Sugar Ray Leonard vs Thomas Hearns 16 September 1981

Sugar Ray Leonard Vs Thomas Hearns - Boxing's Greats Duke It Out - The funniest videos clips are here

That Mushroom Cloud? They’re Just Svejking Around

One Sunday, several months ago, early risers gazing at Czech Television’s CT2 channel saw picturesque panoramas of the Czech countryside, broadcast to the wordless accompaniment of elevator music. It was the usual narcoleptic morning weather show.

Then came the nuclear blast.

Across the Krkonose Mountains, or so it appeared, a white flash was followed by the spectacle of a rising mushroom cloud. A Web address at the bottom of the screen said Ztohoven.com.

Ztohoven, to no one’s great surprise, turned out to be a collective of young artists and friends who had previously tinkered with a giant neon sculpture of a heart high atop Prague Castle, and managed (during a single night, no less) to insert announcements for an art opening inside all 750 lighted advertising boxes in the city’s subway system.

Now half a dozen members of the group face up to three years in jail or a fine or both, charged with scaremongering and attempted scaremongering. The trial is set for March. Some Czechs expressed outrage over Ztohoven’s action, naturally, but in general it drew a mild, tolerant, even amused public response, in contrast to how terrorism-related pranks, or what might seem like them, have been widely greeted elsewhere. The incident instead has highlighted an old Czech tradition of tomfoolery that is a particular matter of national cultural pride.

Not long ago a film that became a local hit, “Czech Dream,” documented a boondoggle by two young Czech filmmakers, who enlisted advertisers and publicists to devise a marketing scheme for a nonexistent supermarket. The movie’s goal, like Ztohoven’s, was to wag the dog: lampoon media manipulation and public gullibility. In the trailer hundreds of shoppers swarm a weedy field, rushing toward what they believe to be the store, which turns out to be a painted backdrop. The mushroom cloud, in a sense, upped the ante on the supermarket.

To hack into the CT2 broadcast, Ztohoven simply switched cables on an unmanned, remote camera at a limestone quarry in the mountains, which the artists had scouted three years earlier. Then they piped in their video. The name Ztohoven makes a pun in Czech that means both “out of it” and an obscenity. Rightly, the group presumed this would tip off viewers that the explosion was fake, in case they hadn’t already guessed it from the cheesy special effects.

Contrary to what the British press reported, no “War of the Worlds” panic ensued. So far as anyone can tell, not a single sleepy-eyed Czech viewer was frightened by the stunt, their lack of fear, the state attorney said, not being the explanation for the curious charge of “attempted” scaremongering. (The charge is a Czech legal fine point.)

As for exactly who the group’s members are, that remains something of a mystery, which Ztohoven theatrically guards. Even the state prosecutor said over the phone the other day it was private information until the trial. Nevertheless three members of the group — two amiable ringleaders and a quiet, sweet-faced 26-year-old who looked as if he were 12 — agreed to meet at an empty cafe over coffee and Coke. They declined to give their names. But they brought a film crew.

Turns out, Ztohoven includes no women. “That’s the problem of radicalism,” sighed the threesome’s 33-year-old elder statesman, who called himself Roman Tyc. (The pun works in English.) “To get together for pranks is also more difficult now that we’re getting into our 30s.”

His associate, in a pastel crewneck sweater, who gave his name as Zdenek Dostal, and whom the highly voluble Roman had a tendency to talk over, said the action on Czech Television, which Ztohoven titled “Media Reality,” was “not meant to be threatening but to land softly on the public consciousness so that people won’t let themselves be brainwashed.”

The artists just wanted to startle viewers “from their lethargy,” piped in the quietest member of the trio, Mira Slava (punningly, “peace and fame”). All three Ztohovenites recoiled at a description of an art project some years back entailing fake bombs left in a New York subway station, which briefly shut part of the city down.

Nothing really happened at all here, initially, anyway. Ladislav Sticha, the tall spokesman for Czech Television, told me that the show’s audience was “miniature” — presumably he meant small in number. Only a few people, among them perplexed hikers checking the weather before setting out for a Sunday stroll, called or sent e-mail messages to inquire.

But then Czech Television broadcast Ztohoven’s handiwork hour after hour on its numerous news programs, and the video soon landed on YouTube. By the next day all Europe knew about it.

“It’s not that we would not have supported this kind of art, if they had come to us,” Mr. Sticha added, somewhat abashed that, because Czech Television filed a complaint for breach of property, the affair ended up in court.

Hardly anyone here seems to want Ztohoven to receive more than a legal slap on the wrist, if that. Neither have fellow artists protested the trial in the streets, nor made a freedom of speech issue out of it. A literary weekly even mildly took Ztohoven to task for being a little too hungry for media attention.

On the other hand, the National Gallery in Prague last month awarded the group a prize. Milan Knizak, the National Gallery’s white-haired, pony-tailed director, himself an artist and one-time Czech Actionist, explained that the award was not a statement about the court case but given for the “directness” of “Media Reality.”

Back in the 1960s, Mr. Knizak added, he contrived to send hundreds of packages to a randomly chosen apartment building in Prague: “clothes, furniture, live fish, tickets to the movie theater.”

