to get some money to make it," he says now. "But then you had to give a lot away to keep the street price down. So anyway, I'm sort of embedded in this thing that I'm tangled up in. ... Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation."
Bear, chemist to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, was involved with the Dead almost from the band's beginnings at Kesey's notorious Acid Tests. Bear was the Dead's first patron and, briefly, their manager. He bought the band sound equipment and began to use the Dead as a laboratory for audio research.
"We'd never thought about high-quality PAs," says the Dead's Weir. "There was no such thing until Bear started making one."
Bear made the first public address system specifically dedicated to music in 1966. If he was the first concert sound engineer in rock music to take his job seriously, his habit of making tape recordings of the shows he mixed also gave the Dead an unprecedented archive of live recordings dating back to the band's first days. Many of Bear's tapes have been turned into albums.
Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. "He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level," says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. "I've seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson's."
His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in 1966 in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.
As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting that the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of psycho-acoustics.
"The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the dolphins. It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from everything else."
Bear left Northern California in the early '80s, convinced that a natural disaster was imminent. He predicted at the time that global warming would lead to a six-week-long ultra-cyclone that could cover the Northern Hemisphere with a new ice age. Determining that the tropical northern side of Australia would be the most likely region to survive, Bear made a beeline for Queensland and says he felt at home the moment he set foot on the new continent.
"I might be right about the ice age thing," he allows. "I might be wrong."
Old friends express shock that Bear would ever even admit to that possibility, but, if not exactly mellowed in his old age, he has found room to accommodate other points of view.
"He's come a long way," says Wavy Gravy, who visited Bear in Australia this year. "He used to be real snappy and grumpy. Now he can be actually sweet."
His four children are grown. He has five grandchildren, and his oldest son, Pete, in Florida, just became a grandfather, making Bear a great-grandfather for the first time. His other son, Starfinder, a veterinarian, hosted a party for him last month at his Oakland home attended by the old Dead crowd, a tortoise and a caged iguana. He has two daughters, Nina and Redbird, and maintains his own Web site (www.thebear.org) where he sells his sculpture and posts various diatribes and essays.
He keeps up with the music scene -- he singles out Wolfmother and the Arctic Monkeys as new bands he likes. "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD," he says.
Owsley Stanley (he legally dropped the "Augustus" 40 years ago) has also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on their experiences as youthful indiscretions.
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he says. "What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."
At the hilltop San Anselmo home where Bear had been house-sitting, pretty much all available space was taken over with his belongings. He squatted over the piles, trying to figure out what to ship and what to take with him. Two days before his flight, it looks like he'll need every minute.
This time, he was extending his stay to catch his old friends Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady of Hot Tuna play at the Fillmore. But when he left for the airport the next day, he got as far as Sausalito before he discovered that he had left the briefcase with the tickets back in San Anselmo, and the trip home was postponed for another week.
"I even said, 'I wonder what I'm leaving behind this time?' before I left," he says, somewhat sadly.
E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/12/MNGK0QV7HS1.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Music to your ears is music for your heart, too
Reuters/MSNBC
Music to your ears is music for your heart, too
Hearing favorite tunes helps blood vessels dilate, researchers find
Reuters
updated 1:37 p.m. PT, Tues., Nov. 11, 2008
WASHINGTON - Songs that make our hearts soar can make them stronger too, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found that when people listened to their favorite music, their blood vessels dilated in much the same way as when laughing, or taking blood medications.
"We have a pretty impressive effect," said Dr. Michael Miller, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.
"Blood vessel diameter improved," he said in a telephone interview. "The vessel opened up pretty significantly. You can see the vessels opening up with other activities such as exercise." A similar effect is seen with drugs such as statins and ACE inhibitors.
When blood vessels open more, blood flows more smoothly and is less likely to form the blood clots that cause heart attacks and strokes. Elastic vessels also resist the hardening activity of atherosclerosis.
"We are not saying to stop your statins or not to exercise but to add this to an overall program of heart health," said Miller, who presented his findings to a meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans.
Miller's team tested 10 healthy, non-smoking men and women, who were told to bring their favorite music.
They spent half an hour listening to the recordings and half an hour listening to music they said made them feel anxious while the researchers did ultrasound tests designed to show blood vessel function.
Compared to their normal baseline measurements, blood vessel diameter increased 26 percent on average when the volunteers heard their joyful music. Listening to music they disliked -- in most cases in this group heavy metal -- narrowed blood vessels by six percent, Miller said.
Miller said he came up with the idea after discovering the laughter caused blood to literally flow more smoothly.
"I asked myself what other things make us feel real good, besides calories from dark chocolate of course. Music came to mind. ... It makes me feel real good," he said.
Most of the volunteers chose country music but Miller said the style is not so important as what pleases each individual.
Music to your ears is music for your heart, too
Hearing favorite tunes helps blood vessels dilate, researchers find
Reuters
updated 1:37 p.m. PT, Tues., Nov. 11, 2008
WASHINGTON - Songs that make our hearts soar can make them stronger too, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found that when people listened to their favorite music, their blood vessels dilated in much the same way as when laughing, or taking blood medications.
"We have a pretty impressive effect," said Dr. Michael Miller, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.
"Blood vessel diameter improved," he said in a telephone interview. "The vessel opened up pretty significantly. You can see the vessels opening up with other activities such as exercise." A similar effect is seen with drugs such as statins and ACE inhibitors.
When blood vessels open more, blood flows more smoothly and is less likely to form the blood clots that cause heart attacks and strokes. Elastic vessels also resist the hardening activity of atherosclerosis.
"We are not saying to stop your statins or not to exercise but to add this to an overall program of heart health," said Miller, who presented his findings to a meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans.
Miller's team tested 10 healthy, non-smoking men and women, who were told to bring their favorite music.
They spent half an hour listening to the recordings and half an hour listening to music they said made them feel anxious while the researchers did ultrasound tests designed to show blood vessel function.
Compared to their normal baseline measurements, blood vessel diameter increased 26 percent on average when the volunteers heard their joyful music. Listening to music they disliked -- in most cases in this group heavy metal -- narrowed blood vessels by six percent, Miller said.
Miller said he came up with the idea after discovering the laughter caused blood to literally flow more smoothly.
"I asked myself what other things make us feel real good, besides calories from dark chocolate of course. Music came to mind. ... It makes me feel real good," he said.
Most of the volunteers chose country music but Miller said the style is not so important as what pleases each individual.
Monday, November 10, 2008
South Africa Singer/Activist Miriam Makeba (1932-2008)
NYT
November 11, 2008
Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON — Miriam Makeba, a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom among millions in her own country though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against, died overnight after performing at a concert in Italy on Sunday. She was 76.
The cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to Vincenza Di Saia, a physician at the private Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno near Naples in southern Italy, where she was brought by ambulance. The time of death was listed in hospital records as midnight, the doctor said.
Ms. Makeba collapsed as she was leaving the stage, the South African authorities said. She had been singing at a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats after writing about organized crime.
Widely known as “Mama Africa,” she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States.
Although Ms. Makeba had been weakened by osteoarthritis, her death stunned many in South Africa, where she stood as an enduring emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Mandela said the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation.”
He continued: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”
“She was South Africa’s first lady of song and so richly deserved the title of Mama Afrika. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours,” Mr. Mandela’s was one of many tributes from South African leaders.
“One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing,” Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a statement. “Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song.”
For 31 years, Ms. Makeba lived in exile, variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa’s state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations. “I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” Ms. Makeba said upon her return at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble, according to The Associated Press. “I never committed any crime.”
Music was a central part of the struggle against apartheid. The South African authorities of the era exercised strict censorship of many forms of expression, while many foreign entertainers discouraged performances in South Africa in an attempt to isolate the white authorities and show their opposition to apartheid.
From exile she acted as a constant reminder of the events in her homeland as the white authorities struggled to contain or pre-empt unrest among the black majority.
Ms. Makeba wrote in 1987: “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”
She was married several times and her husbands included the American black activist Stokely Carmichael, with whom she lived in Guinea, and the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who also spent many years in exile.
In the United States she became a star, touring with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and winning a Grammy award with him in 1965. Such was her following and fame that she sang in 1962 at the birthday party of President John F. Kennedy. She also performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.
But she fell afoul of the U.S. music industry because of her marriage to Mr. Carmichael and her decision to live in Guinea.
In one of her last interviews, in May 2008 with the British music critic Robin Denselow, she said she found her concerts in the United States being cancelled. “It was not a ban from the government. It was a cancellation by people who felt I should not be with Stokely because he was a rebel to them. I didn’t care about that. He was somebody I loved, who loved me, and it was my life,” she said.
Ms. Makeba was born in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, the daughter of a Swazi mother and a father from the Xhosa people who live mainly in the eastern Cape region of South Africa. She became known to South Africans in the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg in the 1950s.
According to Agence France-Presse, she was often short of money and could not afford to buy a coffin when her only daughter in 1985. She buried her alone, barring a handful of journalists from covering the funeral.
She was particularly renowned for her performances of songs such as what was known as the Click Song — named for a clicking sound in her native tongue — or “Qongoqothwane,” and Pata Pata, meaning Touch Touch in Xhosa. Her style of singing was widely interpreted as a blend of black township rhythms, jazz and folk music.
In her interview in 2008, Ms. Makeba said: “I’m not a political singer. I don’t know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.”
In a tribute, Jacob Zuma, head of the ruling African National Congress, said the party “dips its banner in tribute to an African heroine, Miriam Zenzile Makeba, a freedom fighter and outstanding African cultural figure.”
“Miriam Makeba used her voice, not merely to entertain, but to give a voice to the millions of oppressed South Africans under the yoke of apartheid,” Mr. Zuma said.
Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting from Johannesburg and Rachel Donadio from Rome.
November 11, 2008
Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON — Miriam Makeba, a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom among millions in her own country though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against, died overnight after performing at a concert in Italy on Sunday. She was 76.
The cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to Vincenza Di Saia, a physician at the private Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno near Naples in southern Italy, where she was brought by ambulance. The time of death was listed in hospital records as midnight, the doctor said.
Ms. Makeba collapsed as she was leaving the stage, the South African authorities said. She had been singing at a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats after writing about organized crime.
Widely known as “Mama Africa,” she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States.
Although Ms. Makeba had been weakened by osteoarthritis, her death stunned many in South Africa, where she stood as an enduring emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Mandela said the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation.”
He continued: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”
“She was South Africa’s first lady of song and so richly deserved the title of Mama Afrika. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours,” Mr. Mandela’s was one of many tributes from South African leaders.
“One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing,” Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a statement. “Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song.”
For 31 years, Ms. Makeba lived in exile, variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa’s state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations. “I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” Ms. Makeba said upon her return at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble, according to The Associated Press. “I never committed any crime.”
Music was a central part of the struggle against apartheid. The South African authorities of the era exercised strict censorship of many forms of expression, while many foreign entertainers discouraged performances in South Africa in an attempt to isolate the white authorities and show their opposition to apartheid.
From exile she acted as a constant reminder of the events in her homeland as the white authorities struggled to contain or pre-empt unrest among the black majority.
Ms. Makeba wrote in 1987: “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”
She was married several times and her husbands included the American black activist Stokely Carmichael, with whom she lived in Guinea, and the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who also spent many years in exile.
In the United States she became a star, touring with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and winning a Grammy award with him in 1965. Such was her following and fame that she sang in 1962 at the birthday party of President John F. Kennedy. She also performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.
But she fell afoul of the U.S. music industry because of her marriage to Mr. Carmichael and her decision to live in Guinea.
In one of her last interviews, in May 2008 with the British music critic Robin Denselow, she said she found her concerts in the United States being cancelled. “It was not a ban from the government. It was a cancellation by people who felt I should not be with Stokely because he was a rebel to them. I didn’t care about that. He was somebody I loved, who loved me, and it was my life,” she said.
Ms. Makeba was born in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, the daughter of a Swazi mother and a father from the Xhosa people who live mainly in the eastern Cape region of South Africa. She became known to South Africans in the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg in the 1950s.
According to Agence France-Presse, she was often short of money and could not afford to buy a coffin when her only daughter in 1985. She buried her alone, barring a handful of journalists from covering the funeral.
She was particularly renowned for her performances of songs such as what was known as the Click Song — named for a clicking sound in her native tongue — or “Qongoqothwane,” and Pata Pata, meaning Touch Touch in Xhosa. Her style of singing was widely interpreted as a blend of black township rhythms, jazz and folk music.
In her interview in 2008, Ms. Makeba said: “I’m not a political singer. I don’t know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.”
In a tribute, Jacob Zuma, head of the ruling African National Congress, said the party “dips its banner in tribute to an African heroine, Miriam Zenzile Makeba, a freedom fighter and outstanding African cultural figure.”
“Miriam Makeba used her voice, not merely to entertain, but to give a voice to the millions of oppressed South Africans under the yoke of apartheid,” Mr. Zuma said.
Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting from Johannesburg and Rachel Donadio from Rome.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Don't let them eat cake, Saudi cleric says: Birthdays in Saudi Arabia
LAT
Don't let them eat cake, Saudi cleric says
Birthday celebrations are banned as un-Islamic. But that doesn't stop people from throwing parties.
The Associated Press
November 9, 2008
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — When Hala Masaad invited her girlfriends over to celebrate her 18th birthday with cake and juice, the high school student was stepping into an unusual public debate. Is celebrating birthdays un-Islamic?
