Showing posts with label charity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charity. Show all posts
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Calling Out Sting for his Performance in Uzbekistan
Sting in the pay of tyrannical Uzbekistan regime
Sting accepted more than £1m to play for the Uzbek dictator's daughter, reports Marina Hyde
Sting with Gulnara Karimova at a fashion show in Uzbekistan. Photograph: Getty
From the Lost in showbiz blog of the Guardian.
Once again we must ponder the question "how much money is enough?", inspired by reports that Sting accepted between £1m and £2m to perform for the glory of the brutal despotic regime in Uzbekistan.
The services of Sting - whose personal fortune is estimated well north of £150m - were engaged by Gulnara Karimova, the daughter and anointed heir of dictator Islam Karimov. To explore Islam Karimov's human rights record in full would take too long: suffice to say he is condemned approximately every 10 minutes by organisations from the UN to Amnesty, accused of such delights as boiling his enemies, slaughtering his poverty-stricken people when they protest, and conscripting armies of children for slave labour. Oh, and the Aral Sea on which his country sits - once the world's fourth biggest lake - has lost 80% of its volume, partly as a result of Karimov siphoning it off to intensively irrigate his remote desert cotton fields.
Whether he is a perfect fit for self-styled eco-warrior and humanitarian Sting is a matter for you to decide: what is beyond dispute is that in October, the former Police frontman agreed to travel to Tashkent and effectively headline Gulnara Karimova's alleged arts festival.
Unfortunately, people have now found out about the jaunt, and so many of them have misunderstood the reasoning behind it as financially motivated that Sting has been forced to issue a statement.
"I played in Uzbekistan a few months ago," he begins. "The concert was organized by the president's daughter and I believe sponsored by Unicef."
You can believe it all you like, Sting, but it's absolute cobblers - Lost in Showbiz has checked it out with Unicef, who tactfully describe themselves as "quite surprised" by your claim.
"I supported wholeheartedly the cultural boycott of South Africa under the apartheid regime," Sting continues, in response to those who wonder why he did not refuse the invitation, "because it was a special case and specifically targeted the younger demographic of the ruling white middle class."
Chop-logic, sir! But go on.
"I am well aware of the Uzbek president's appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment. I made the decision to play there in spite of that. I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular."
Mm. Even if you accept Sting's live performances as "ideas and art", you can't really help but question this notion of "open commerce", considering the tickets for his concert cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan. 45 times! As for his distaste for the regime, the picture above shows Sting being repulsed by it all at a fashion show during the "cultural" week, which also seems to have served as a vehicle for promoting Gulnara Karimova's jewellery range for stratospherically expensive Swiss firm Chopard. She's the one sitting right next to him.
"I seriously doubt whether the President of Uzbekistan cares in the slightest whether artists like myself come to play in his country," concludes Sting. "He is hermetically sealed in his own medieval, tyrannical mindset."
You will note that Sting conspicuously declines to deflect the heat by stating that he donated all or indeed any of his monstrous fee to charity. And I could go on - but at this point it feels right to hand over to former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray.
"This really is transparent bollocks," observes Murray on his blog. "He did not take a guitar and jam around the parks of Tashkent. He got paid over a million pounds to play an event specifically designed to glorify a barbarous regime. Is the man completely mad?
"Why does he think it was worth over a million quid to the regime to hear him warble a few notes?
"I agree with him that cultural isolation does not help. I am often asked about the morality of going to Uzbekistan, and I always answer - go, mix with ordinary people, tell them about other ways of life, avoid state owned establishments and official tours. What Sting did was the opposite. To invoke Unicef as a cover, sat next to a woman who has made hundreds of millions from state forced child labour in the cotton fields, is pretty sick."
Well quite. And yet, to misquote his worship, I seriously doubt whether Sting cares in the slightest whether shmucks like Craig and us question his probity. He is hermetically sealed in his own self-righteous mindset.
Still, him accepting a wedge from despots, Trudie making films for Tesco - it must be said that the House of Sumner has moved into a most intriguing era of late, and we shall redouble the focus on its activities.
Sting accepted more than £1m to play for the Uzbek dictator's daughter, reports Marina Hyde
Sting with Gulnara Karimova at a fashion show in Uzbekistan. Photograph: Getty
From the Lost in showbiz blog of the Guardian.