“No art was present” in that action, he went on. “It meant a change in the everyday life of everyday people. It didn’t take place in a gallery or museum, it just happened. Like love. You don’t reason why. It just is.”

Ztohoven’s work has a larger context, in other words. It belongs to a history of Czech literary and artistic mystification and sly, deadpan humor that is the expression of a small, underdog nation dominated for generations by outsiders, one after another. “The Good Soldier Svejk,” by Jaroslav Hasek, the famous Czech novel that is the masterpiece of this genre, tells of an idiot Candide, a hopeless orderly whose humanity throws into contrast a decaying empire.

“The Czech hero was no longer the nobleman but the poor, simple creature,” Mr. Knizak said about “Svejk,” “not Don Quixote but Sancho Panza.”

The book, it seems, even gave rise to a droll verb: “Because of the past, Austria, communism, fascism, someone always stepping on our necks, we have had no choice except to Svejk around,” Roman Tyc said about the general Czech psyche.

From Svejk’s example derived the fictional Jara da Cimrman, a kind of kitsch anti-Svejk, concocted by a group of writers and actors partly as a protest against authority during the communist era. In a country that claims no towering inventors or explorers, Cimrman became the quintessential Czech hero, a Zelig who trekked to the North Pole but missed it by several yards, who advised Chekhov, but failed to get credit. (“Two sisters?” he asked the Russian. “Isn’t that too few?”)

“It’s the difference between us and the Soviets,” Ladislav Smoljak, one of Cimrman’s creators, said one recent morning in his apartment, where an imitation Vermeer hung on the wall. “The oppression under which we lived was mostly mild so our reaction has been mild too. Mystification is a part of it.”

“Mystification is too strong a word,” Mr. Knizak, the gallery director, responded. “It’s more nebulous: important and unimportant at once, not aggressive, light, distant, not black humored. Czechs don’t start revolutions in the streets. We settle things over beer in pubs.”

Which, as it happened, was where Jiri Rak held forth the other night. A specialist in Czech smallness and a historian of culture, he summed up Ztohoven’s larger meaning in a neighborhood bar. “When people make fun of something, they are making themselves free of it,” he said. “That’s the condition of the small nation. It’s a defense for everyone today in the globalized world.

“I think the goal of Czech mystification is to show us that we live in a world continually mystifying us — the politicians, the advertisers.” He paused over his Pilsner, then raised the glass. “Thank God for Ztohoven.”

By Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times on 24 January, 2008

Mulatu Astatke

Mulatu Astatke is an Ethiopian musician and arranger. He is known as the father of Ethio-jazz. Born in 1943 in the western Ethiopian city of Jimma, Astatke was musically trained in London, New York City, and Boston, where he was the first African student at Berklee College of Music. He would later combine his jazz and Latin music influences with traditional Ethiopian music.

He has worked with many influential jazz artists such as Duke Ellington during the 1970s. After meeting the Massachusetts-based Either Orchestra in Addis Ababa in 2004, Mulatu began a collaboration with the band which continues today, with the most recent performances in Scandinavia in summer 2006.

In 2005, his music appeared on the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers. Also, Volume 4 of the Ethiopiques series is devoted entirely to his music. He has recently released an album sold exclusively to passengers of Ethiopian Airlines. It is a 2-disc set, the first one being a compilation of the different styles from different regions of Ethiopia, and the second being studio originals. Astatke has recently been invited to play at Harvard university to display and lecture on his wide range of musical infuences.

'72 World Championship

Bobby Fischer, Troubled Genius of Chess, Dies at 64

Bobby Fischer, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-bred genius who became one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, died Thursday in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was 64, and had for decades lived in obscurity, ultimately settling in Reykjavik after renouncing his American citizenship.

His death was confirmed Friday by Gardar Sverrisson, a close friend of Mr. Fischer’s. The cause was kidney failure, Mr. Sverrisson told wire services. Mr. Fischer was said to have been ill at home for some time before being admitted to the hospital on Wednesday.

Mr. Fischer was the most powerful American player in history, and the most enigmatic. After scaling the heights of fame, he all but dropped out of chess, losing money and friends and living under self-imposed exile in Budapest, Japan, possibly in the Philippines and Switzerland, and finally in Iceland, moving there in 2005 and becoming a citizen.

When he emerged now and then, it was sometimes on the radio, ranting in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and Jews. His rationality was questioned.

In 1992, he came out of a long seclusion for a $5 million rematch against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky. The match, in Yugoslavia, commemorated the 20th anniversary of the two men’s monumental meeting in Reykjavik and Mr. Fischer’s most glorious triumph. Mr. Fischer won the rematch handily, but it was a sad reprise of their face-off in the summer of 1972.

In that earlier encounter, Mr. Fischer wrested the world championship from the elegant Mr. Spassky to become the first and, as yet, only American to win the title, one that Soviet-born players had held for more than four decades. It was the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place.

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as aesthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, wrote in his 1973 book “Grandmasters of Chess.”

The rematch 20 years later drew no such plaudits. By participating, Mr. Fischer defied an American ban on conducting business in Yugoslavia as it waged war on Bosnia. After dispatching Mr. Spassky, Mr. Fischer dropped out of sight again, partly to avoid arrest on American charges stemming from his appearance. He stayed in touch with a dwindling number of friends in the United States by phone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection.