Saudi Arabia's most senior Muslim cleric recently denounced birthday parties as an unwanted foreign influence, but another prominent cleric declared they were OK.
That has left Masaad with mixed feelings about her low-key celebration last month. She loves birthday parties, she says, because they make her feel that she has "moved from one stage of life to another."
"But I sometimes feel I'm doing something haram," she said sheepishly, using the Arabic word for "banned."
The Saudi ban on birthdays is in line with the strict interpretation of Islam followed by the conservative Wahhabi sect adhered to in the kingdom. All Christian and even most Muslim feasts are also prohibited because they are considered alien customs the Saudi clerics don't sanction.
Only the Muslim feasts of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, which follows the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, are permitted.
Elsewhere in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, Dubai, Lebanon and Iran, people routinely celebrate birthdays, especially for children. Among middle-class and affluent families, parties can be elaborate, with cakes, toys, clowns, ponies and many presents. In Egypt, the prophet Muhammad's birthday is celebrated by handing out special sweets -- in the shape of a doll for girls and a horse for boys.
Even in Saudi Arabia, it's not hard to find Saudis who celebrate birthdays or stores that cater to putting on parties, despite the ban.
What makes the latest controversy notable is that it started when a prominent cleric, Salman Awdah, said on a popular satellite TV program in August that it was OK to mark birthdays and wedding anniversaries with parties as long as the Arabic word that describes the events -- eid, or "feast" -- is not used.
That prompted a quick denunciation by Saudi Arabia's grand mufti and top religious authority, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Sheik, who said such celebrations had no place in Islam and gave a list of foreign customs he suggested were unacceptable.
"Christians have Mother's Day, an eid for trees and an eid for every occasion," said Al Sheik, who also heads the Presidency for Scientific Research and Religious Edicts, speaking to Al Madina newspaper. "And on every birthday, candles are lit and food is given out."
There is no question that the television remarks by Awdah, who is not employed by the country's religious establishment, contradicted several fatwas, or religious edicts, issued by senior Saudi clerics over the years.
One such ruling, by the previous mufti, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Baz, said Muslims should not emulate the West by celebrating birthdays -- even that of Muhammad, which is marked in most other Middle Eastern countries as a holiday.
"It's not permissible to take part in them," he said. "Birthday parties are an innovation . . . and people are in no need of innovations."
Still, some Saudis welcomed a loosening of the prohibition.
"Allowing such celebrations can be an element that can strengthen ties among people and contribute to an increase in the happy occasions in our society," wrote Ibrahim Dawood in a column in the newspaper Al Eqtisadiah.
Others, including several prominent Muslim scholars, issued statements backing the ban and denouncing Awdah.
Sheik Abdullah Manie, a member of the Council of Senior Scholars, said Awdah's remarks were a "slip of the tongue that he should retract."
"We Muslims should have our identity that sets us apart and makes us proud," he said in a statement.
Some Saudis worry the controversy will be used by conservative members of the religious establishment, including the religious police, as a green light to crack down on all celebrations.
Despite the continuous fatwas against them, it's not hard to find merchandise for celebrating birthdays, anniversaries or even Western holidays like Valentine's Day. But importing the items can be tricky for shop owners.
One store owner said it's hard to say when shipments will be intercepted. A month ago, an order of balloons, hats and banners was confiscated, said the owner, who did not want to be identified.
Still, business was brisk at one gift store recently, where parties might cost from $4,000 to $32,000, depending on the decorations, giveaways and number of guests.
Customers can browse albums of wall decorations, table settings and cakes, and order party bags with coloring books and school supplies.
But one Jidda resident, Riham Ahmed, 20, said she didn't like birthdays. "It's enough to have two eids," said the economics major. "My birthday is a normal day. Even my parents don't congratulate me."
Her sister Arwa agreed.
"I missed my 25th birthday by two days [in August] and only remembered it when I checked the calendar for prayer times," she said. "I don't like it when someone tells me, 'Happy birthday.' It's like a reminder that I'm getting closer to death."
Don't let them eat cake, Saudi cleric says
Birthday celebrations are banned as un-Islamic. But that doesn't stop people from throwing parties.
The Associated Press
November 9, 2008
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — When Hala Masaad invited her girlfriends over to celebrate her 18th birthday with cake and juice, the high school student was stepping into an unusual public debate. Is celebrating birthdays un-Islamic?
Saudi Arabia's most senior Muslim cleric recently denounced birthday parties as an unwanted foreign influence, but another prominent cleric declared they were OK.
That has left Masaad with mixed feelings about her low-key celebration last month. She loves birthday parties, she says, because they make her feel that she has "moved from one stage of life to another."
"But I sometimes feel I'm doing something haram," she said sheepishly, using the Arabic word for "banned."
The Saudi ban on birthdays is in line with the strict interpretation of Islam followed by the conservative Wahhabi sect adhered to in the kingdom. All Christian and even most Muslim feasts are also prohibited because they are considered alien customs the Saudi clerics don't sanction.
Only the Muslim feasts of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, which follows the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, are permitted.
Elsewhere in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, Dubai, Lebanon and Iran, people routinely celebrate birthdays, especially for children. Among middle-class and affluent families, parties can be elaborate, with cakes, toys, clowns, ponies and many presents. In Egypt, the prophet Muhammad's birthday is celebrated by handing out special sweets -- in the shape of a doll for girls and a horse for boys.
Even in Saudi Arabia, it's not hard to find Saudis who celebrate birthdays or stores that cater to putting on parties, despite the ban.
What makes the latest controversy notable is that it started when a prominent cleric, Salman Awdah, said on a popular satellite TV program in August that it was OK to mark birthdays and wedding anniversaries with parties as long as the Arabic word that describes the events -- eid, or "feast" -- is not used.
That prompted a quick denunciation by Saudi Arabia's grand mufti and top religious authority, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Sheik, who said such celebrations had no place in Islam and gave a list of foreign customs he suggested were unacceptable.
"Christians have Mother's Day, an eid for trees and an eid for every occasion," said Al Sheik, who also heads the Presidency for Scientific Research and Religious Edicts, speaking to Al Madina newspaper. "And on every birthday, candles are lit and food is given out."
There is no question that the television remarks by Awdah, who is not employed by the country's religious establishment, contradicted several fatwas, or religious edicts, issued by senior Saudi clerics over the years.
One such ruling, by the previous mufti, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Baz, said Muslims should not emulate the West by celebrating birthdays -- even that of Muhammad, which is marked in most other Middle Eastern countries as a holiday.
"It's not permissible to take part in them," he said. "Birthday parties are an innovation . . . and people are in no need of innovations."
Still, some Saudis welcomed a loosening of the prohibition.
"Allowing such celebrations can be an element that can strengthen ties among people and contribute to an increase in the happy occasions in our society," wrote Ibrahim Dawood in a column in the newspaper Al Eqtisadiah.
Others, including several prominent Muslim scholars, issued statements backing the ban and denouncing Awdah.
Sheik Abdullah Manie, a member of the Council of Senior Scholars, said Awdah's remarks were a "slip of the tongue that he should retract."
"We Muslims should have our identity that sets us apart and makes us proud," he said in a statement.
Some Saudis worry the controversy will be used by conservative members of the religious establishment, including the religious police, as a green light to crack down on all celebrations.
Despite the continuous fatwas against them, it's not hard to find merchandise for celebrating birthdays, anniversaries or even Western holidays like Valentine's Day. But importing the items can be tricky for shop owners.
One store owner said it's hard to say when shipments will be intercepted. A month ago, an order of balloons, hats and banners was confiscated, said the owner, who did not want to be identified.
Still, business was brisk at one gift store recently, where parties might cost from $4,000 to $32,000, depending on the decorations, giveaways and number of guests.
Customers can browse albums of wall decorations, table settings and cakes, and order party bags with coloring books and school supplies.
But one Jidda resident, Riham Ahmed, 20, said she didn't like birthdays. "It's enough to have two eids," said the economics major. "My birthday is a normal day. Even my parents don't congratulate me."
Her sister Arwa agreed.
"I missed my 25th birthday by two days [in August] and only remembered it when I checked the calendar for prayer times," she said. "I don't like it when someone tells me, 'Happy birthday.' It's like a reminder that I'm getting closer to death."
"The Singing Revolution": How Estonians sang their way to freedom
CS Monitor
How Estonians sang their way to freedom
A new documentary tells story of how the national tradition of singing helped unite the masses against the Soviet occupation.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 24, 2008 edition
Walk around the verdant green amphitheater known as the Lauluvaljak, or song ground, here on the outskirts of Tallin, Estonia, and it's easy to imagine the air alive with music, reverberating up the grassy slopes from the half-domed, vaulted stage at the bottom of this natural theatrical setting.
But to grasp what it feels like to be amid an audience 300,000-strong, singing in Von Trapp family-like harmony with sub rosa political purpose, you'll just have to pick up the DVD of "The Singing Revolution," a passion project by documentarians Jim and Maureen Tusty. Released this week, it is the story of how a tiny country (population: 1 million) with a 5,000-year-old culture, perched on the western edge of the Russian giant, used its tradition of song to finally free itself of foreign occupation, in this case the Soviet state, in 1991.
This tale of how peaceful crowds managed to fend off Soviet tanks as they attempted to take over the local television station is operatic in its drama, says the married couple. "This is the story of the power of nonviolent resistance to succeed where guns and rock-throwing would have resulted in death and more political oppression," says Jim Tusty. The nation was trying to throw off the Soviet yoke, which ensnared it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin secretly signed a pact to divide up the Baltic countries. But, says Jim Tusty, it is also the story of a relationship between art and politics.
"We wanted to tell this remarkable story ... before the generation that lived it is no longer around," he says. He adds that a number of the older Estonians he interviewed say they are grateful to have the narrative preserved. They see that the next generation – a global, externally focused cohort in a nation that is now part of the European Union and NATO – has little awareness of the struggles of an earlier generation, he says.
The story began for the filmmakers when they taught a cinema class in Estonia during the summer of 1999 and began to hear about the song festival and the revolution it had inspired. In the festival, founded in 1869 and held every five years, choirs from all over the nation audition to be part of the 20,000 to 30,000-member chorus that takes the stage and leads the huge crowds that attend.
The music is a mix of modern and traditional folk songs, many of which have what the team calls the kind of oral traditions that are full of hidden, deeply patriotic meaning that sustained Estonians through centuries of oppression. As they investigated the festival itself, they discovered the role that the traditional songs played during the critical years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, 1987 through 1991. Rather than engage the Soviets directly, as Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania did, all with disastrous results, the various political groups united in song.
"They never wanted to give the Soviets a reason to arrest or hurt anyone," says Maureen Tusty. Paraphrasing one of the Estonians who survived the brutal years of Soviet gulags, her husband adds, "Art used to be serious when real political participation was not possible," but now, with meaningful political activity allowed, the arts have become trivial and the next generation is not interested in the power of this culture to make a difference.
Beyond that, the filmmakers say the film has a role to play in a world that is getting increasingly violent, particularly a Russia with more aggressive foreign policies. They have assembled a three-disc educational DVD version (available at www.singingrevolution.com), complete with maps and historical data. But, Jim Tusty hastens to add, they are not advocacy filmmakers. "We just believe in this story, which has its own message."
• Los Angeles-based writer Gloria Goodale toured the Tallinn festival grounds in 2007.
How Estonians sang their way to freedom
A new documentary tells story of how the national tradition of singing helped unite the masses against the Soviet occupation.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 24, 2008 edition
Walk around the verdant green amphitheater known as the Lauluvaljak, or song ground, here on the outskirts of Tallin, Estonia, and it's easy to imagine the air alive with music, reverberating up the grassy slopes from the half-domed, vaulted stage at the bottom of this natural theatrical setting.
But to grasp what it feels like to be amid an audience 300,000-strong, singing in Von Trapp family-like harmony with sub rosa political purpose, you'll just have to pick up the DVD of "The Singing Revolution," a passion project by documentarians Jim and Maureen Tusty. Released this week, it is the story of how a tiny country (population: 1 million) with a 5,000-year-old culture, perched on the western edge of the Russian giant, used its tradition of song to finally free itself of foreign occupation, in this case the Soviet state, in 1991.
This tale of how peaceful crowds managed to fend off Soviet tanks as they attempted to take over the local television station is operatic in its drama, says the married couple. "This is the story of the power of nonviolent resistance to succeed where guns and rock-throwing would have resulted in death and more political oppression," says Jim Tusty. The nation was trying to throw off the Soviet yoke, which ensnared it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin secretly signed a pact to divide up the Baltic countries. But, says Jim Tusty, it is also the story of a relationship between art and politics.
"We wanted to tell this remarkable story ... before the generation that lived it is no longer around," he says. He adds that a number of the older Estonians he interviewed say they are grateful to have the narrative preserved. They see that the next generation – a global, externally focused cohort in a nation that is now part of the European Union and NATO – has little awareness of the struggles of an earlier generation, he says.
The story began for the filmmakers when they taught a cinema class in Estonia during the summer of 1999 and began to hear about the song festival and the revolution it had inspired. In the festival, founded in 1869 and held every five years, choirs from all over the nation audition to be part of the 20,000 to 30,000-member chorus that takes the stage and leads the huge crowds that attend.