Once again we must ponder the question "how much money is enough?", inspired by reports that Sting accepted between £1m and £2m to perform for the glory of the brutal despotic regime in Uzbekistan.
The services of Sting - whose personal fortune is estimated well north of £150m - were engaged by Gulnara Karimova, the daughter and anointed heir of dictator Islam Karimov. To explore Islam Karimov's human rights record in full would take too long: suffice to say he is condemned approximately every 10 minutes by organisations from the UN to Amnesty, accused of such delights as boiling his enemies, slaughtering his poverty-stricken people when they protest, and conscripting armies of children for slave labour. Oh, and the Aral Sea on which his country sits - once the world's fourth biggest lake - has lost 80% of its volume, partly as a result of Karimov siphoning it off to intensively irrigate his remote desert cotton fields.
Whether he is a perfect fit for self-styled eco-warrior and humanitarian Sting is a matter for you to decide: what is beyond dispute is that in October, the former Police frontman agreed to travel to Tashkent and effectively headline Gulnara Karimova's alleged arts festival.
Unfortunately, people have now found out about the jaunt, and so many of them have misunderstood the reasoning behind it as financially motivated that Sting has been forced to issue a statement.
"I played in Uzbekistan a few months ago," he begins. "The concert was organized by the president's daughter and I believe sponsored by Unicef."
You can believe it all you like, Sting, but it's absolute cobblers - Lost in Showbiz has checked it out with Unicef, who tactfully describe themselves as "quite surprised" by your claim.
"I supported wholeheartedly the cultural boycott of South Africa under the apartheid regime," Sting continues, in response to those who wonder why he did not refuse the invitation, "because it was a special case and specifically targeted the younger demographic of the ruling white middle class."
Chop-logic, sir! But go on.
"I am well aware of the Uzbek president's appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment. I made the decision to play there in spite of that. I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular."
Mm. Even if you accept Sting's live performances as "ideas and art", you can't really help but question this notion of "open commerce", considering the tickets for his concert cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan. 45 times! As for his distaste for the regime, the picture above shows Sting being repulsed by it all at a fashion show during the "cultural" week, which also seems to have served as a vehicle for promoting Gulnara Karimova's jewellery range for stratospherically expensive Swiss firm Chopard. She's the one sitting right next to him.
"I seriously doubt whether the President of Uzbekistan cares in the slightest whether artists like myself come to play in his country," concludes Sting. "He is hermetically sealed in his own medieval, tyrannical mindset."
You will note that Sting conspicuously declines to deflect the heat by stating that he donated all or indeed any of his monstrous fee to charity. And I could go on - but at this point it feels right to hand over to former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray.
"This really is transparent bollocks," observes Murray on his blog. "He did not take a guitar and jam around the parks of Tashkent. He got paid over a million pounds to play an event specifically designed to glorify a barbarous regime. Is the man completely mad?
"Why does he think it was worth over a million quid to the regime to hear him warble a few notes?
"I agree with him that cultural isolation does not help. I am often asked about the morality of going to Uzbekistan, and I always answer - go, mix with ordinary people, tell them about other ways of life, avoid state owned establishments and official tours. What Sting did was the opposite. To invoke Unicef as a cover, sat next to a woman who has made hundreds of millions from state forced child labour in the cotton fields, is pretty sick."
Well quite. And yet, to misquote his worship, I seriously doubt whether Sting cares in the slightest whether shmucks like Craig and us question his probity. He is hermetically sealed in his own self-righteous mindset.
Still, him accepting a wedge from despots, Trudie making films for Tesco - it must be said that the House of Sumner has moved into a most intriguing era of late, and we shall redouble the focus on its activities.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
A Lovely Rememberance of Paul Newman
SLATE
obit
Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992 introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them.
Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarter-billion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in 1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice boxes.
But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world—he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would.
Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201116/
obit
Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992 introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them.
Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarter-billion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in 1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice boxes.
But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world—he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would.
Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201116/
Thursday, September 18, 2008
People in Need Ads
Some rather effective and striking donation solicitation photographs (by Carl Stolz) from the Dutch charity Cordaid Mensen in Nood (People in Need). Wow.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
School Rocks! As Arts Education Funds Dip, Pop Stars Make Sure the Beat Goes On
WASHINGTON POST
School Rocks!