In 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane to Manila and accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months while the various governments and his supporters in the chess world tried to resolve the issue.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews with a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were “wonderful news.” He wished for a time, he said, “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

Even in his years of triumph, Mr. Fischer was volatile and difficult. During the 1972 world championship match against Mr. Spassky, Mr. Fischer’s petulance, even loutishness, was the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whir of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted that the remaining games be played in an isolated room.

There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½ to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point for each player, a draw a half-point.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

Through July and most of August 1972, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television.

All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer — the rebel, the enfant terrible, the uncompromising savage of the chess board — had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States, the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when the championship match was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize had been $1,400.

Trouble With Celebrity

Mr. Fischer’s victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph of democracy over communism, and it turned the new champion into an unlikely American hero. He was invited to the White House by President Richard M. Nixon, interviewed on television, wooed unsuccessfully by commercial interests. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons.

But Mr. Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird, contrarian solitude he maintained more or less for the rest of his life. He turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran offered even larger sums for matches in their countries. Mr. Fischer said the money was not enough.

At the same time, he tithed to the Worldwide Church of God, a fringe church he had become involved with beginning in the early 1960s. (He later abandoned it.) For a time, Mr. Fischer lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or in Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of his finances was never clear.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock. He began railing to other chess players that computers had ruined the mystery of chess. He advocated a variation on the game in which pieces on the back rank, at the start, are lined up randomly.

A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 — Mr. Fischer was a demanding personality (charismatic to some, merely infuriating to others) who seemed to feel that his prowess in chess entitled him to exorbitant privilege. He demanded loyalty from his supporters, concessions from his opponents, special treatment from tournament organizers and unalloyed respect from the world at large.

It was an outlook that became ever more skewed. In the end his self-involvement was his undoing, isolating him from all but the most obsequious chess-world worshipers.

Introduction to the Game

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. While his father was variously listed as Gerard, Gerhard or Gerhardt Fischer, a German-born physicist, there is also credible evidence that his father might have been a Hungarian émigré who worked in a naval research laboratory.

He and his wife, the former Regina Wender, divorced when Bobby was 2. Shortly thereafter, the elder Mr. Fischer left the United States for good, and Bobby and his older sister, Joan, were reared by their mother, a Swiss-born registered nurse and schoolteacher.

Regina Fischer moved her family first to California and then to Arizona before settling in a Brooklyn walkup, where Bobby grew up. The strong-willed Mrs. Fischer, who would become a forceful advocate of pacifist causes, had an uneven influence on her willful son. When he was a teenager, she tried to dissuade him from concentrating solely on chess. But she also helped raise money for him to compete in tournaments.

Mrs. Fischer was Jewish, and her son developed a hatred of Jews that became more virulent as he grew older. But mother and son evidently kept in touch over the years, and when she died in 1997, Mr. Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister died soon afterward, and acquaintances of Mr. Fischer speculated that the two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. He never married, but had a daughter, Jinky Ong, in 2000 with a companion, Justine Ong, in Manila. The child is his only immediate survivor.

It was his sister, Joan, who bought Bobby, then age 6, his first chess set and taught him the basic moves. By 8 he was taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club; by 12 he was holding his own among America’s strongest players, who gathered at the Manhattan Chess Club and the Marshall Chess Club. His adult opponents called him “the Boy Robot” and “the Corduroy Killer,” for his unwavering wardrobe and insatiable will to win.

In 1956, when he was 13, Mr. Fischer became the youngest player ever to win the United States Junior Championship. The same year, at the Lessing J. Rosenwald Trophy Tournament, the most important invitational tournament in the country at the time, he created his first masterpiece in defeating the international master Donald Byrne. The Chess Review called it “The Game of the Century,” as it is still known today.

The next year he not only repeated as winner of the United States Junior Championship but also captured the first of his eight United States Championships, becoming at 14 the youngest person ever to hold the title. No less impressive was the manner of his victory — in 13 games against the best players in America, he had a score of 8 wins, 5 draws and no losses.

The next year he became, at 15, the youngest person until then to attain the rank of grandmaster, the game’s highest designation of skill. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but, indifferent to classes because they took time away from chess, he dropped out at 16.

Aggressive, and ‘Brilliant’

At the chessboard he was renowned as a pitiless attacker. “I love to see them squirm,” he said of his opponents. From early on, he buttressed his penchant for original thinking with monumental study and he became known for his mastery of the game’s literature.

He favored strategies like the King’s Gambit, an opening maneuver in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack. It had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic. But Mr. Fischer used it in spectacular fashion during the 1964 United States Championship in a game against the grandmaster Larry Evans. It was part of perhaps the greatest tournament performance ever, in which Mr. Fischer won 11 games, losing and drawing none. “He blew the chess world away,” said the chess teacher and writer Bruce Pandolfini.

The 1964 tournament also produced another of his legendary games, this one against the grandmaster Robert Byrne.

“It was one of his brilliant counterattacks,” recalled Mr. Byrne, who would go on to become the chess columnist for The New York Times. “He was playing Black, and he made a deep sacrifice, so deep that I did not understand it. It was a very profound combination, very beautiful.”

Mr. Byrne ended up resigning the game while he was still materially ahead. The result was so unusual that it confounded grandmasters analyzing the games for spectators.