The music is a mix of modern and traditional folk songs, many of which have what the team calls the kind of oral traditions that are full of hidden, deeply patriotic meaning that sustained Estonians through centuries of oppression. As they investigated the festival itself, they discovered the role that the traditional songs played during the critical years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, 1987 through 1991. Rather than engage the Soviets directly, as Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania did, all with disastrous results, the various political groups united in song.
"They never wanted to give the Soviets a reason to arrest or hurt anyone," says Maureen Tusty. Paraphrasing one of the Estonians who survived the brutal years of Soviet gulags, her husband adds, "Art used to be serious when real political participation was not possible," but now, with meaningful political activity allowed, the arts have become trivial and the next generation is not interested in the power of this culture to make a difference.
Beyond that, the filmmakers say the film has a role to play in a world that is getting increasingly violent, particularly a Russia with more aggressive foreign policies. They have assembled a three-disc educational DVD version (available at www.singingrevolution.com), complete with maps and historical data. But, Jim Tusty hastens to add, they are not advocacy filmmakers. "We just believe in this story, which has its own message."
• Los Angeles-based writer Gloria Goodale toured the Tallinn festival grounds in 2007.
The changing face of Chicago blues
CS Monitor (see original for photos and video)
The changing face of Chicago blues
Foreign-born players and whites pick up the slack creating a global appeal and expanded songbook.
By Mark Guarino | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the November 7, 2008 edition
Chicago - Billy Branch steps off the stage and into the crowd, leaving his band to chug through a 12-bar blues. With a harmonica pressed to his lips, Branch sends light, flirty chirps to a woman, just inches from her face. For a single moment, the hundred or so people at Rosa's Lounge on Chicago's West Side fall silent.
The woman slips into the groove and joins Branch's musical conversation, and everyone around follows her cue.
Branch barks his biography – "I was born in the North, but my heart is in the South!" – and the band guns it. His heels spin to join them.
Here, on a Saturday night in October, it is a familiar conquest: Targeting lips to hips is what makes Chicago blues so enduring. But movement of a different sort, through geography and generation, is what also makes it deceptively complex.
That journey is threatening to jump the track. The music is largely silent in the Chicago neighborhoods where it originated, due to a shuttered club scene that moved audiences to the North Side, near the friendlier confines of Wrigley Field. But more alarming is the increased passing in recent years of aged blues luminaries, an inevitable loss of stories and techniques that connect the music to its fundamental roots.
Today, the Chicago blues scene is in stark transition. Younger blacks are failing to see the music as anything but a relic, leaving an entire tradition largely up for adoption by foreign-born players traveling halfway around the world to learn from the source. Their enthusiasm is helping move the blues from isolated neighborhoods to the global stage, evidenced by Chicago bands that very recently have come to resemble a United Nations portfolio.
This cultural exchange is expanding the music's songbook with stories it never addressed before and is helping create sophisticated players schooled as much in Van Halen and Led Zeppelin as they are in Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. But advocates worry that the flashy guitar tones and studied technique threaten to replace the personal expression that has long made the music profound.
In Chicago, blues music has always lived, not through television documentaries or books, but primarily through people – the Southerners who populated the city's South and West sides and who helped pass the music's foundation on to the next generation. For this reason, the blues has always been a collaborative pact between fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, the grizzled mentors and the eager young followers who sought them out, either from the other side of town or from as far away as Japan.
"There is a crisis," says Tony Mangiullo, owner of Rosa's Lounge, which marks its 25th anniversary next year. Mr. Mangiullo is a record keeper of this turning point in Chicago blues history; he keeps a database of musician deaths, which these days can be every other month. "If we keep losing those important links, it could be catastrophic."
Younger players may neglect in their playing what Eddy Clearwater calls "a spiritual thing." Clearwater arrived in Chicago from Birmingham, Ala., in 1950 when he was 15. (This fall, he released "West Side Strut" [Alligator], his 16th album.) In the '50s, an agent changed his last name from Harrington to Clearwater, a riff on Muddy Waters; Clearwater was honored.
"He's my all-time hero. He took me in. He used to call me son," Clearwater says.
Clearwater embodies the total Chicago sound. His polished performance style is what Waters helped shape on the South Side, but his guitar style – minor chords, gutbucket distortion, raw phrasing – is identified with Magic Sam, Elmore James, and others who developed the West Side sound and whom Clearwater listened to and watched as he grew up.
Back then, music filled those neighbor- hoods when nightclubs and taverns became incubators for experimentation and collaboration, and the dozens of record labels on South Michigan Ave. sent the results to the world.
Today, only a handful of clubs on the South and West sides feature live music – the rest fell victim to the crumbling infrastructure created by the race riots of the 1960s, widespread factory closings, and gentrification. Younger blacks largely turned away from blues and toward music they considered more contemporary: soul and funk.
"All of your blues clubs were in dominant black areas. You didn't hear of a blues club in the white areas. So now it's totally the opposite," Clearwater says. "Now, more white people support the blues. I hope black people realize it's their own heritage."
Branch has held court at the Artist's Lounge on E. 87th St. every Monday for 22 years precisely for this reason: "To keep the music in the community." Also an educator, he has traveled the world since 1978, giving week-long clinics to teach blues harmonica to schoolchildren and show them how the blues can be a relevant mode of expression in their lives.
"The main reason black kids can't grasp onto it is they're not afforded the availability. It's not played on the radio, and you don't see it on television," he says.
How far Chicago blues spread outside its neighborhoods becomes clear upon any visit to a club bandstand. There, the visitor may encounter either Shun Kikuta or Guy King, two guitarists who made a beeline to Chicago from Japan and Israel respectively to learn the music they only knew through recordings. They represent a new generation that sought mentors to learn the music's fundamentals, but would never assume to represent its past.
"We still do play the 12-bar style, but the sound is much heavier. In traditional blues, there's more space between notes. But nowadays, because of the funk and rock influences, that sound is more concentrated," says Kikuta, who came to Chicago in 1990 and now plays guitar for blues luminary Koko Taylor. His recent album connects Chicago blues to his own heritage with the use of a shamisen, a three-string traditional Japanese instrument that dates back to the 16th century.
On "Livin' It" (IBF), his just-released first album, King uses the blues to talk about religion and the battle over land rights in his home country. "Some people will say it's not really blues. But I think the blues has been misinterpreted. They will tell you it's old people's music, but if you think about it, the legends were all young when they made it. Robert Johnson died when he was 28," he says.
As much as Chicago blues is changing to tell new stories or incorporate different sounds, there remain musicians who consider its earliest and simplest incarnation, the pre-electric era of the 1930s and 1940s, as the most relevant.
"I'm burnt out on the electric stuff, it seems what they're doing is headed more towards tourists," says Rick Sherry of Devil in a Woodpile, a trio that for the past 12 years has played every Tuesday night at the Hideout, a cozy bar and music room tucked inside the North Side's industrial corridor.
Long ago the band decided it would play on the floor and not a stage to make the music more intimate. On a recent Tuesday in October, 20-year-olds crowd so close to the band that guitarist Joel Patterson has to lean over while playing so as not to block the line for the bathroom.
Sherry, who plays washboard and clarinet, and kicks a 1916 drum at his feet, gets couples dancing with early 20th-century standards from Charlie Patton, Fats Waller, and others who date back to a time when musicianship was more physical: Players could not rely on amplification to be heard.
"It was like a niche that was untouched," he says. "I'm not stealing anything from anyone. I'm stealing everything from everyone. People like this music."
The changing face of Chicago blues
Foreign-born players and whites pick up the slack creating a global appeal and expanded songbook.
By Mark Guarino | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the November 7, 2008 edition
Chicago - Billy Branch steps off the stage and into the crowd, leaving his band to chug through a 12-bar blues. With a harmonica pressed to his lips, Branch sends light, flirty chirps to a woman, just inches from her face. For a single moment, the hundred or so people at Rosa's Lounge on Chicago's West Side fall silent.
The woman slips into the groove and joins Branch's musical conversation, and everyone around follows her cue.
Branch barks his biography – "I was born in the North, but my heart is in the South!" – and the band guns it. His heels spin to join them.
Here, on a Saturday night in October, it is a familiar conquest: Targeting lips to hips is what makes Chicago blues so enduring. But movement of a different sort, through geography and generation, is what also makes it deceptively complex.
That journey is threatening to jump the track. The music is largely silent in the Chicago neighborhoods where it originated, due to a shuttered club scene that moved audiences to the North Side, near the friendlier confines of Wrigley Field. But more alarming is the increased passing in recent years of aged blues luminaries, an inevitable loss of stories and techniques that connect the music to its fundamental roots.
Today, the Chicago blues scene is in stark transition. Younger blacks are failing to see the music as anything but a relic, leaving an entire tradition largely up for adoption by foreign-born players traveling halfway around the world to learn from the source. Their enthusiasm is helping move the blues from isolated neighborhoods to the global stage, evidenced by Chicago bands that very recently have come to resemble a United Nations portfolio.
This cultural exchange is expanding the music's songbook with stories it never addressed before and is helping create sophisticated players schooled as much in Van Halen and Led Zeppelin as they are in Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. But advocates worry that the flashy guitar tones and studied technique threaten to replace the personal expression that has long made the music profound.
In Chicago, blues music has always lived, not through television documentaries or books, but primarily through people – the Southerners who populated the city's South and West sides and who helped pass the music's foundation on to the next generation. For this reason, the blues has always been a collaborative pact between fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, the grizzled mentors and the eager young followers who sought them out, either from the other side of town or from as far away as Japan.
"There is a crisis," says Tony Mangiullo, owner of Rosa's Lounge, which marks its 25th anniversary next year. Mr. Mangiullo is a record keeper of this turning point in Chicago blues history; he keeps a database of musician deaths, which these days can be every other month. "If we keep losing those important links, it could be catastrophic."
Younger players may neglect in their playing what Eddy Clearwater calls "a spiritual thing." Clearwater arrived in Chicago from Birmingham, Ala., in 1950 when he was 15. (This fall, he released "West Side Strut" [Alligator], his 16th album.) In the '50s, an agent changed his last name from Harrington to Clearwater, a riff on Muddy Waters; Clearwater was honored.
"He's my all-time hero. He took me in. He used to call me son," Clearwater says.
Clearwater embodies the total Chicago sound. His polished performance style is what Waters helped shape on the South Side, but his guitar style – minor chords, gutbucket distortion, raw phrasing – is identified with Magic Sam, Elmore James, and others who developed the West Side sound and whom Clearwater listened to and watched as he grew up.
Back then, music filled those neighbor- hoods when nightclubs and taverns became incubators for experimentation and collaboration, and the dozens of record labels on South Michigan Ave. sent the results to the world.
Today, only a handful of clubs on the South and West sides feature live music – the rest fell victim to the crumbling infrastructure created by the race riots of the 1960s, widespread factory closings, and gentrification. Younger blacks largely turned away from blues and toward music they considered more contemporary: soul and funk.
"All of your blues clubs were in dominant black areas. You didn't hear of a blues club in the white areas. So now it's totally the opposite," Clearwater says. "Now, more white people support the blues. I hope black people realize it's their own heritage."
Branch has held court at the Artist's Lounge on E. 87th St. every Monday for 22 years precisely for this reason: "To keep the music in the community." Also an educator, he has traveled the world since 1978, giving week-long clinics to teach blues harmonica to schoolchildren and show them how the blues can be a relevant mode of expression in their lives.
"The main reason black kids can't grasp onto it is they're not afforded the availability. It's not played on the radio, and you don't see it on television," he says.
How far Chicago blues spread outside its neighborhoods becomes clear upon any visit to a club bandstand. There, the visitor may encounter either Shun Kikuta or Guy King, two guitarists who made a beeline to Chicago from Japan and Israel respectively to learn the music they only knew through recordings. They represent a new generation that sought mentors to learn the music's fundamentals, but would never assume to represent its past.
"We still do play the 12-bar style, but the sound is much heavier. In traditional blues, there's more space between notes. But nowadays, because of the funk and rock influences, that sound is more concentrated," says Kikuta, who came to Chicago in 1990 and now plays guitar for blues luminary Koko Taylor. His recent album connects Chicago blues to his own heritage with the use of a shamisen, a three-string traditional Japanese instrument that dates back to the 16th century.
On "Livin' It" (IBF), his just-released first album, King uses the blues to talk about religion and the battle over land rights in his home country. "Some people will say it's not really blues. But I think the blues has been misinterpreted. They will tell you it's old people's music, but if you think about it, the legends were all young when they made it. Robert Johnson died when he was 28," he says.
As much as Chicago blues is changing to tell new stories or incorporate different sounds, there remain musicians who consider its earliest and simplest incarnation, the pre-electric era of the 1930s and 1940s, as the most relevant.
"I'm burnt out on the electric stuff, it seems what they're doing is headed more towards tourists," says Rick Sherry of Devil in a Woodpile, a trio that for the past 12 years has played every Tuesday night at the Hideout, a cozy bar and music room tucked inside the North Side's industrial corridor.
Long ago the band decided it would play on the floor and not a stage to make the music more intimate. On a recent Tuesday in October, 20-year-olds crowd so close to the band that guitarist Joel Patterson has to lean over while playing so as not to block the line for the bathroom.
Sherry, who plays washboard and clarinet, and kicks a 1916 drum at his feet, gets couples dancing with early 20th-century standards from Charlie Patton, Fats Waller, and others who date back to a time when musicianship was more physical: Players could not rely on amplification to be heard.