As Arts Education Funds Dip, Pop Stars Make Sure the Beat Goes On
By Melinda Newman
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 27, 2007; N01
LOS ANGELES
Four years ago, Maya Ramos couldn't find middle C on a keyboard. Now she's finding her way to first place in international piano competitions.
In a tiny rehearsal studio in a storefront music school, the slender 11-year-old bends over an upright piano and lovingly tucks into Manuel Ponce's "Scherzino Mexicano," her wrists high, her fingers caressing the keys lightly, then heavier as the tone of the piece shifts. It's among the works she will perform in at a recital in Mexico City this fall.
Taking piano lessons wasn't her idea, she says, but her mother insisted and managed to find a place that would nurture Maya's interest and talent: the Silverlake Conservatory of Music on the city's east side. It was co-founded by a rock musician known more for his onstage antics than his appreciation of classical composers. That would be Flea, the frequently shirtless, frenetic bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He's one of a handful of pop stars, including soul singer Macy Gray and hip-hop's Black Eyed Peas, who have established nonprofit music schools for children. The artists initially bankrolled the projects and now rely primarily on donations and fundraisers to subsidize operations.
Such schools help fill a void left by deep state and federal budget cuts that have severely diminished arts programs in public schools. Maya, for example, cannot take piano at her charter public school; the only music electives are for violin and cello. Other students at Silverlake talk about having no music programs at their schools at all.
Flea (born Michael Balzary) launched Silverlake in 2001, in part because of such cutbacks. He says the music program at Los Angeles's Fairfax High School was his salvation in the late 1970s. "I was a troubled kid. I was on the street. I was doing drugs. I was breaking into people's houses. I was bad news," he recalled in an interview.
"Having music in school was the one thing that I really believed in. [It] gave me a focus, a structure and consistency." He took full advantage of a menu of offerings including orchestra, jazz and marching band, choir and musical productions.
After sitting by chance beside Fairfax's music teacher at a Knicks game in New York several years ago, the rocker decided to revisit his alma mater -- and found its music program decimated by budget cuts: "Everything was gone. I couldn't believe it," he says. "When I went, you could pick any instrument. You want to play in an orchestra? No problem. When I went back, it was a volunteer teacher, a couple of acoustic guitars. It was this shell of this thing that was still alive while I was there."
Flea says he put up "a few hundred thousand dollars" to open the Silverlake Conservatory with high school friend-turned-music teacher Keith Barry, who is the school's dean.
On a busy afternoon last week, students lugged their instruments, sometimes in music cases as tall as they are, into the lobby and sat under photos of Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The sounds of piano, trumpet and guitar wafted from the six rehearsal rooms. The school has swelled to 25 part-time teachers tutoring 700 students (ages 4 and up), seven days a week. When his schedule permits, Flea teaches bass and trumpet.
Cut Off
The cuts Flea witnessed began more than 25 years ago. Although there has been some improvement -- most notably in 2006, California's legislature agreed to a $500 million one-time allocation and $105 million in ongoing funding to restore arts education in the state's public schools -- slashing still occurs.
"Today, the first thing to go when there's a budget issue is the arts program," says Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. NARAS's Grammy Foundation provides grants to more than 20 public schools annually to help fund music instruction. (Portnow himself is an alumnus of a musician-run program: he attended late trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's summer jazz camp in the 1960s.)
"It's probably more of a cultural issue than anything," he says. "For some reason, over the years the leadership that makes the decisions has failed to recognize how critical arts are" in an overall educational and humanities program.
Additionally, arts cuts have been an
unintended consequence of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The initiative sets standards of accountability in math and reading, leading to criticisms of schools' "teaching to the test" in those subjects instead of providing a well-rounded humanities curriculum.
The arts cuts are "not something that is intended by the accountability measures that were put in place by No Child Left Behind for math and reading," says Doug Herbert, a special assistant in the Department of Education's office of innovation and improvement. Arts courses are included in the act's list of 10 core academic subjects, but, he says, "I think hardly anybody would disagree with the idea that if you can't read by third grade, you're probably not going to do well in music and visual arts and dance and theater either."
Some cuts continue despite data showing a direct correlation between music study and increased SAT scores. Students with four or more years of music and arts education scored 93 points higher on their SATs than students who had half a year or less, according to statistics compiled by the College Board.