Moving Beyond Eccentric

Mr. Fischer had always been brash, but by the early 1960s his self-regard had ballooned. He told Harper’s magazine that women could not be great chess players. Mr. Byrne recalled that at a tournament in Bulgaria in 1962 he suggested to Mr. Fischer that he see a psychiatrist. Mr. Fischer said a psychiatrist ought to pay him for the privilege of working on his brain.

He began making outlandish demands on tournament directors — for special lighting, special seating, special conditions to ensure quiet. He complained that opponents were trying to poison his food, that his hotel rooms were bugged, that Russians were colluding at tournaments and prearranging draws. He began to fear flying because he thought the Russians might hide booby traps on the plane.

He played less and less, withdrawing from competition for months at a time, fueling gossip that he was afraid to lose, but always returning to play at a level no one could equal. At one point, before the Spassky match in Reykjavik, he won 20 consecutive games against grandmasters. He also completed “My 60 Memorable Chess Games” (1969), a classic collection that remains required reading for serious players.

He earned his shot at the world champion, Mr. Spassky, when he soundly defeated another Russian, Tigran Petrosian. Now, in Reykjavik, Mr. Fischer had a world stage, and he seized the spotlight with his 6-foot-2 frame — broad-shouldered, angular and fit in bespoke suits — casting an imposing shadow.

He was imperious and, to some, insufferable. In the days before the match, he threatened to not show up and delayed his departure from New York. He insisted on television coverage, then refused to play for the cameras because he said he could hear them. He lost the first game on a blunder, then forfeited Game 2; then he threatened to withdraw entirely unless Mr. Spassky agreed to move play to a small room, away from the audience.

“He drove the organizers of the tournament to despair,” Fred Waitzkin wrote in “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” his 1988 book about the chess world, which became the basis for a 1993 movie.
In the end, though, Mr. Fischer was brilliant in Reykjavik, and when it was over, he was a legend: the American who beat the Russians at their own game.

During the match he had allowed a reporter for Life magazine, Brad Darrach, to spend time with him. Mr. Darrach produced a favorable article for the magazine but followed it with a biography, “Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World,” which portrayed Mr. Fischer as a monomaniac and a monster.

Mr. Fischer brought suit, and after a long battle, he lost. By then he had received a fresh blow from the chess establishment. The International Chess Federation (known by its French acronym as FIDE) stripped him of his title in 1975 when he refused to play the rightful challenger, Anatoly Karpov, under federation rules. His life had begun its downward spiral. After an unsuccessful lawsuit against members of the Worldwide Church, he was apparently broke and homeless.

“The rare accounts of his situation all mention cheap rooms in Pasadena and L.A., months of his crashing on former friends and days spent riding the orange city bus between L.A. and Pasadena, analyzing chess games on his pocket set,” Ivan Solotaroff wrote in Esquire magazine in 1992.

Chess players generally think that Mr. Fischer agreed to the 1992 Spassky match for the money. But the opportunity to reassert his primacy was apparently attractive as well. The games were played in a surreal atmosphere in Sveti Stefan, a resort in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, just a few miles from the bloody warfare then raging in Bosnia. The $5 million purse was put up by a Serbian wheeler-dealer named Jezdimir Vasiljevic.

Although the match was unsanctioned, a banner was put up proclaiming it to be the world chess championship. At a press conference, Mr. Fischer held up a letter from the Treasury Department warning him that his participation in the match, considered an economic project, would constitute defiance of American sanctions against Yugoslavia. He would be subject to fine and arrest, he was told. In front of more than 150 reporters, he spat on the letter and ranted on against Jews and Russians.

Decades after Mr. Fischer faded into his oblivion, stories of Fischer sightings were traded as currency by chess players, and the debate — how would he have fared against Garry Kasparov, the great champion of the 1980s and 1990s? — echoed at tournaments and in chess publications.
“After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art,” said Mr. Pandolfini, the chess teacher, “hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being. We feel the great loss. All chess players do.”

Bruce Weber New York Times 19 January, 2008.

Graham Bowley also contributed reporting.

Martin Luther King in Memphis

Martin Luther's (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) last speech in Memphis before being assasinated on the balcony of the Hotel Lorraine the next day.

Can I Get an Amen?

In 1950, as the gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe was preparing for a guest performance on Perry Como’s television show, “The Chesterfield Supper Club,” she was instructed to climb into a horse-drawn wagon and sing “White Christmas” while simulating a country hayride. The Rosettes, her backing group, were told to wear bandannas. Tharpe objected to this latter indignity — not an easy thing to do for a veteran singer hungering for a large audience — and the Rosettes eventually performed without the demeaning bandannas. As Gayle F. Wald demonstrates in “Shout, Sister, Shout!,” a short, absorbing biography, this was just one of many instances in which the expectations of the entertainment industry and the aspirations of this genre-defying artist were painfully out of sync.

Though the success Rosetta Tharpe attained during her four-decade career was largely in gospel music, she is most admired for her feisty R&B guitar playing. Listen to a few piquant licks from her 1938 Decca recordings, and the sonic vernacular of rock ’n’ roll is sharply apparent. Yet, though her upbeat music and charismatic performance style attracted adherents like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, Tharpe is only lately being accorded her rightful place in rock history.