"It was like a niche that was untouched," he says. "I'm not stealing anything from anyone. I'm stealing everything from everyone. People like this music."
Country Sensation Taylor Swift: My Music, MySpace, My Life
NYT
November 9, 2008
Music
My Music, MySpace, My Life
By JON CARAMANICA
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.
BY now Taylor Swift knows how to work all the different digital cameras, all the different camera phones. When surrounded by a group of fans clamoring for pictures, as she was here on a Saturday night in mid-October after a sold-out show at the McKenzie Arena, she warmly appropriated the camera of each one, struck a cute pose, snapped the picture and then handed it back, usually followed by a hug. All in all it was a fair trade: intimacy for control.
“Intimidation isn’t what I’m going for,” Ms. Swift, 18, said earlier in the day in the Zen-like tour bus she and her mother, Andrea, designed, from the leather on the sofas to the faux peacock feathers on the bathroom wall. “I don’t have big security guards,” she said as Fox News played mutely on the television. “I don’t have an entourage. I try to write lyrics about what’s happening to me and leave out the part that I live in hotel rooms and tour buses. It’s the relatability factor. If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.”
Thus far Ms. Swift, who spends much of her free time updating her MySpace page and editing personal videos to upload to the Internet, has not had a tough time finding the right balance. She has quickly established herself as the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade. In part that’s because she is one of Nashville’s most exciting songwriters, with a chirpy, exuberant voice. But mainly Ms. Swift’s career has been noteworthy for what happens once the songs are finished. She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is proving to be revolutionary in country music. As she vigilantly narrates her own story and erases barriers between her and her fans, she is helping country reach a new audience.
Ms. Swift’s second album, “Fearless” (Big Machine), will be released Tuesday, and like her self-titled 2006 debut, it’s full of charming, clean-scrubbed songs about teenage love and heartbreak. Ms. Swift writes from her own experiences, names intact, giving her songs an almost radical intimacy, especially in a pop world of plasticized come-ons and impersonal brush-offs.
She has placed the concerns of young women at the center of her songs, subject matter that generally has been anathema in the more mature world of country singers. Most important, though, she very much sees country music as part of the larger pop panorama. A huge success on country radio, she has also found homes on pop stations and at MTV, including a gig hosting the MTV Video Music Awards preshow in September, an unheard-of slot for a country singer. This week an entire episode of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will be devoted to her album release party. Put more plainly, she has proved that there’s no reason a country singer can’t be a pop star too.
Just four years ago, when Ms. Swift and her family moved from Wyomissing, Pa., to Hendersonville, a Nashville suburb, this seemed an impossible proposition. It had been more than a decade since a teenager last made a true impact in town, but that singer, LeAnn Rimes, had been praised for sounding grown-up; Ms. Swift’s music was unabashedly youthful. When Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, would talk to Nashville insiders about his teenage signee, “people would look at me cross-eyed,” he said. “I would feel like they were deleting me from their Blackberrys as I was telling them.”
But Ms. Swift had been carefully honing her sound for a few years already. After a trip to Nashville when she was 11, she began writing songs and learning to play guitar in earnest. (She now often plays a Swarovski crystal-encrusted one.) By the time her family moved, in the summer before her freshman year of high school, she had already been singing at coffee shops and minor league baseball games.
Ms. Swift first signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the youngest person the company had ever signed. Every day after school she would truck off to one of Nashville’s many studios on Music Row for writing appointments.
“I knew every writer I wrote with was pretty much going to think, ‘I’m going to write a song for a 14-year-old today,’ ” Ms. Swift said. “So I would come into each meeting with 5 to 10 ideas that were solid. I wanted them to look at me as a person they were writing with, not a little kid.”
It was during this time that Ms. Swift honed her songwriting strength: looking in the mirror. Relationships and their failures, the fodder for so much teenage pop, are her primary texts. “I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things,” she said. “When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. For years.”
Her mother, Andrea, said: “She simply has to write songs. It’s how she filters life.” (Andrea, who was previously a stay-at-home mom, now travels with her daughter; Ms. Swift’s father, Scott, is a stockbroker.)
And so, around the play-by-play details of broken hearts and romantic dreams, Ms. Swift’s sound began to coalesce. She has an ear for the indelible chorus — “She’s one of those writers who won’t run away from a hook,” Mr. Borchetta said — but her music is appropriately loose. There are obvious country flourishes in the arrangements, but mainly her vocals, excitable and airy and hardly twangy at all, take center stage.
Whether anyone would accept Ms. Swift’s sound was an open question. “We felt it wasn’t likely that country radio would embrace it unless we had a story,” Mr. Borchetta said, so Ms. Swift made a series of biographical shorts to air on the GAC (Great American Country) cable network. Then came “Tim McGraw,” Ms. Swift’s canny first single, named after the country superstar. (In the lyrics Mr. McGraw is the singer of a special song she and a boy share.) “We put that out deliberately, so people would ask, who’s this new artist with a song called ‘Tim McGraw’?” said Mr. Borchetta, who likened its reception to that of “a grenade in a still pond.”
Released in late 2006, Ms. Swift’s debut album sold a modest 39,000 copies in its first week, but as Ms. Swift gained attention and released more singles, it did not stop selling. It has now moved well over three million copies. Last year Ms. Swift won the Country Music Association’s Horizon Award for best new artist, and this year she is nominated for female vocalist of the year. She will also perform at the ceremony, which is Wednesday.
“From the moment ‘Tim McGraw’ hit the channel, she began to amass an audience that traditional Nashville didn’t know or didn’t believe existed, and that is young women, specifically teens,” said Brian Philips, executive vice president and general manager of CMT (Country Music Television). “It’s as if Taylor has kind of willed herself into being.”
She has willed herself beyond the country music world too. After landing at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, “Teardrops on My Guitar,” the third single on her first album, became a crossover hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Hot 100. “In a lot of cities the pop stations will take a chance because there’s been exposure in that market on the country station,” said Sharon Dastur, program director of the New York Top 40 station Z100 (WHTZ-FM), which played the song in a medium-level rotation last year after it had been broken at Top 40 stations in more country-friendly markets like Greensville, S.C.; Wichita, Kan.; and Austin, Tex.
Ms. Swift is not without forebears. In the past 15 years female country stars like Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Lee Ann Womack and the Dixie Chicks have all experienced some degree of pop success. And Ms. Swift’s ability to straddle both country and pop was facilitated by the recent crossover success of Carrie Underwood, the “American Idol” winner.
Monte Lipman, president and chief executive of Universal Republic Records, which joined with Big Machine to work Ms. Swift’s records to pop radio, said: “We don’t want to alienate country radio at all because we’ve found pop success. Scott is always superserving the country marketplace first, and we work for him.”
Mr. Borchetta said that country radio would always be the top priority. “They’re always going to get the singles first, always going to be first in line at the meet-and-greets,” he said. “We overthink everything. One thing we can’t do is chase the moving target of pop radio. It could be all emo next year, all urban next year.”
No one much complains when a rapper or indie rocker crosses over to the pop charts, but a country singer perceived as trying to go pop can still raise eyebrows. Nashville remains a fiercely hermetic town and is unusually protective, or possessive, of its own.
“I’m not about to snub the people who brought me to the party,” said Ms. Swift, who when she speaks of her plan to manage her crossover fame sounds like a well-seasoned executive. “We went back and studied other cases where it had failed every way that it can fail, and we tried to avoid those things.”
Ms. Swift is, by all accounts, an extremely good-natured micromanager. “She’s a very competitive person, and she’s always got her game face on,” said the country singer Kellie Pickler, one of Ms. Swift’s closest friends. “And she’s a really smart businesswoman, smarter than a lot of 40-year-olds I know.”
Right before the show in Chattanooga, as she does before every performance, Ms. Swift loaded up her wrists with bracelets that she would later toss out to fans, allowing them to take home a small piece of her. And after she finished singing “Should’ve Said No,” about a boy who cheated on her, she dropped to her knees and bent forward, holding her head still as fans in the front rows patted it concernedly. It was a scarily intimate moment but essential to her self-presentation that there is no barrier between her and her songs, and their listeners, the consumers. That insistence informs every aspect of her work.
It has also led to the decimation of her privacy. “Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans,” she said, a little giddy. “I had the opportunity to be more general on this record, but I chose not to. I like to have the last word.”
That may become less tenable, though, as Ms. Swift’s personal life makes its way into the tabloids, as it lately has in regards to her never-confirmed romance with Joe Jonas, the would-be rake of the Jonas Brothers. On this subject, at least, Ms. Swift is uncharacteristically mum: “He’s not in my life anymore, and I have absolutely nothing to say about or to him.”
At least until the next album, maybe, which Ms. Swift insists will detail her life just as thoroughly as the first two. “When I knew something was going on in someone’s personal life and they didn’t address it in their music, I was always very confused by that,” Ms. Swift said. “I owe it to people from letting them in from Day 1.”
But eventually, if things continue as they are, walls will have to be erected. Jakks Pacific has just released a line of Taylor Swift dolls, making her even more of an abstract idol and less of a real person. She is also the face of the l.e.i. clothing brand, carried exclusively at Wal-Mart, one of what is certain to be many endorsements to come. And next year she will be spending time in England, Japan and Australia in hopes of facilitating Taylor Swift, the global brand, a move that few country acts have been able to pull off.
That she’s likely to become only less accessible is a problem that Ms. Swift is, naturally, very attuned to. “All I can do,” she said, “is put up a MySpace video where I don’t have any makeup on and am wearing a periodic table of the elements T-shirt.”
That and continue to make connections, one person at a time. The night before Chattanooga, Ms. Swift was at Sommet Center in Nashville, opening a charity gig for Rascal Flatts. After emptying her wrist during “Tim McGraw,” she took in the sold-out crowd. “I am so proud to live in Nashville, Tennessee,” she said, “and I hope to run into you at the grocery store.”
November 9, 2008
Music
My Music, MySpace, My Life
By JON CARAMANICA
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.
BY now Taylor Swift knows how to work all the different digital cameras, all the different camera phones. When surrounded by a group of fans clamoring for pictures, as she was here on a Saturday night in mid-October after a sold-out show at the McKenzie Arena, she warmly appropriated the camera of each one, struck a cute pose, snapped the picture and then handed it back, usually followed by a hug. All in all it was a fair trade: intimacy for control.
“Intimidation isn’t what I’m going for,” Ms. Swift, 18, said earlier in the day in the Zen-like tour bus she and her mother, Andrea, designed, from the leather on the sofas to the faux peacock feathers on the bathroom wall. “I don’t have big security guards,” she said as Fox News played mutely on the television. “I don’t have an entourage. I try to write lyrics about what’s happening to me and leave out the part that I live in hotel rooms and tour buses. It’s the relatability factor. If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.”
Thus far Ms. Swift, who spends much of her free time updating her MySpace page and editing personal videos to upload to the Internet, has not had a tough time finding the right balance. She has quickly established herself as the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade. In part that’s because she is one of Nashville’s most exciting songwriters, with a chirpy, exuberant voice. But mainly Ms. Swift’s career has been noteworthy for what happens once the songs are finished. She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is proving to be revolutionary in country music. As she vigilantly narrates her own story and erases barriers between her and her fans, she is helping country reach a new audience.
Ms. Swift’s second album, “Fearless” (Big Machine), will be released Tuesday, and like her self-titled 2006 debut, it’s full of charming, clean-scrubbed songs about teenage love and heartbreak. Ms. Swift writes from her own experiences, names intact, giving her songs an almost radical intimacy, especially in a pop world of plasticized come-ons and impersonal brush-offs.
She has placed the concerns of young women at the center of her songs, subject matter that generally has been anathema in the more mature world of country singers. Most important, though, she very much sees country music as part of the larger pop panorama. A huge success on country radio, she has also found homes on pop stations and at MTV, including a gig hosting the MTV Video Music Awards preshow in September, an unheard-of slot for a country singer. This week an entire episode of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will be devoted to her album release party. Put more plainly, she has proved that there’s no reason a country singer can’t be a pop star too.
Just four years ago, when Ms. Swift and her family moved from Wyomissing, Pa., to Hendersonville, a Nashville suburb, this seemed an impossible proposition. It had been more than a decade since a teenager last made a true impact in town, but that singer, LeAnn Rimes, had been praised for sounding grown-up; Ms. Swift’s music was unabashedly youthful. When Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, would talk to Nashville insiders about his teenage signee, “people would look at me cross-eyed,” he said. “I would feel like they were deleting me from their Blackberrys as I was telling them.”
But Ms. Swift had been carefully honing her sound for a few years already. After a trip to Nashville when she was 11, she began writing songs and learning to play guitar in earnest. (She now often plays a Swarovski crystal-encrusted one.) By the time her family moved, in the summer before her freshman year of high school, she had already been singing at coffee shops and minor league baseball games.
Ms. Swift first signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the youngest person the company had ever signed. Every day after school she would truck off to one of Nashville’s many studios on Music Row for writing appointments.
“I knew every writer I wrote with was pretty much going to think, ‘I’m going to write a song for a 14-year-old today,’ ” Ms. Swift said. “So I would come into each meeting with 5 to 10 ideas that were solid. I wanted them to look at me as a person they were writing with, not a little kid.”
It was during this time that Ms. Swift honed her songwriting strength: looking in the mirror. Relationships and their failures, the fodder for so much teenage pop, are her primary texts. “I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things,” she said. “When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. For years.”