Pop stars aren't the only ones stepping up to help. More than $4 million worth of new and refurbished musical instruments have been donated to school programs and students by the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation in Sherman Oaks, Calif. -- started in 1996 by the late composer Michael Kamen, who wrote the music for the movie of the same name. And VH1's Save the Music Foundation, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization, says it has restored musical instrument programs in more than 1,400 elementary and middle schools.
Paul Cothran, Save the Music's executive director, praises the efforts of Flea and other performers, but doesn't believe their generosity absolves public schools of their responsibility to provide arts education.
"As recently as two years ago, I was reading reports that there were still about 30 million students that lacked access to music programs. That's K through 12. There's still a lot of work to be done," he says.
Modern Music
If the Silverlake Conservatory of Music leans toward the traditional, the Black Eyed Peas' efforts are geared to the digital age. The Peapod Music & Arts Academy was launched in January with the debut of a $400,000 studio donated by the Peas to a foster kids and at-risk youth group at the Watts/Willowbrook Boys & Girls Club. But there are no violin or flute lessons at this school: The curriculum gives students access to Pro Tools digital audio workstations, video editing bays, cameras and more.
"We were, like, let's give them the same equipment we use to make our music, the same editing tools that we use and the same cameras we use to make our videos," says William Adams, better known as Will.I.Am, the Peas' rapper, producer and multi-instrumentalist.
Macy Gray's M.Gray Music Academy combines the old and new, offering after-school and weekend classes in disciplines ranging from jazz guitar and musical composition to "beginning turntable." Classes are offered in eight-week sessions at Gray's North Hollywood studio. The Peapod Academy classes are free, while both the M.Gray Music Academy and Silverlake Conservatory charge for lessons, but offer scholarships to eligible students. Silverlake managing director Jennifer Rey says approximately 100 students are on scholarship (that includes free instruments) and that number will increase to 150 next year.
The oldest of the schools is the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Ga., founded in 1997 by the slain rapper's mother, Afeni Shakur. The program started as a summer performing arts day camp for 25 middle school and high school students, who met in donated space at high schools and colleges. The center, which offers training in singing, acting, dancing, set design and poetry, now has its own facility on 11 acres and has expanded to a year-round after-school curriculum. Much of the teaching centers on Tupac's music and poetry. Last year Shakur launched a foundation in her son's name and is now attempting to raise $4 million to build a community performing arts facility. "Tupac pursued the performing arts as an alternative to life on the streets," Shakur said in a statement to The Post. "Forming the foundation and the center were my ways of guaranteeing that Tupac would be remembered as the man he really was, not as the character he often took on in his music."
As a 17-year-old student and mother, Celina Nixon participated in the Shakur Center's 2000 summer camp. Now 24, she is the center's artistic director and says the skills she gained at camp extended far beyond the artistic: "I learned it wasn't just about performance and who's a big star . . . Being a teenage mother, it gave me other things I could use," including knowledge about careers and finances.
That mirrors the mission the Black Eyed Peas have set for their academy -- to teach life lessons, not just music ones. They also aim to close the digital divide that exists between high-income and lower-income computer users. "The same tools that the people have in Beverly Hills are accessible to the people in the 'hood, but the people in the 'hood don't have the knowledge that they can do that," says Will.I.Am. "The new Steven Spielberg could live in Watts, but they don't know they can compete because there's not the technology in their schools."
The Peas' ambitious plan includes unveiling two more academies over the next two years (2008's will be in the East L.A. projects where Will.I.Am grew up) and then hatching up to four new Peapod schools a year via the Boys & Girls Clubs in inner cities throughout the United States and abroad, according to Will.I.Am.
Flea isn't talking yet about a nationwide program but believes all children deserve the chance to study music as he did. "Even a moderately simple understanding of music leads to a much richer life," he says. The famed bassist is too modest to declare that the Silverlake Conservatory will be his legacy, but is sure of one thing: "It's the best idea I ever had."
School Rocks!
As Arts Education Funds Dip, Pop Stars Make Sure the Beat Goes On
By Melinda Newman
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 27, 2007; N01
LOS ANGELES
Four years ago, Maya Ramos couldn't find middle C on a keyboard. Now she's finding her way to first place in international piano competitions.