The R&B charts of the 1940s attest to her popularity, and songs like the rollicking “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (1945) provide evidence of her show-stealing talent. But Tharpe’s career, which shuttled between sacred and secular modes, never settled into a niche that would have made her an avatar of any one musical moment. The music press could never quite place her either, inventing descriptions that complemented her honorific, like “holy roller singer” and “hymnswinger.”

In the 1940s, when big bands were hiring pretty girls with sweet voices to bob over their beats, Tharpe fronted Lucky Millinder’s raucous swing outfit with gutsy force. In the late 1950s, when blues revivalists prized rootsy growls and acoustic guitar twangs, she happily shouted praises over electric riffs. And when early rock historians reached back to trace the form’s lineage, this middle-aged lady cheerily shouting and soloing in front of robed choirs didn’t quite fit their secular, guitar-as-phallus ideal.

Rosetta Tharpe’s story, salvaged here by Wald, a professor of English at George Washington University, is very much a woman’s story, refreshingly free of Svengalis and impresarios. Her picaresque journey from Pentecostal child prodigy in Cotton Plant, Ark., to preteen phenom on Chicago’s church circuit to Cotton Club darling to one of gospel’s first recording stars is constantly surprising.

In Wald’s previous book, “Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture,” an academic examination of racial construction, she showed a taste for the messiness and necessary creativity at the margins of American cultural life. This interest helps her parse Tharpe’s musical contradictions and sensitively explore touchy issues like the hymnswinger’s rumored bisexuality, which some in her circle deny. The author finds humor and pathos in the tale of Tharpe’s third marriage — a publicity stunt worthy of reality TV, staged on the field of Griffith Stadium in Washington and followed by a concert performed by Tharpe in her wedding dress.

Absent the personal recollections of Tharpe, who died in 1973 at the age of 58, the book relies on intimates and musical heavyweights, from her singing partner Marie Knight to the gospel singer Willa Ward-Royster of the Ward Singers to Isaac Hayes. Count Basie’s trumpeter Sweets Edison recounts her scorching performance for “From Spirituals to Swing,” a groundbreaking 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall. And of Tharpe’s guitar prowess, Jeannette Eason, the wife of the steel guitarist Willie Eason, offers the assessment, “Rosetta got her man in her hand,” an elucidation that beats any cultural-studies jargon outright.

Of course, fellow musicians also give more sobering accounts of the obstacles confronted by this resourceful woman, whose livelihood depended on wowing affluent whites at the Cotton Club and touring the Jim Crow South in a cramped bus that doubled as diner and hotel. But the hard-earned joy of Tharpe’s ascent, which comes through in her music, regularly drowns out the heartbreak. Archival clips on YouTube support anecdotes like the one told by her fellow Apollo performer Inez Andrews, who remembers Sam Cooke chiding guitarists after they shared a stage with Tharpe: “Man, I wouldn’t let a woman outplay me!” Maybe not, but now they’ll all have to move over a step or two to make room for the good Sister’s big break into the canon of rock and soul legends.

By Laura Singra New York Times March 18, 2007

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Up Above My Head

The World's Worst Airports

Keeping with our theme of dodgy airports, my friend Dr Newman recently sent me a consolidated list of the world's worst airports. Some beauties here. Special mention goes to Mineralnye Vody Airport, which earlier this year was profiled on this blog - a lower circle than hell. Nice.

Hate flying? You are not alone. But often, it's not the crowded, overly air-conditioned airplanes themselves that are the problem: Just getting on and off the plane is the real nightmare. For this week's List, Foreign Policy looks at five airports around the world that make traveling hell.

Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport

Location: Dakar, Senegal

Firsthand account: There is only squalor, an unnerving sense of confinement, and to some extent danger. Patrick Smith, Salon.com, May 25, 2007

Why it's so bad: Because its standing room only. As a regional hub, an ordeal at Senghor is often unavoidable for travelers to West Africa. Once you're in the terminal, don't plan on relaxing: There are no seats, and guards will advise you to stop loitering if you hang around in one spot too long. Immigration lines can take up to three hours. And in any event, it's best to keep moving since you can expect to be surrounded by vendors selling counterfeit goods and unofficial porters who will pressure you into hiring their services if you happen to come to a standstill. But the good news is that help may be on the way. The Senegalese government has begun construction on a new airport set to open in 2010, which will double the country's air passenger capacity. No word yet on whether the new terminal will actually have chairs.

Indira Gandhi International Airport

Location: New Delhi, India

Firsthand account: Of all the regional capital airports this one takes the cake¦ a piece of crap ... bring the bug spray. Anonymous commenter, The Budget Traveller's Guide to Sleeping in Airports, Dec 11, 2005

Why it's so bad: Because it's sheer chaos. The IT boomtowns of Hyderabad and Bangalore have built shiny new airports in recent years, but old standbys like New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport have failed to benefit from India's economic expansion. Visitors report aggressive panhandlers, filthy bathrooms where attendants charge for toilet paper, and used syringes on the terminal floor. The main terminal building was even closed to visitors for a few months in 1999 after a flight from Nepal was hijacked. Things have hopefully gotten a little safer since an Australian tourist was murdered by a taxi driver leaving IGIA in 2004, prompting the Indian government to form a special tourist police force. But there's still a danger of things going slightly awry: In 2005, an act of sabotage in an ongoing feud between cable television providers led to a pornographic film appearing on the airport's television monitors. Let's just hope it provided a much-needed respite from CNN International.