Her mother, Andrea, said: “She simply has to write songs. It’s how she filters life.” (Andrea, who was previously a stay-at-home mom, now travels with her daughter; Ms. Swift’s father, Scott, is a stockbroker.)
And so, around the play-by-play details of broken hearts and romantic dreams, Ms. Swift’s sound began to coalesce. She has an ear for the indelible chorus — “She’s one of those writers who won’t run away from a hook,” Mr. Borchetta said — but her music is appropriately loose. There are obvious country flourishes in the arrangements, but mainly her vocals, excitable and airy and hardly twangy at all, take center stage.
Whether anyone would accept Ms. Swift’s sound was an open question. “We felt it wasn’t likely that country radio would embrace it unless we had a story,” Mr. Borchetta said, so Ms. Swift made a series of biographical shorts to air on the GAC (Great American Country) cable network. Then came “Tim McGraw,” Ms. Swift’s canny first single, named after the country superstar. (In the lyrics Mr. McGraw is the singer of a special song she and a boy share.) “We put that out deliberately, so people would ask, who’s this new artist with a song called ‘Tim McGraw’?” said Mr. Borchetta, who likened its reception to that of “a grenade in a still pond.”
Released in late 2006, Ms. Swift’s debut album sold a modest 39,000 copies in its first week, but as Ms. Swift gained attention and released more singles, it did not stop selling. It has now moved well over three million copies. Last year Ms. Swift won the Country Music Association’s Horizon Award for best new artist, and this year she is nominated for female vocalist of the year. She will also perform at the ceremony, which is Wednesday.
“From the moment ‘Tim McGraw’ hit the channel, she began to amass an audience that traditional Nashville didn’t know or didn’t believe existed, and that is young women, specifically teens,” said Brian Philips, executive vice president and general manager of CMT (Country Music Television). “It’s as if Taylor has kind of willed herself into being.”
She has willed herself beyond the country music world too. After landing at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, “Teardrops on My Guitar,” the third single on her first album, became a crossover hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Hot 100. “In a lot of cities the pop stations will take a chance because there’s been exposure in that market on the country station,” said Sharon Dastur, program director of the New York Top 40 station Z100 (WHTZ-FM), which played the song in a medium-level rotation last year after it had been broken at Top 40 stations in more country-friendly markets like Greensville, S.C.; Wichita, Kan.; and Austin, Tex.
Ms. Swift is not without forebears. In the past 15 years female country stars like Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Lee Ann Womack and the Dixie Chicks have all experienced some degree of pop success. And Ms. Swift’s ability to straddle both country and pop was facilitated by the recent crossover success of Carrie Underwood, the “American Idol” winner.
Monte Lipman, president and chief executive of Universal Republic Records, which joined with Big Machine to work Ms. Swift’s records to pop radio, said: “We don’t want to alienate country radio at all because we’ve found pop success. Scott is always superserving the country marketplace first, and we work for him.”
Mr. Borchetta said that country radio would always be the top priority. “They’re always going to get the singles first, always going to be first in line at the meet-and-greets,” he said. “We overthink everything. One thing we can’t do is chase the moving target of pop radio. It could be all emo next year, all urban next year.”
No one much complains when a rapper or indie rocker crosses over to the pop charts, but a country singer perceived as trying to go pop can still raise eyebrows. Nashville remains a fiercely hermetic town and is unusually protective, or possessive, of its own.
“I’m not about to snub the people who brought me to the party,” said Ms. Swift, who when she speaks of her plan to manage her crossover fame sounds like a well-seasoned executive. “We went back and studied other cases where it had failed every way that it can fail, and we tried to avoid those things.”
Ms. Swift is, by all accounts, an extremely good-natured micromanager. “She’s a very competitive person, and she’s always got her game face on,” said the country singer Kellie Pickler, one of Ms. Swift’s closest friends. “And she’s a really smart businesswoman, smarter than a lot of 40-year-olds I know.”
Right before the show in Chattanooga, as she does before every performance, Ms. Swift loaded up her wrists with bracelets that she would later toss out to fans, allowing them to take home a small piece of her. And after she finished singing “Should’ve Said No,” about a boy who cheated on her, she dropped to her knees and bent forward, holding her head still as fans in the front rows patted it concernedly. It was a scarily intimate moment but essential to her self-presentation that there is no barrier between her and her songs, and their listeners, the consumers. That insistence informs every aspect of her work.
It has also led to the decimation of her privacy. “Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans,” she said, a little giddy. “I had the opportunity to be more general on this record, but I chose not to. I like to have the last word.”
That may become less tenable, though, as Ms. Swift’s personal life makes its way into the tabloids, as it lately has in regards to her never-confirmed romance with Joe Jonas, the would-be rake of the Jonas Brothers. On this subject, at least, Ms. Swift is uncharacteristically mum: “He’s not in my life anymore, and I have absolutely nothing to say about or to him.”
At least until the next album, maybe, which Ms. Swift insists will detail her life just as thoroughly as the first two. “When I knew something was going on in someone’s personal life and they didn’t address it in their music, I was always very confused by that,” Ms. Swift said. “I owe it to people from letting them in from Day 1.”
But eventually, if things continue as they are, walls will have to be erected. Jakks Pacific has just released a line of Taylor Swift dolls, making her even more of an abstract idol and less of a real person. She is also the face of the l.e.i. clothing brand, carried exclusively at Wal-Mart, one of what is certain to be many endorsements to come. And next year she will be spending time in England, Japan and Australia in hopes of facilitating Taylor Swift, the global brand, a move that few country acts have been able to pull off.
That she’s likely to become only less accessible is a problem that Ms. Swift is, naturally, very attuned to. “All I can do,” she said, “is put up a MySpace video where I don’t have any makeup on and am wearing a periodic table of the elements T-shirt.”
That and continue to make connections, one person at a time. The night before Chattanooga, Ms. Swift was at Sommet Center in Nashville, opening a charity gig for Rascal Flatts. After emptying her wrist during “Tim McGraw,” she took in the sold-out crowd. “I am so proud to live in Nashville, Tennessee,” she said, “and I hope to run into you at the grocery store.”
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Book: "Hip Hop Speaks to Children"
NYT
November 8, 2008
Child’s Garden of Hip-Hop (for Mom to Love, Too)
By MOTOKO RICH
By now, hip-hop has become a mainstream part of the cultural landscape for children on shows like “Sesame Street,” “Yo Gabba Gabba!” on Nickelodeon and “Choo-Choo Soul” and “Handy Manny” on the Disney Channel. But when Rona Brinlee, a bookseller in Atlantic Beach, Fla., first heard about “Hip Hop Speaks to Children,” an illustrated anthology of poems and song lyrics, she worried that prospective buyers might shy away.
With previous volumes of poetry for children, she had noticed that the books were popular among grandparents looking for gifts. “I didn’t know if these same loving grandparents were going to say, ‘Wow, hip-hop,’ ” said Ms. Brinlee, who owns the BookMark, an independent bookstore. “Because some are going to make assumptions that this is violent, or they just don’t know anything about it.”
Ms. Brinlee quickly sold out of the initial six copies she stocked, and she has 10 more on order. “I’m thrilled to say that I was wrong,” she said.
“Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry With a Beat,” which features lyrics by Mos Def, Kanye West and Queen Latifah, as well as poems by Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks, has become a modest hit, rising to No. 3 among picture books on The New York Times children’s best-Seller list last Sunday .
One of the selling points of the book, which was edited by the poet Nikki Giovanni, is that it comes with a CD of recordings by many of the poets and artists performing their work, including an excerpt from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Ham ’N’ Eggs” and “Dream Variations,” by Langston Hughes. The book and CD conclude with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, followed by a hip-hop interpretation of the speech by Ms. Giovanni and the performers Oni Lasana and Val Gray Ward.
“We wanted to connect some dots, but in a very light way,” said Ms. Giovanni, who contributed three poems to the book, as well as an introduction. “I wanted to find that hip-hop voice that allows children to enter it, because they are listening to it anyway.”
Ms. Giovanni said she also wanted to reach back to what she sees as the roots of hip-hop in older poems by mainly African-American poets, like Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as to use the familiar vernacular of hip-hop to lure children to more established literary voices.
“I wanted them to see that there are, for lack of a better word, some train tracks with stops and stations along the way,” Ms. Giovanni said. “If you like Queen Latifah and ‘Ladies First,’ you’re going to love Langston Hughes and ‘Dream Boogie.’ ”
For that reason teachers and librarians have welcomed the book. “This is poetry in a form that really appeals to them,” Diane Chen, the librarian at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Nashville, said of her students. Ms. Chen said she played the CD regularly in the library and had ordered 15 copies of the book for the school.
While hip-hop has become ubiquitous on the radio and on television, its verbal component is increasingly embraced as a literary form. “There is a growing sensibility that is recognizing that hip-hop is where poetry lives today in so many ways,” said Adam Bradley, assistant professor of African-American literature at Claremont McKenna College in California, who is an editor of a coming anthology of rap lyrics for Yale University Press.
Professor Bradley added that for children, hip-hop was a natural way to learn the basics of poetry. “The kinds of word games that children naturally create really mirror hip-hop in its most basic forms,” he said.
Ms. Giovanni has been doing readings at bookstores and schools since the book came out early last month. Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, hosted an event for about 225 students. “Every school in the area was calling to see if they could come and bring their kids,” said Dara La Porte, manager of the store’s children’s and young adult department. “Schools are really looking for a way to interest kids in poetry. This is their poetry, and Nikki knows that.”
Barnes & Noble has selected the book as one it will feature on picture-book walls in the children’s departments of all its stores throughout November and December in the hopes that it will be a popular holiday gift. Sales could be difficult, though. As Leonard S. Riggio, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, recently warned in an internal memo, the chain was “bracing for a terrible holiday season” over all.
The book is the second foray into poetry for children by Sourcebooks, a small independent publisher in Chicago. Three years ago the company had a best seller with “Poetry Speaks to Children,” a collection of favorites by the likes of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson and Ms. Giovanni, who contributed four poems. That volume also came with a CD and featured historic recordings by poets like Frost and Sandburg.
Dominique Raccah, who withdrew $17,000 from a 401(k) retirement account to found Sourcebooks 21 years ago, started out publishing books for the financial services industry. In 2001 the company moved into poetry with “Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work From Tennyson to Plath,” a book-and-three-CD package for adults.
Although Ms. Raccah said that each of the company’s previous books of poetry had sold more than 150,000 copies, she said the publisher had difficulty persuading booksellers to take on many copies of “Hip Hop Speaks to Children.”
According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has now sold about 3,000 copies. Ms. Raccah said that figure did not account for sales in some African-American bookstores or at group events. She added that there were now about 25,000 copies in bookstores.
Both the publisher and Ms. Giovanni are hopeful that the anthology will have quiet traction. For her part, Ms. Giovanni said she believed the book would help counteract persistent negative images of hip-hop.
“I just didn’t want to see it hijacked by half-naked girls and boys doing bling-bling,” she said. “I just wanted to try to help remind youngsters out there that this is a good expression.”
Friday, November 07, 2008
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Essay in D: The Critic’s Cogitation About Titles
NYT
November 6, 2008
Music
Essay in D: The Critic’s Cogitation About Titles
By ALLAN KOZINN
During an interview segment of a Making Music concert at Zankel Hall last week the composer George Crumb was asked whether the titles of the first and last movements of his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” — “Vocalise (... for the Beginning of Time)” and “Sea-Nocturne (... for the End of Time)” — were meant to be as ominous as they sounded.
“They’re just poetic titles,” Mr. Crumb said, brushing off the question. “Sometimes people take composers’ titles too seriously.”
And whose fault is that? When listeners encounter these titles in their program books or on CD covers, it’s only natural that they conclude that the title is meant to tell them something about the nature of the work. But logical as that assumption is, it is often confounded these days.
A few weeks before the Crumb program, inapt titles were thick on the ground at a Da Capo Chamber Players concert. A shimmering but increasingly vehement work by Chen Yi seemed far too forceful to be called “Happy Rain on a Spring Night.” And “Cloud Forest” seemed far too misty a title for Conor Brown’s zesty, off-kilter work, with its strands of American and Turkish folk music.
At a recent concert by the Cassatt Quartet, Joan Tower offered some insight into how little a title can tell us about what a work actually means to a composer. She said that her first quartet was a struggle, and that she originally thought of calling it “Nightmare.” But thinking the title was too negative, she changed it to “Night Fields” and wrote a program note describing “a cold windy night in a wheat field lit up by a bright full moon, with waves of fast moving colors rolling over the fields” to explain the fanciful new title. But the harmonically prickly writing at the work’s heart suggested that she had been right the first time.
Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward. Through much of classical music’s history, the titles of secular instrumental works were usually just formal descriptions (symphony, quartet, concerto), and when titles were affixed (“Moonlight,” for example) they were usually a publisher’s idea. Publishers understood that titles, and the imagery they evoked, could help move copies; composers were in it for the art.
Even so, Baroque composers sometimes used titles to tell listeners what their works were about, and in the case of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” four descriptive sonnets were translated into music phrase by phrase.
Early in the 19th century composers with wild imaginations, like Robert Schumann, weren’t shy about using titles that informed listeners about outlandish subtexts — battles between art-hating Philistines and artistic Davids for example — which the music’s impulses fully supported. By the late 19th century titles were plentiful. The vast majority of Liszt’s piano works have descriptive names (the B minor Sonata is an obvious exception), and few would dispute that the music of each section of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” lives up to its title, in some cases more vividly than the Victor Hartmann sketch that inspired it.