In a tiny rehearsal studio in a storefront music school, the slender 11-year-old bends over an upright piano and lovingly tucks into Manuel Ponce's "Scherzino Mexicano," her wrists high, her fingers caressing the keys lightly, then heavier as the tone of the piece shifts. It's among the works she will perform in at a recital in Mexico City this fall.
Taking piano lessons wasn't her idea, she says, but her mother insisted and managed to find a place that would nurture Maya's interest and talent: the Silverlake Conservatory of Music on the city's east side. It was co-founded by a rock musician known more for his onstage antics than his appreciation of classical composers. That would be Flea, the frequently shirtless, frenetic bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He's one of a handful of pop stars, including soul singer Macy Gray and hip-hop's Black Eyed Peas, who have established nonprofit music schools for children. The artists initially bankrolled the projects and now rely primarily on donations and fundraisers to subsidize operations.
Such schools help fill a void left by deep state and federal budget cuts that have severely diminished arts programs in public schools. Maya, for example, cannot take piano at her charter public school; the only music electives are for violin and cello. Other students at Silverlake talk about having no music programs at their schools at all.
Flea (born Michael Balzary) launched Silverlake in 2001, in part because of such cutbacks. He says the music program at Los Angeles's Fairfax High School was his salvation in the late 1970s. "I was a troubled kid. I was on the street. I was doing drugs. I was breaking into people's houses. I was bad news," he recalled in an interview.
"Having music in school was the one thing that I really believed in. [It] gave me a focus, a structure and consistency." He took full advantage of a menu of offerings including orchestra, jazz and marching band, choir and musical productions.
After sitting by chance beside Fairfax's music teacher at a Knicks game in New York several years ago, the rocker decided to revisit his alma mater -- and found its music program decimated by budget cuts: "Everything was gone. I couldn't believe it," he says. "When I went, you could pick any instrument. You want to play in an orchestra? No problem. When I went back, it was a volunteer teacher, a couple of acoustic guitars. It was this shell of this thing that was still alive while I was there."
Flea says he put up "a few hundred thousand dollars" to open the Silverlake Conservatory with high school friend-turned-music teacher Keith Barry, who is the school's dean.
On a busy afternoon last week, students lugged their instruments, sometimes in music cases as tall as they are, into the lobby and sat under photos of Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The sounds of piano, trumpet and guitar wafted from the six rehearsal rooms. The school has swelled to 25 part-time teachers tutoring 700 students (ages 4 and up), seven days a week. When his schedule permits, Flea teaches bass and trumpet.
Cut Off
The cuts Flea witnessed began more than 25 years ago. Although there has been some improvement -- most notably in 2006, California's legislature agreed to a $500 million one-time allocation and $105 million in ongoing funding to restore arts education in the state's public schools -- slashing still occurs.
"Today, the first thing to go when there's a budget issue is the arts program," says Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. NARAS's Grammy Foundation provides grants to more than 20 public schools annually to help fund music instruction. (Portnow himself is an alumnus of a musician-run program: he attended late trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's summer jazz camp in the 1960s.)
"It's probably more of a cultural issue than anything," he says. "For some reason, over the years the leadership that makes the decisions has failed to recognize how critical arts are" in an overall educational and humanities program.
Additionally, arts cuts have been an
unintended consequence of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The initiative sets standards of accountability in math and reading, leading to criticisms of schools' "teaching to the test" in those subjects instead of providing a well-rounded humanities curriculum.
The arts cuts are "not something that is intended by the accountability measures that were put in place by No Child Left Behind for math and reading," says Doug Herbert, a special assistant in the Department of Education's office of innovation and improvement. Arts courses are included in the act's list of 10 core academic subjects, but, he says, "I think hardly anybody would disagree with the idea that if you can't read by third grade, you're probably not going to do well in music and visual arts and dance and theater either."
Some cuts continue despite data showing a direct correlation between music study and increased SAT scores. Students with four or more years of music and arts education scored 93 points higher on their SATs than students who had half a year or less, according to statistics compiled by the College Board.
Pop stars aren't the only ones stepping up to help. More than $4 million worth of new and refurbished musical instruments have been donated to school programs and students by the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation in Sherman Oaks, Calif. -- started in 1996 by the late composer Michael Kamen, who wrote the music for the movie of the same name. And VH1's Save the Music Foundation, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization, says it has restored musical instrument programs in more than 1,400 elementary and middle schools.