Mineralnye Vody Airport

Location: Mineralnye Vody, Russia

Firsthand account: Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. The Economist, Dec. 19, 2006

Why it's so bad: Because nobody told Mineralnye Vody that the Soviet Union is no more. Most of Russia's airports have come a long way since the bad old days of communism, as new construction at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport attests. Competition from increasingly popular Domodedovo International Airport finally induced its cross-town rival to build two new terminals including cafes, electronic displays, and a new train service. But Mineralnye Vody, in a war-torn region of the Caucasus not far from the Chechen border, remains a stubborn throwback, right down to the large map of the Soviet Union that hangs in the departure hall. The airport seems to have earned a special place in the hearts of Russia's foreign journalists, including the BBC's Steve Rosenberg, who wrote in 2005,"Rather worryingly there's a man selling Caucasian swords and daggers in the departure lounge and opposite him, over on the wall, is a list of local criminals wanted for murder." Other amenities include snow and ice inside the terminal, feral cats wandering around, and Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra in the gift shop.

Baghdad International Airport

Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Firsthand account: Before jumping out of your seat to complain to the pilot, consider the good news: You've just avoided being shot down by a missile. Alan T. Duffin, Air & Space magazine, Oct./Nov. 2006

Why it's so bad: Because it's in a war zone. The Baghdad International experience begins before you even touch the runway. That;s when you're treated to the stomach-churning effects of a Vietnam-era landing technique known as the corkscrew, used to avoid projectiles like the shoulder-fired missile that took down a DHL Airbus cargo plane in November 2003. The corkscrew involves an abrupt roll during final approach that twists into a spiraling, straight-down descent until the plane flattens out and lands at what feels like the last possible moment before crash landing. The terminal at the former Saddam International Airport is itself apparently not that bad, having been refurbished after the war by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Homesick American troops can even chow down at a food court featuring Burger King and Pizza Hut. But that feeling of comfort ends abruptly after leaving the airport, as visitors have to brave the infamous highway of death between the airport and downtown Baghdad.

Charles de Gaulle International Airport

Location: Paris, France

Firsthand account: Charles de Gaulle is a disgrace¦ it's like a third-world airport. Michel-Yves Labba, president of French travel company Directours, Aug. 14, 2007

Why it's so bad: Because a city this great with an airport this bad is just plain embarrassing. It may not have surface-to-air missiles or feral cats, but visitors to Paris should expect more than the grimy terminals, rude staff, confusing layout, and overpriced food that they;ll find at Europe's second-busiest hub. Charles de Gaulle's most recent attempt at modernization, the construction of futuristic terminal ”you might remember it from U2's Beautiful Day video”led to tragedy when its roof collapsed in 2004, killing four people. In June, President Nicolas Sarkozy opened a new facility capable of handling up to six Airbus superjumbos at one time, or about 8.5 million passengers per year. Normally, such a move would be welcome, but CDG already boasts eight terminals and handled 57 million passengers in 2006. Making the airport bigger only makes the problem worse.

Drogin on Curveball

In a very clever and disciplined campaign, Kevin Rudd
effectively articulated a vision for Australia. After
11 years of divisive and calculated political
manoeuvrings, John Howard was unable to find a
'Rovian' wedge to derail the ALP campaign.

Rudd's instinct was that Australians were beginning to
awake from 11 years of prosperity and question what it
all meant. He was correct. In calling for new
leadership, he minimised policy differences on issues
that were Howard's traditional strengths - national
security (including Australian deployments in Iraq and
Afghanistan), economic policy, government spending,
indigenous affairs and immigration. This strategy of
"me tooism" flustered Howard, who in past campaigns
had mercilessly picked apart ALP policy initiatives.

Facing a confused and hapless Howard campaign, Rudd
clinically stuck to his core themes of mortgage
stress, climate change, hospital bed shortages, and an
education revolution. Importantly, Rudd also
campaigned doggedly on rolling back unpopular work
place relations legislation that many saw as a further
erosion of the Australian gospel known as ‘the fair
go’. Economic growth and low unemployment are all well
and good, but many people's perception was that
Australia had evolved into a meaner and less
egalitarian society.

Another important element in Howard’s defeat was an
ongoing and combustible leadership debate within his
own political party. Having declined to gracefully
retire from politics a year before following an
unsuccessful challenge to his leadership, Howard
authored an unworkable transition arrangement with
Peter Costello. Despite being a competent and youthful
senior minister responsible for much of Australia’s
resource fuelled economic boom, Costello was a
divisive figure both within the Liberal Party and the
Australian public. The electorate was never able to
reconcile Howard’s announcement that if returned to
power he would retire and hand over the reins of power
to Costello.

Rudd exploited this indeterminate decision endlessly.
He goaded his opponent by asking how was it that
Howard was unveiling new policies about the future of
Australia, when he was publicly outlining succession
plans for the unpopular Costello. Howard never
successfully bridged this dilemma. The outcome was an
all too apparent contrast between a crisp almost
presidential style ALP campaign focussed on 'new
leadership', and a confused, negative, and ageing
Liberal message that shifted as the campaign
progressed.