The French Impressionists, though harmonic revolutionaries, retained the notion that a title should tell listeners something about what’s going on in the piece. You can’t hear “Le Gibet” (“The Gallows”), the central movement of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit,” without conjuring the bleak image of a hanged man, slowly swinging as the sun sets and a bell tolls, and Debussy was a master of evocative work names.
To an extent composers began thinking differently about titles in the mid-20th century, when some modernist composers swept them away as remnants of the emotional and painterly excesses of Romanticism. For a time names became either mathematical or self-consciously blank: “Octagon,” “Synchronism,” “Groups” or “Polymorphia.”
But every now and then composers cottoned on to what 19th-century publishers knew: that titles sell. In 1960 the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote an intense, thoroughly abstract work for 52 strings, which he unsentimentally called “8’37.” ” It wasn’t until he had heard the work performed that he came up with the title by which it is known today, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.”
When Mr. Penderecki told me this, over lunch about a decade ago, I was stunned. I had always heard the work, with its searing, dissonant string clusters, as a cry of anguish, a composer’s contemplation of the devastation unleashed by the atomic bomb. But when I asked Mr. Penderecki how the title came to him, he first said, “I don’t know,” and then looked down at his paella.
“I was surrounded by propaganda against the American bomb,” he said after a moment’s silence. “Living at that time, you know. I did it. And because of the dedication to Hiroshima, certainly, people found this interesting. Because I have other pieces for strings that are not so well known.”
That the title was an opportunistic afterthought, not an indication of Mr. Penderecki’s feelings while writing the work, apparently doesn’t matter.
Two summers ago, when John Harbison’s “Abu Ghraib” had its premiere at Tanglewood, Mr. Harbison presided over a panel discussion about political works and cited the Penderecki as a predecessor. When I caught up with him during the intermission and told him about my conversation with Mr. Penderecki, Mr. Harbison said he had heard that too. Yet he still regarded “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” as Exhibit A in a discussion of politically inspired works.
Younger composers are often more whimsical with their titles. Michael Torke seemingly mined a Crayola box for the titles of his most famous works and forestalled critical argument: Who is to say that “Ecstatic Orange” doesn’t sound like that? Caleb Burhans keeps a list of lines from films, television shows and advertisements, as well as random overheard phrases that catch his ear, pinned to the wall over his composing desk and has drawn titles like “Iceman Stole the Sun” and “You Could Hear It Touch the Viking” from it.
Then there’s my favorite: David Lang’s “Eating Living Monkeys,” a title that the music, thankfully, does not live up to.
But as amusing or provocative as titles can be, they inevitably create expectations. And those expectations enlist the listener as a participant in the performance. It’s hard not to do some mental gymnastics to square the titles with the music.
In theory a title ups the stakes by proposing an image that the composer must match with fresh, surprising music that avoids any clichés the title may suggest. So applying a title frivolously is cheating. If composers are going to bother with titles at all, they might as well be as serious about them as Schumann and Ravel were.
November 6, 2008
Music
Essay in D: The Critic’s Cogitation About Titles
By ALLAN KOZINN
During an interview segment of a Making Music concert at Zankel Hall last week the composer George Crumb was asked whether the titles of the first and last movements of his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” — “Vocalise (... for the Beginning of Time)” and “Sea-Nocturne (... for the End of Time)” — were meant to be as ominous as they sounded.
“They’re just poetic titles,” Mr. Crumb said, brushing off the question. “Sometimes people take composers’ titles too seriously.”
And whose fault is that? When listeners encounter these titles in their program books or on CD covers, it’s only natural that they conclude that the title is meant to tell them something about the nature of the work. But logical as that assumption is, it is often confounded these days.
A few weeks before the Crumb program, inapt titles were thick on the ground at a Da Capo Chamber Players concert. A shimmering but increasingly vehement work by Chen Yi seemed far too forceful to be called “Happy Rain on a Spring Night.” And “Cloud Forest” seemed far too misty a title for Conor Brown’s zesty, off-kilter work, with its strands of American and Turkish folk music.
At a recent concert by the Cassatt Quartet, Joan Tower offered some insight into how little a title can tell us about what a work actually means to a composer. She said that her first quartet was a struggle, and that she originally thought of calling it “Nightmare.” But thinking the title was too negative, she changed it to “Night Fields” and wrote a program note describing “a cold windy night in a wheat field lit up by a bright full moon, with waves of fast moving colors rolling over the fields” to explain the fanciful new title. But the harmonically prickly writing at the work’s heart suggested that she had been right the first time.
Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward. Through much of classical music’s history, the titles of secular instrumental works were usually just formal descriptions (symphony, quartet, concerto), and when titles were affixed (“Moonlight,” for example) they were usually a publisher’s idea. Publishers understood that titles, and the imagery they evoked, could help move copies; composers were in it for the art.
Even so, Baroque composers sometimes used titles to tell listeners what their works were about, and in the case of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” four descriptive sonnets were translated into music phrase by phrase.
Early in the 19th century composers with wild imaginations, like Robert Schumann, weren’t shy about using titles that informed listeners about outlandish subtexts — battles between art-hating Philistines and artistic Davids for example — which the music’s impulses fully supported. By the late 19th century titles were plentiful. The vast majority of Liszt’s piano works have descriptive names (the B minor Sonata is an obvious exception), and few would dispute that the music of each section of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” lives up to its title, in some cases more vividly than the Victor Hartmann sketch that inspired it.
The French Impressionists, though harmonic revolutionaries, retained the notion that a title should tell listeners something about what’s going on in the piece. You can’t hear “Le Gibet” (“The Gallows”), the central movement of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit,” without conjuring the bleak image of a hanged man, slowly swinging as the sun sets and a bell tolls, and Debussy was a master of evocative work names.
To an extent composers began thinking differently about titles in the mid-20th century, when some modernist composers swept them away as remnants of the emotional and painterly excesses of Romanticism. For a time names became either mathematical or self-consciously blank: “Octagon,” “Synchronism,” “Groups” or “Polymorphia.”
But every now and then composers cottoned on to what 19th-century publishers knew: that titles sell. In 1960 the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote an intense, thoroughly abstract work for 52 strings, which he unsentimentally called “8’37.” ” It wasn’t until he had heard the work performed that he came up with the title by which it is known today, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.”
When Mr. Penderecki told me this, over lunch about a decade ago, I was stunned. I had always heard the work, with its searing, dissonant string clusters, as a cry of anguish, a composer’s contemplation of the devastation unleashed by the atomic bomb. But when I asked Mr. Penderecki how the title came to him, he first said, “I don’t know,” and then looked down at his paella.
“I was surrounded by propaganda against the American bomb,” he said after a moment’s silence. “Living at that time, you know. I did it. And because of the dedication to Hiroshima, certainly, people found this interesting. Because I have other pieces for strings that are not so well known.”
That the title was an opportunistic afterthought, not an indication of Mr. Penderecki’s feelings while writing the work, apparently doesn’t matter.
Two summers ago, when John Harbison’s “Abu Ghraib” had its premiere at Tanglewood, Mr. Harbison presided over a panel discussion about political works and cited the Penderecki as a predecessor. When I caught up with him during the intermission and told him about my conversation with Mr. Penderecki, Mr. Harbison said he had heard that too. Yet he still regarded “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” as Exhibit A in a discussion of politically inspired works.
Younger composers are often more whimsical with their titles. Michael Torke seemingly mined a Crayola box for the titles of his most famous works and forestalled critical argument: Who is to say that “Ecstatic Orange” doesn’t sound like that? Caleb Burhans keeps a list of lines from films, television shows and advertisements, as well as random overheard phrases that catch his ear, pinned to the wall over his composing desk and has drawn titles like “Iceman Stole the Sun” and “You Could Hear It Touch the Viking” from it.
Then there’s my favorite: David Lang’s “Eating Living Monkeys,” a title that the music, thankfully, does not live up to.
But as amusing or provocative as titles can be, they inevitably create expectations. And those expectations enlist the listener as a participant in the performance. It’s hard not to do some mental gymnastics to square the titles with the music.
In theory a title ups the stakes by proposing an image that the composer must match with fresh, surprising music that avoids any clichés the title may suggest. So applying a title frivolously is cheating. If composers are going to bother with titles at all, they might as well be as serious about them as Schumann and Ravel were.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
New Orleans photographer Michael P. Smith (1937-2008)
I missed this when it happened. He was a documentarian to the wonderful culture of New Orleans.
Times-Picayune
Photographer, jazz archivist Michael Smith dies at 71
Posted by beggler September 27, 2008 22:31PM
Michael P. Smith, a photographer who spent three decades capturing vivid, vibrant images at jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indian ceremonies and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, died Friday at his New Orleans home of two diseases that destroyed his nervous system. He was 71.
A man of boundless energy who devoted himself to the culture he chronicled, Mr. Smith seemed to be everywhere at whatever event he was shooting. Fellow photographers joked that every good Jazzfest picture they took included the back of Mr. Smith's head.
Mr. Smith's subjects included Mahalia Jackson, Irma Thomas, James Booker, Harry Connick Jr., Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, as well as anonymous mourners, strutters and Indians whom Mr. Smith always managed to capture caught up in the moment.
"I don't think there's another photographer who has more sensitively documented very significant aspects of the second half of 20th century New Orleans culture," said Steven Maklansky, a former curator of photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Mr. Smith started concentrating on this kind of photography at a 1969 jazz funeral and kept at it, covering every Jazzfest through 2003. Though he showed up at subsequent festivals, silently cradling his camera, the degeneration of his nervous system had put an end to his career.
He built up a trove of more than 500,000 negatives, many of which remain unprocessed because he couldn't afford to have them developed, said Michael Sartisky, president and executive director of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
"He did something that no other photographer had done: He captured the cultural landscape of the streets and did so with a vision of passion and beauty," said Jason Berry, who has written extensively about indigenous music.
This world provided a sharp contrast to the genteel environment in which he had grown up. A child of Metairie who was a star athlete, he was the son of a member of the Rex organization and the Boston Club, and he graduated from Metairie Park Country Day School and Tulane University.
Everything changed, he said in a 1995 interview, when he went to work as Tulane's jazz archive's staff photographer in the 1960s. He heard hours and hours of the music that had been created in New Orleans' bars and brothels, and he was hooked.
"He paid attention when many locals took that culture for granted or ignored it," said Bruce Raeburn, the archive's curator.
Around that time, Mr. Smith met Matthew Herron, a photographer with the Black Star agency living in New Orleans, and became his assistant.
With Paul Barbarin's funeral in 1969, Mr. Smith began his photographic exploration, abandoning the realm of his youth.
"I have friends in that privileged world, but haven't had much interest in the society I grew up in since discovering the folk community of New Orleans, a side of town I had never known that struck me as the real heart of the city," Mr. Smith said in the interview.
He summed up his philosophy in three words: "Follow the music."
He was a founder of Tipitina's, the Uptown music club that has become famous worldwide. Mr. Smith's pictures have been collected in five books, and in magazine articles.
To supplement his income, Mr. Smith regularly took commercial jobs, such as shooting pictures for annual reports.
Mr. Smith's work has been shown in galleries, embassies and museums and at jazz festivals, and it is part of the permanent collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Louisiana State Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
In March 2007, the Historic New Orleans Collection bought Mr. Smith's archives, which contain more than 2,000 rolls of black-and-white film, tens of thousands of color slides and about 200 audiotapes. Collection spokeswoman Mary Mees declined to disclose the price.
"Michael P. Smith has defined the visual appearance of contemporary homegrown New Orleans music for people around the world," said John Lawrence, the collection's director of museum programs.
Mr. Smith's work is important, Lawrence said, because "it serves to document not just the musicians and their music, but the environment, social structures and neighborhoods that both create and sustain the musical traditions."
Mr. Smith received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Mayor's Arts Award, the Clarence John Laughlin Lifetime Achievement Award from the local chapter of the American Society of Magazine Photographers and the Artist Recognition Award from the New Orleans Museum of Art's Delgado Society.
Survivors include a companion, Karen Louise Snyder; two daughters, Jan Lamberton Smith of Quail Springs, Calif., and Leslie Blackshear Smith of New Orleans; a brother, Joseph Byrd Hatchitt Smith of Port Angeles, Wash.; and two grandchildren.
Times-Picayune
Photographer, jazz archivist Michael Smith dies at 71
Posted by beggler September 27, 2008 22:31PM
Michael P. Smith, a photographer who spent three decades capturing vivid, vibrant images at jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indian ceremonies and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, died Friday at his New Orleans home of two diseases that destroyed his nervous system. He was 71.
A man of boundless energy who devoted himself to the culture he chronicled, Mr. Smith seemed to be everywhere at whatever event he was shooting. Fellow photographers joked that every good Jazzfest picture they took included the back of Mr. Smith's head.
Mr. Smith's subjects included Mahalia Jackson, Irma Thomas, James Booker, Harry Connick Jr., Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, as well as anonymous mourners, strutters and Indians whom Mr. Smith always managed to capture caught up in the moment.