Paul Cothran, Save the Music's executive director, praises the efforts of Flea and other performers, but doesn't believe their generosity absolves public schools of their responsibility to provide arts education.
"As recently as two years ago, I was reading reports that there were still about 30 million students that lacked access to music programs. That's K through 12. There's still a lot of work to be done," he says.
Modern Music
If the Silverlake Conservatory of Music leans toward the traditional, the Black Eyed Peas' efforts are geared to the digital age. The Peapod Music & Arts Academy was launched in January with the debut of a $400,000 studio donated by the Peas to a foster kids and at-risk youth group at the Watts/Willowbrook Boys & Girls Club. But there are no violin or flute lessons at this school: The curriculum gives students access to Pro Tools digital audio workstations, video editing bays, cameras and more.
"We were, like, let's give them the same equipment we use to make our music, the same editing tools that we use and the same cameras we use to make our videos," says William Adams, better known as Will.I.Am, the Peas' rapper, producer and multi-instrumentalist.
Macy Gray's M.Gray Music Academy combines the old and new, offering after-school and weekend classes in disciplines ranging from jazz guitar and musical composition to "beginning turntable." Classes are offered in eight-week sessions at Gray's North Hollywood studio. The Peapod Academy classes are free, while both the M.Gray Music Academy and Silverlake Conservatory charge for lessons, but offer scholarships to eligible students. Silverlake managing director Jennifer Rey says approximately 100 students are on scholarship (that includes free instruments) and that number will increase to 150 next year.
The oldest of the schools is the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Ga., founded in 1997 by the slain rapper's mother, Afeni Shakur. The program started as a summer performing arts day camp for 25 middle school and high school students, who met in donated space at high schools and colleges. The center, which offers training in singing, acting, dancing, set design and poetry, now has its own facility on 11 acres and has expanded to a year-round after-school curriculum. Much of the teaching centers on Tupac's music and poetry. Last year Shakur launched a foundation in her son's name and is now attempting to raise $4 million to build a community performing arts facility. "Tupac pursued the performing arts as an alternative to life on the streets," Shakur said in a statement to The Post. "Forming the foundation and the center were my ways of guaranteeing that Tupac would be remembered as the man he really was, not as the character he often took on in his music."
As a 17-year-old student and mother, Celina Nixon participated in the Shakur Center's 2000 summer camp. Now 24, she is the center's artistic director and says the skills she gained at camp extended far beyond the artistic: "I learned it wasn't just about performance and who's a big star . . . Being a teenage mother, it gave me other things I could use," including knowledge about careers and finances.
That mirrors the mission the Black Eyed Peas have set for their academy -- to teach life lessons, not just music ones. They also aim to close the digital divide that exists between high-income and lower-income computer users. "The same tools that the people have in Beverly Hills are accessible to the people in the 'hood, but the people in the 'hood don't have the knowledge that they can do that," says Will.I.Am. "The new Steven Spielberg could live in Watts, but they don't know they can compete because there's not the technology in their schools."
The Peas' ambitious plan includes unveiling two more academies over the next two years (2008's will be in the East L.A. projects where Will.I.Am grew up) and then hatching up to four new Peapod schools a year via the Boys & Girls Clubs in inner cities throughout the United States and abroad, according to Will.I.Am.
Flea isn't talking yet about a nationwide program but believes all children deserve the chance to study music as he did. "Even a moderately simple understanding of music leads to a much richer life," he says. The famed bassist is too modest to declare that the Silverlake Conservatory will be his legacy, but is sure of one thing: "It's the best idea I ever had."
Friday, December 16, 2005
The Rock Star's Burden
December 15, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
The Rock Star's Burden
By PAUL THEROUX
Hale'iwa, Hawaii
THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself "Bono" - as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.
It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.
I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.
If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.
In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.
When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.
Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.
Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.
Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.
Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.
Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.
Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.
But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.
Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.
It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.
Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.
Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."
Op-Ed Contributor
The Rock Star's Burden
By PAUL THEROUX
Hale'iwa, Hawaii
THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself "Bono" - as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.
It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.
I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.
If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.
In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.
When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.
Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.
Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.
Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.
Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.
Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.
Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.
But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.
Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.
It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.
Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.
Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."
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