Much and more will be written about this election. It
ushers in a new epoch in Australian politics. While
brilliant tactical campaigning by Rudd partly explains
the end result, an Australian Prime Minister does not
get thrown out of his own parliamentary seat (an event
that has only happened once before in 1929) unless
something deeper is at play. It is clear that the
Australian public wanted and sought political renewal.
A youthful and shrewd Rudd answered their call.

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings :: 100 Days, 100 Nights

Nun who nurtured reggae

Bar the odd dent - such as the depiction in the film The Magdalene Sisters of cruelty in their now-defunct Irish orphanages and laundries - the reputation of the Catholic Order of the Sisters of Mercy is of 200 years of good deeds in some of the most underprivileged areas of the world.

Less well known, and more bizarre, is that this order of nuns is also partly responsible for the birth of reggae music.

The sisters had already been working in Kingston, Jamaica, for 12 years when they founded the Alpha Boys' School in 1892. Its purpose was to house and educate "wayward boys", most of them from backgrounds of dire poverty.

With instruments donated by a benefactor, a drum and fife corps was set up, which as the years passed became a martial brass band. By the mid-20th century, the connection with military music was still a constant, but the Alpha Boys' bandmasters were increasingly influenced by swing and jazz.

"Without the school, there just wouldn't have been the blossoming of talent on the island in the key period of the '60s and '70s," says Laurence Cane-Honeysett, a music consultant to reggae label Trojan Records, who has compiled the excellent album Alpha Boys' School: Music in Education 1910-2006. "When the Jamaican music industry took off, it was totally dependent on those who studied there."

A quartet of Alpha alumni, Tommy McCook, Johnny "Dizzy" Moore, Lester Sterling and the celebrated trombonist Don Drummond, were founder members of the Skatalites, and, as such, co-creators of Jamaica's first indigenous pop music. Reggae would eventually bloom from these roots at Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd's hugely influential Studio One, all built on horn sections featuring Alpharians.

Another old boy, Winston "Sparrow" Martin, has been the school's bandleader for the past 18 years, having also worked with artists from Otis Redding to Bob Marley. He attributes the sound of Marley's original '60s versions of Stir It Up and One Love to ex-Alpha musicians.

Martin well recalls life at the school in the '50s. "We worked six days a week," he says. "Some boys were on the morning shift, some on the evening shift; those on the morning shift would go to band practice in the evening, and those on the evening shift would go to band practice in the morning."

Despite the strict discipline, the school's musical reputation was such that trumpeter "Dizzy" Moore faked tantrums just so his parents would be forced to send him there.

There were, of course, times when the children weren't so willing to buckle down to work. "I was one of the boys who used to try to escape practice," Martin says, laughing. "There was a tree they used to have by the name of the monkey puzzle tree, and I climbed up this tree, hid up this tree.

"Rain was falling when Sister Ignatius found me and said, 'Come out the tree, you naughty little sparrow. What will your mother do if you stay there and drown?' From that day until now, that name is mine - 'sparrow'."

Sister Mary Ignatius Davies perhaps best encapsulates the spirit of the school. She joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1939, aged 18, and remained at Alpha until her death in 2003, but it was her devotion to the music programme for which she is remembered. Hard as it is to imagine, this nun also ran sound-system dances at the weekends, where she would spin records from her vast collection.

"Sister Ignatius preferred secular music to anything," says Sister Susan Frazier, the school's current director. "She was really a blues fan, and loved jazz music.

"In the early days in Jamaica, whenever there was any significant event such as a hurricane or earthquake, a 45rpm record would immediately be cut about it. Iggy, as she was affectionately known, would send out a couple of boys to buy these records. She had an expansive collection, which eventually went to the Seattle music museum."

Don Drummond's 1964 number Eastern Standard Time was Sister Ignatius's favourite piece of music - and a key moment in ska's development. And as the Alpha Boys' School album runs in chronological order, it's possible to trace the astonishing musical impact of Drummond and his fellow Skatalites.

Proceedings open with '50s British jazz recordings by Alpharians such as Joe Harriott and Dizzy Reece, but as the school's graduates develop their sound such music gives way to something far rootsier and uniquely Jamaican.

It seems that nuns - and a boys' brass band - inadvertently helped release the spirit of one of the most musical islands in the world.

'Alpha Boys' School: Music in Education 1910-2006' is out now on Trojan Records.

Article by Thomas H Green Telegraph 12/01/2006

Writing Desk

Artist: Schulim Krimper

Birth/Death: 1893–1971

European refugees and immigrants with design and crafts skills found a small but dedicated clientele among those seeking to reflect in their homes a sense of the prosperity of the period and a connection to contemporary European design. Schulim Krimper used his formidable craftsmanship and an enthusiasm for exotic and Australian native timbers to make luxurious modern furniture, such as this writing desk. With its organic and clearly expressed structure, his furniture shared the same qualities as the more innovative domestic architecture of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Paradise Garage and Larry Levan

Loss and Gain

When I compare

What I have lost with what I have gained,

What I have missed with what attained,

Little room do I find for pride.