"I don't think there's another photographer who has more sensitively documented very significant aspects of the second half of 20th century New Orleans culture," said Steven Maklansky, a former curator of photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Mr. Smith started concentrating on this kind of photography at a 1969 jazz funeral and kept at it, covering every Jazzfest through 2003. Though he showed up at subsequent festivals, silently cradling his camera, the degeneration of his nervous system had put an end to his career.
He built up a trove of more than 500,000 negatives, many of which remain unprocessed because he couldn't afford to have them developed, said Michael Sartisky, president and executive director of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
"He did something that no other photographer had done: He captured the cultural landscape of the streets and did so with a vision of passion and beauty," said Jason Berry, who has written extensively about indigenous music.
This world provided a sharp contrast to the genteel environment in which he had grown up. A child of Metairie who was a star athlete, he was the son of a member of the Rex organization and the Boston Club, and he graduated from Metairie Park Country Day School and Tulane University.
Everything changed, he said in a 1995 interview, when he went to work as Tulane's jazz archive's staff photographer in the 1960s. He heard hours and hours of the music that had been created in New Orleans' bars and brothels, and he was hooked.
"He paid attention when many locals took that culture for granted or ignored it," said Bruce Raeburn, the archive's curator.
Around that time, Mr. Smith met Matthew Herron, a photographer with the Black Star agency living in New Orleans, and became his assistant.
With Paul Barbarin's funeral in 1969, Mr. Smith began his photographic exploration, abandoning the realm of his youth.
"I have friends in that privileged world, but haven't had much interest in the society I grew up in since discovering the folk community of New Orleans, a side of town I had never known that struck me as the real heart of the city," Mr. Smith said in the interview.
He summed up his philosophy in three words: "Follow the music."
He was a founder of Tipitina's, the Uptown music club that has become famous worldwide. Mr. Smith's pictures have been collected in five books, and in magazine articles.
To supplement his income, Mr. Smith regularly took commercial jobs, such as shooting pictures for annual reports.
Mr. Smith's work has been shown in galleries, embassies and museums and at jazz festivals, and it is part of the permanent collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Louisiana State Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
In March 2007, the Historic New Orleans Collection bought Mr. Smith's archives, which contain more than 2,000 rolls of black-and-white film, tens of thousands of color slides and about 200 audiotapes. Collection spokeswoman Mary Mees declined to disclose the price.
"Michael P. Smith has defined the visual appearance of contemporary homegrown New Orleans music for people around the world," said John Lawrence, the collection's director of museum programs.
Mr. Smith's work is important, Lawrence said, because "it serves to document not just the musicians and their music, but the environment, social structures and neighborhoods that both create and sustain the musical traditions."
Mr. Smith received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Mayor's Arts Award, the Clarence John Laughlin Lifetime Achievement Award from the local chapter of the American Society of Magazine Photographers and the Artist Recognition Award from the New Orleans Museum of Art's Delgado Society.
Survivors include a companion, Karen Louise Snyder; two daughters, Jan Lamberton Smith of Quail Springs, Calif., and Leslie Blackshear Smith of New Orleans; a brother, Joseph Byrd Hatchitt Smith of Port Angeles, Wash.; and two grandchildren.
Peruvian Singer Yma Sumac (1922-2008)
LAT
Yma Sumac, 'Peruvian songbird' with multi-octave range, dies at 86
The singer with a persona matching her exotic voice became an international sensation in the 1950s.
By Dennis McLellan
November 3, 2008
Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born singer whose spectacular multi-octave vocal range and exotic persona made her an international sensation in the 1950s, has died. She was 86.
Sumac, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in February, died Saturday in an assisted-living facility in Silver Lake, said Damon Devine, her personal assistant and close friend.
Bursting onto the U.S. music scene after signing with Capitol Records in 1950, the raven-haired Sumac was known as the "Nightingale of the Andes," the "Peruvian Songbird" and a "singing marvel" with a 4 1/2 -octave (she said five-octave) voice.
"She is five singers in one," boasted her then-husband Moises Vivanco, a composer-arranger, in a 1951 interview with the Associated Press. "Never in 2,000 years has there been another voice like hers."
After Sumac performed at the Shrine Auditorium with a company of dancers, drummers and musicians in 1955, a Los Angeles Times writer observed:
"She warbles like a bird in the uppermost regions, hoots like an owl in the lowest registers, produces bell-like coloratura passages one minute, and exotic, dusky contralto tones the next."
Sumac's first album for Capitol, "Voice of the Xtabay," soared to the top of the record charts. A handful of other albums followed during the 1950s.
With her exotic beauty, elaborate costumes and singing voice that could imitate the cries of birds and wild animals, the woman who claimed to be a descendant of an ancient Incan emperor offered Eisenhower-era audiences something unique.
During her 1950s heyday, Sumac sang at the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall. She reportedly made $25,000 a week in Las Vegas.
She was featured in the 1951 Broadway musical "Flahooley" and appeared in the films "Secret of the Incas" in 1954 and "Omar Khayyam" in 1957.
Although details of her birth date and early life vary widely, Devine said Sumac was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in Cajamarca, Peru, on Sept. 13, 1922.
Sumac said she began singing when she was about 9.
After joining Vivanco's large group of native singers, dancers and musicians, she made her radio debut in 1942; she and Vivanco were married the same year.
In Argentina in 1943, Sumac and Vivanco's group recorded a series of Peruvian folk songs. By then, she was known professionally as Imma Sumack. (Capitol Records later changed the spelling.)
In 1946, she and her husband moved to New York City, where they performed as the Inca Taky Trio, with Vivanco on guitar, Sumac singing soprano and her cousin Cholita Rivero singing contralto and dancing.
After making her name as a solo artist, Sumac toured around the world for several years in the '60s, but her popularity in the U.S. had waned by then.
In 1971, she recorded a psychedelic rock album, "Miracles," that was not widely released, and semi-retired to Peru later in the decade -- at least that's what she always said.
"That's the legend that she stuck with all through these decades," Devine, who runs the Sumac website www.yma-sumac.com, told The Times in June. "She didn't want people to know she was here and not working. The story was good for her. She's a very eccentric woman. . . . Her whole career and life is based on her mystery, and so the facts and fiction is a fine line with her."
Sumac, however, did return to performing in 1984 at the Vine Street Bar & Grill and the Cinegrill in Hollywood. In the early 1990s, she toured in Europe and continued to perform until 1997.
"The younger generation loves the music, loves Yma," Sumac told the Tampa Tribune in 1996. "The new generation told me many times: 'Miss Yma, we love you. Your music is something. It's out of this world.' "
Sumac, who was divorced from and remarried to Vivanco in the late '50s and divorced from him again in 1965, is survived by their son, Charles, who lives in Europe, and three sisters, who live in Peru.
Services will be private.
McLellan is a Times staff writer.
Yma Sumac, 'Peruvian songbird' with multi-octave range, dies at 86
The singer with a persona matching her exotic voice became an international sensation in the 1950s.
By Dennis McLellan
November 3, 2008
Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born singer whose spectacular multi-octave vocal range and exotic persona made her an international sensation in the 1950s, has died. She was 86.
Sumac, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in February, died Saturday in an assisted-living facility in Silver Lake, said Damon Devine, her personal assistant and close friend.
Bursting onto the U.S. music scene after signing with Capitol Records in 1950, the raven-haired Sumac was known as the "Nightingale of the Andes," the "Peruvian Songbird" and a "singing marvel" with a 4 1/2 -octave (she said five-octave) voice.
"She is five singers in one," boasted her then-husband Moises Vivanco, a composer-arranger, in a 1951 interview with the Associated Press. "Never in 2,000 years has there been another voice like hers."
After Sumac performed at the Shrine Auditorium with a company of dancers, drummers and musicians in 1955, a Los Angeles Times writer observed:
"She warbles like a bird in the uppermost regions, hoots like an owl in the lowest registers, produces bell-like coloratura passages one minute, and exotic, dusky contralto tones the next."
Sumac's first album for Capitol, "Voice of the Xtabay," soared to the top of the record charts. A handful of other albums followed during the 1950s.
With her exotic beauty, elaborate costumes and singing voice that could imitate the cries of birds and wild animals, the woman who claimed to be a descendant of an ancient Incan emperor offered Eisenhower-era audiences something unique.
During her 1950s heyday, Sumac sang at the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall. She reportedly made $25,000 a week in Las Vegas.
She was featured in the 1951 Broadway musical "Flahooley" and appeared in the films "Secret of the Incas" in 1954 and "Omar Khayyam" in 1957.
Although details of her birth date and early life vary widely, Devine said Sumac was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in Cajamarca, Peru, on Sept. 13, 1922.
Sumac said she began singing when she was about 9.
After joining Vivanco's large group of native singers, dancers and musicians, she made her radio debut in 1942; she and Vivanco were married the same year.
In Argentina in 1943, Sumac and Vivanco's group recorded a series of Peruvian folk songs. By then, she was known professionally as Imma Sumack. (Capitol Records later changed the spelling.)
In 1946, she and her husband moved to New York City, where they performed as the Inca Taky Trio, with Vivanco on guitar, Sumac singing soprano and her cousin Cholita Rivero singing contralto and dancing.
After making her name as a solo artist, Sumac toured around the world for several years in the '60s, but her popularity in the U.S. had waned by then.
In 1971, she recorded a psychedelic rock album, "Miracles," that was not widely released, and semi-retired to Peru later in the decade -- at least that's what she always said.
"That's the legend that she stuck with all through these decades," Devine, who runs the Sumac website www.yma-sumac.com, told The Times in June. "She didn't want people to know she was here and not working. The story was good for her. She's a very eccentric woman. . . . Her whole career and life is based on her mystery, and so the facts and fiction is a fine line with her."
Sumac, however, did return to performing in 1984 at the Vine Street Bar & Grill and the Cinegrill in Hollywood. In the early 1990s, she toured in Europe and continued to perform until 1997.
"The younger generation loves the music, loves Yma," Sumac told the Tampa Tribune in 1996. "The new generation told me many times: 'Miss Yma, we love you. Your music is something. It's out of this world.' "
Sumac, who was divorced from and remarried to Vivanco in the late '50s and divorced from him again in 1965, is survived by their son, Charles, who lives in Europe, and three sisters, who live in Peru.
Services will be private.
McLellan is a Times staff writer.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Israel considers question: ‘Who is a Jew?’
AP/MSNBC
Israel considers question: ‘Who is a Jew?’
Issue heads to higher court after rabbis annul some 40,000 conversions
The Associated Press
updated 4:17 p.m. PT, Sat., Nov. 1, 2008
JERUSALEM - Raised without religion in Maryland, Shannon sought to make a new life for herself as a Jew in Israel.
In a rigorous conversion process, she studied religious law for a year, took a Hebrew name and changed her wardrobe to long skirts and sleeves as dictated by Orthodox Jewish custom. Finally, a panel of rabbis pronounced her Jewish.
But five years later, she and some 40,000 like her have suddenly had their conversions annulled by Israel's Rabbinical High Court. The court says the rabbi who heads a government authority set up to oversee conversions is too liberal in approving them.
The issue, now headed to Israel's Supreme Court, has exposed an intensifying power struggle inside Israel's religious establishment over the age-old question of "who is a Jew." It also threatens to deepen the wedge between Israel and American Jews, who largely follow more liberal schools of Judaism.
While 34-year-old Shannon's Israeli citizenship isn't in jeopardy, the ruling diminishes her religious rights. Many rabbis will no longer oversee basic Jewish rituals for her, such as getting married or receiving a Jewish burial. If she has children, they might not be considered Jewish.
"I'm very worried. I probably will not be able to get married in Israel," she said. "God forbid, if I die, will I be allowed a Jewish burial?"
Definition of Jewishness
Shannon was the woman's given name in the small Maryland farm town where she grew up. She asked to withhold her surname and Hebrew first name for fear of antagonizing the rabbis who hold her fate in their hands. Other converts interviewed by The Associated Press made the same request.
The quest for a definition of Jewishness has dogged Israel from its beginning, and has taken on urgency in recent years as immigrants have poured in, primarily from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. Many of them have Jewish roots but are not considered Jewish under Orthodox religious law because they weren't born to Jewish mothers.
Three years ago the government formed the conversion authority to set universal standards, headed by Haim Drukman, a respected Orthodox rabbi who had already overseen tens of thousands of conversions over the years, including Shannon's.
Born to a Jewish father and Christian mother, Shannon became drawn to her Jewish roots, and in 1995 moved to Israel. She didn't meet the Orthodox rabbinate's criteria of Jewishness, so she underwent conversion, approved by Drukman in 2003, and maintains a religious lifestyle to this day, keeping kosher and not working on the Sabbath.
But last March, the state-funded rabbinical court, which has the final say over who is Jewish, reversed her conversion and some 40,000 others overseen by Drukman and his followers.
The rabbis based their ruling on their discovery that a Danish woman whom Drukman converted more than a decade ago did not observe the Sabbath. But the decision was a symptom of a broader struggle.
On one side are ultra-Orthodox hard-liners, who insist converts must embrace their strict interpretation of Judaism for life. On the other side are moderates like Drukman. "There is a commandment to love every Jew and there is a special commandment to love the convert," he says.
An important goal of Drukman's office was to help the more than 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union whose Jewishness was in question.
Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, director of the rabbinical courts, said too many people are being converted who aren't genuinely interested in the religion. "Nobody really checked how many of these 300,000 people really wanted to be Jews," Ben-Dahan said.
Divisions between Israeli, American Jews
The decision also has threatened ties with those American Jews who belong to the more liberal Reform and Conservative denominations. The ruling on conversions is seen as another blow to their struggle for recognition in Israel.
"Few crises have so divided Israel from the North American Jewish community," the United Jewish Communities, a U.S. umbrella group that donates hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel each year, wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in July.
To the group's plea for action, Olmert replied he was "determined" to solve the conversion crisis.
But the same month, Olmert abruptly fired Drukman. He said the law requires the 76-year-old rabbi to retire, but an official said Olmert felt that Drukman's rate of conversions — 3,400 in the three years of his authority's existence — was too slow. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was sharing confidential information.
Drukman, speaking to the AP, called the dismissal "foolish and malicious," saying his contract had been renewed only a year earlier.
The Supreme Court is likely to take up within weeks an action brought by Yael, the Danish woman at the heart of the conflict. She converted to marry an Israeli man she met 20 years ago, but during divorce proceedings last year, she acknowledged she did not live by Orthodox rules. The rabbis then invalidated her conversion and everyone else converted by Drukman.
Yael says the rabbis are acting against the spirit of Judaism.
"There is an unwritten law that we should be nice to each other and be human beings, and I always connected this to religion," she said.
Israel considers question: ‘Who is a Jew?’
Issue heads to higher court after rabbis annul some 40,000 conversions
The Associated Press
updated 4:17 p.m. PT, Sat., Nov. 1, 2008
JERUSALEM - Raised without religion in Maryland, Shannon sought to make a new life for herself as a Jew in Israel.
In a rigorous conversion process, she studied religious law for a year, took a Hebrew name and changed her wardrobe to long skirts and sleeves as dictated by Orthodox Jewish custom. Finally, a panel of rabbis pronounced her Jewish.
But five years later, she and some 40,000 like her have suddenly had their conversions annulled by Israel's Rabbinical High Court. The court says the rabbi who heads a government authority set up to oversee conversions is too liberal in approving them.
The issue, now headed to Israel's Supreme Court, has exposed an intensifying power struggle inside Israel's religious establishment over the age-old question of "who is a Jew." It also threatens to deepen the wedge between Israel and American Jews, who largely follow more liberal schools of Judaism.
While 34-year-old Shannon's Israeli citizenship isn't in jeopardy, the ruling diminishes her religious rights. Many rabbis will no longer oversee basic Jewish rituals for her, such as getting married or receiving a Jewish burial. If she has children, they might not be considered Jewish.
"I'm very worried. I probably will not be able to get married in Israel," she said. "God forbid, if I die, will I be allowed a Jewish burial?"
Definition of Jewishness
Shannon was the woman's given name in the small Maryland farm town where she grew up. She asked to withhold her surname and Hebrew first name for fear of antagonizing the rabbis who hold her fate in their hands. Other converts interviewed by The Associated Press made the same request.
The quest for a definition of Jewishness has dogged Israel from its beginning, and has taken on urgency in recent years as immigrants have poured in, primarily from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. Many of them have Jewish roots but are not considered Jewish under Orthodox religious law because they weren't born to Jewish mothers.
Three years ago the government formed the conversion authority to set universal standards, headed by Haim Drukman, a respected Orthodox rabbi who had already overseen tens of thousands of conversions over the years, including Shannon's.
Born to a Jewish father and Christian mother, Shannon became drawn to her Jewish roots, and in 1995 moved to Israel. She didn't meet the Orthodox rabbinate's criteria of Jewishness, so she underwent conversion, approved by Drukman in 2003, and maintains a religious lifestyle to this day, keeping kosher and not working on the Sabbath.
But last March, the state-funded rabbinical court, which has the final say over who is Jewish, reversed her conversion and some 40,000 others overseen by Drukman and his followers.
The rabbis based their ruling on their discovery that a Danish woman whom Drukman converted more than a decade ago did not observe the Sabbath. But the decision was a symptom of a broader struggle.
On one side are ultra-Orthodox hard-liners, who insist converts must embrace their strict interpretation of Judaism for life. On the other side are moderates like Drukman. "There is a commandment to love every Jew and there is a special commandment to love the convert," he says.
An important goal of Drukman's office was to help the more than 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union whose Jewishness was in question.
Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, director of the rabbinical courts, said too many people are being converted who aren't genuinely interested in the religion. "Nobody really checked how many of these 300,000 people really wanted to be Jews," Ben-Dahan said.
Divisions between Israeli, American Jews
The decision also has threatened ties with those American Jews who belong to the more liberal Reform and Conservative denominations. The ruling on conversions is seen as another blow to their struggle for recognition in Israel.
"Few crises have so divided Israel from the North American Jewish community," the United Jewish Communities, a U.S. umbrella group that donates hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel each year, wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in July.
To the group's plea for action, Olmert replied he was "determined" to solve the conversion crisis.
But the same month, Olmert abruptly fired Drukman. He said the law requires the 76-year-old rabbi to retire, but an official said Olmert felt that Drukman's rate of conversions — 3,400 in the three years of his authority's existence — was too slow. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was sharing confidential information.
Drukman, speaking to the AP, called the dismissal "foolish and malicious," saying his contract had been renewed only a year earlier.
The Supreme Court is likely to take up within weeks an action brought by Yael, the Danish woman at the heart of the conflict. She converted to marry an Israeli man she met 20 years ago, but during divorce proceedings last year, she acknowledged she did not live by Orthodox rules. The rabbis then invalidated her conversion and everyone else converted by Drukman.
Yael says the rabbis are acting against the spirit of Judaism.
"There is an unwritten law that we should be nice to each other and be human beings, and I always connected this to religion," she said.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Tijuana's Caesar's Restaurant: Home of the Caesar Salad
NYT
October 22, 2008
Tijuana Journal
Wary Tourists Toss Aside a Chance to Taste History
By MARC LACEY
TIJUANA, Mexico — Eating salad in Mexico is discouraged by most guide books, citing the potential threat to the digestive tract.
It is true that the water can be problematic south of the border, if it is consumed directly from the tap or used to wash one’s salad fixings. At the same time, fine dining abounds throughout Mexico, white tablecloth affairs with celebrity chefs, mouthwatering menus and fancy water that comes from elegantly shaped bottles.
Although not in that lofty league, there is one eatery with a particularly distinguished history that is relevant to the question of whether one should consume salads in Mexico. Called Caesar’s Restaurant, it sits in the seediest of spots, along Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución, and specializes in salad — Caesar salad, to be exact, which it says was invented in its kitchen in 1924.
Jorge Chávez is the manager of Caesar’s and the keeper of the historical flame. After a waiter whipped up a salad tableside the other day in an elaborate ceremony, Mr. Chávez plunked down to defend his lettuce.
A table full of customers had recently left the premises after taking advantage of Caesar’s two-for-one beer special but not daring to eat the food. One of them had scoffed when a waiter offered her a salad. She made a crack about that being a sure-fire vacation spoiler.
“She has bad information,” Mr. Chávez said when the group was gone. “We’re not using dirty water on our salad. I’d put our salad up against anyone, anywhere.”
He then veered into a bit of history. One day back in 1924, Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who ran a restaurant in what was then an upscale tourist zone in Tijuana, found himself low on provisions but with some hungry friends to feed. As the story goes, he threw what he had — some lettuce, garlic and pieces of bread, among other ingredients — into a bowl and came up with a creation that has lived on ever since.
There are some disagreements over the details of the story. Was it a cook who really came up with it? Did Caesar’s brother, Alex, first throw anchovies into the mix? But there appears to be some support that the Caesar salad was born in Tijuana, or at the very least earned its worldwide reputation here.
None other than Julia Child wrote in one of her cookbooks, “One of my early remembrances of restaurant life was going to Tijuana in 1925 or 1926 with my parents, who were wildly excited that they should finally lunch at Caesar’s Restaurant.”
She recalled Mr. Cardini himself rolling a big cart to her family’s table and throwing some raw eggs into the mix.
Raw egg yolks are still part of the recipe here. Also tossed into the large wooden bowl, which is big enough to bathe a newborn child, are olive oil, ground anchovies, garlic, a dash of mustard and Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan cheese, pepper and white wine mixed with vinegar.
Large romaine lettuce leaves are dunked in the mixture and then laid out on a plate.
Mr. Chávez took pains to point out that each leaf is carefully cut into a diamond shape and then purified with a chemical additive to kill any microbes. The resulting salad, he contends, is not only safe to eat and delicious to eat but, in his view, quintessentially Mexican.
“Some of the ingredients are foreign but the hands that make it are Mexican,” he said. Another key addition are Mexican limes, which are squeezed into the salad dressing to neutralize the strong flavors of the anchovies, garlic and egg yolks. “No flavor dominates,” he said.
The biggest problem these days is that not enough people are digging in. Tourism is in the doldrums in Tijuana, a result of a variety of factors, including too much crime, police harassment and the economic woes up north.
The restaurant has struggled through hard times before. It closed for more than five years in the 1990s, and after it reopened, it installed a topless dance club in the back, which operates in the evening and supplements the paltry restaurant income.
There were only six people eating salads on a recent afternoon. Four of them were local university students who were on a research trip and were eating on the house. The other two were reporting on and photographing the salads for this article.
“You hear so much that’s bad about Tijuana,” Mr. Chávez said. “I want people to know that we have something to be proud of.”
And how is the salad? Well, the guy taking pictures let out a long “mmmmm” as he sampled the sauce. The guy with the pen thought the croutons, which soak up the zesty dressing, were among the best he had sampled anywhere.
Both of them lingered at the table, their stomachs feeling fine.
October 22, 2008
Tijuana Journal
Wary Tourists Toss Aside a Chance to Taste History
By MARC LACEY
TIJUANA, Mexico — Eating salad in Mexico is discouraged by most guide books, citing the potential threat to the digestive tract.
It is true that the water can be problematic south of the border, if it is consumed directly from the tap or used to wash one’s salad fixings. At the same time, fine dining abounds throughout Mexico, white tablecloth affairs with celebrity chefs, mouthwatering menus and fancy water that comes from elegantly shaped bottles.
Although not in that lofty league, there is one eatery with a particularly distinguished history that is relevant to the question of whether one should consume salads in Mexico. Called Caesar’s Restaurant, it sits in the seediest of spots, along Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución, and specializes in salad — Caesar salad, to be exact, which it says was invented in its kitchen in 1924.
Jorge Chávez is the manager of Caesar’s and the keeper of the historical flame. After a waiter whipped up a salad tableside the other day in an elaborate ceremony, Mr. Chávez plunked down to defend his lettuce.
A table full of customers had recently left the premises after taking advantage of Caesar’s two-for-one beer special but not daring to eat the food. One of them had scoffed when a waiter offered her a salad. She made a crack about that being a sure-fire vacation spoiler.
“She has bad information,” Mr. Chávez said when the group was gone. “We’re not using dirty water on our salad. I’d put our salad up against anyone, anywhere.”
He then veered into a bit of history. One day back in 1924, Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who ran a restaurant in what was then an upscale tourist zone in Tijuana, found himself low on provisions but with some hungry friends to feed. As the story goes, he threw what he had — some lettuce, garlic and pieces of bread, among other ingredients — into a bowl and came up with a creation that has lived on ever since.
There are some disagreements over the details of the story. Was it a cook who really came up with it? Did Caesar’s brother, Alex, first throw anchovies into the mix? But there appears to be some support that the Caesar salad was born in Tijuana, or at the very least earned its worldwide reputation here.
None other than Julia Child wrote in one of her cookbooks, “One of my early remembrances of restaurant life was going to Tijuana in 1925 or 1926 with my parents, who were wildly excited that they should finally lunch at Caesar’s Restaurant.”
She recalled Mr. Cardini himself rolling a big cart to her family’s table and throwing some raw eggs into the mix.
Raw egg yolks are still part of the recipe here. Also tossed into the large wooden bowl, which is big enough to bathe a newborn child, are olive oil, ground anchovies, garlic, a dash of mustard and Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan cheese, pepper and white wine mixed with vinegar.
Large romaine lettuce leaves are dunked in the mixture and then laid out on a plate.
Mr. Chávez took pains to point out that each leaf is carefully cut into a diamond shape and then purified with a chemical additive to kill any microbes. The resulting salad, he contends, is not only safe to eat and delicious to eat but, in his view, quintessentially Mexican.
“Some of the ingredients are foreign but the hands that make it are Mexican,” he said. Another key addition are Mexican limes, which are squeezed into the salad dressing to neutralize the strong flavors of the anchovies, garlic and egg yolks. “No flavor dominates,” he said.
The biggest problem these days is that not enough people are digging in. Tourism is in the doldrums in Tijuana, a result of a variety of factors, including too much crime, police harassment and the economic woes up north.
The restaurant has struggled through hard times before. It closed for more than five years in the 1990s, and after it reopened, it installed a topless dance club in the back, which operates in the evening and supplements the paltry restaurant income.
There were only six people eating salads on a recent afternoon. Four of them were local university students who were on a research trip and were eating on the house. The other two were reporting on and photographing the salads for this article.
“You hear so much that’s bad about Tijuana,” Mr. Chávez said. “I want people to know that we have something to be proud of.”
And how is the salad? Well, the guy taking pictures let out a long “mmmmm” as he sampled the sauce. The guy with the pen thought the croutons, which soak up the zesty dressing, were among the best he had sampled anywhere.
Both of them lingered at the table, their stomachs feeling fine.
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