I am aware

How many days have been idly spent;

How like an arrow the good intent

Has fallen short or been turned aside.

But who shall dare To measure loss and gain in this wise?

Defeat may be victory in disguise;

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Latest Solidstate Los Angeles Mix

[click on image to download podcast]

Sureshot Symphony - Sweet Calypso Disco Pon City Of Frisco

Timewarp inc. feat. Emma - Afrofunk

Quantic Soul Orchestra w/ Noelle Scaggs - Lead Us To The End

The Bongolian - The Champion

Free the Robots - Jazzhole

Casbah 73 - Pushin Forty

Woolfy - Odyssey

Omar - Stylin (with Angie Stone)

Build an Ark - You Gotta Have Freedom (J Rocc mix)

Sureshot Symphony - I Like Movin', I Like Goovin

AIFF - Akwaaba (Diesler remix feat. Laura Vane)

Ohmega Watts feat. Tita Lima - Adaptacao

J-Live - The Incredible

Modaji - Don't Explain

Sureshot Symphony - Jah Makes the World Go Round

Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band - Ease Back

Mother Earth - Time of the Future

Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators - My 4 Leaf Clover (Dynamics Remix)

Border Crossing and Ricky Ranking - City of Love

Yam Yam - Bittersweet

Black Spade - Say So

NPR Jazz Profile Wes Montgomery

[click on image to listen to radio jazz prolife]

The jazz guitar of Wes Montgomery, deemed "the biggest, warmest, fattest sound on record," still reverberates today, nearly forty years after his death. The most influential, widely admired jazz guitarist since Charlie Christian's heyday, Wes re-invented the instrument with his thumb-plucking technique, his innovative approach to playing octaves, and his inventive, masterful execution of complex lines. In the short span of a 9 year recording career as a leader, his name became synonymous with the jazz guitar.

Despite the sophistication of his technique, Wes had no formal musical education. Born on March 6th, 1923 in Indianapolis, Wes grew up making music with his brothers, several of whom also became professional musicians. Electric bass guitarist Monk Montgomery recalls buying his brother his first guitar, a four-string tenor, on which 12-year-old Wes demonstrated immediate proficiency. Wes learned by jamming with his brothers and by emulating Charlie Christian, who inspired Wes to pursue jazz guitar professionally.

After his first big-time gig, touring with Lionel Hampton's band, Wes returned home to Indianapolis, where he worked days to support his growing family and played guitar in local bars all night. Meanwhile, Wes' brothers were enjoying some degree of success with their group, the Mastersounds, and they invited Wes to record with them to gain the gifted guitarist greater exposure. Sure enough, word spread and soon musicians like Cannonball and Nat Adderley were flocking to the Missile Room to witness the new sensation. Riverside Records producer Orin Keepnews was blown away by Wes' virtuosity and signed him on for 25 sessions. Wes' second album, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, earned him Downbeat magazine's "New Star" award in 1960.

Wes' lush, inimitable sound was a product of his unusual stylistic approach. Guitarist Lee Ritenour explains how Wes played with his thumb as opposed to a pick, freeing himself from rhythmic constraints and typical phrasing. According to Wes, thumb-plucking and his technique of "playing two notes at the same time an octave apart" were both accidental revelations. While Wes was not the only guitarist to utilize the octave approach, he did so with incomparable "freedom and fluidity," and the technique "became one of his trademarks."

When Riverside Records went bankrupt, Creed Taylor of Verve Records signed the acclaimed guitarist, steering his career in a different direction. Although Wes recorded a few straight jazz albums with Verve, including his triumphant Smokin' at the Half Note, Taylor sought to bring Wes' music to a broader audience, convincing him to cover the R&B hit, "Goin' Out of My Head." The album, which earned Wes a Grammy Award, was his ticket to "crossing over" and made a name for him on the pop scene, enabling him to support his wife and seven children.

To the chagrin of jazz purists, Wes did not record another jazz album after 1965. However, in concert, as critic Gary Giddins attests, Wes continued to improvise stunning solos until his death of a heart attack in 1968. In a remarkably brief time frame, Wes Montgomery, a kind, modest man and a magnificent musician, left a legacy of enormous distinction to the jazz community.

NPR.org, September 26, 2007

Don't Mess With The Coens' Texas

[click on image to view trailer]

"In Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else," explains M. Emmet Walsh in the voiceover that opened the Coen brothers' first film, Blood Simple. "That's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you're on your own." Made for less than two million dollars in 1984, the fierce, meticulous thriller launched not only the Coens' career, but, to a significant degree, the neo-noir revival and the modern indie movement. Yet it has taken a dozen films and nearly two dozen years for the Coens to return their attention to the lawless byways of the Lone Star state. We may be forgiven for wondering what's taken them so long.

In Blood Simple and their second film, the geographically eponymous Raising Arizona, the Coens demonstrated a deep affinity for the parched land and distant horizons of the American Southwest, for trailer parks and shabby motels and highways that go on forever. The wide open spaces suit their cinematic vision, with its emphasis on stark, simple compositions. They experimented with an arctic variation on this setting in Fargo, but otherwise have confined themselves to the urban Northeast (Miller's Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy), Deep South (O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Ladykillers), and California (Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty), visually busy locales that have served as backdrops for ever busier movies, stuffed with chatter and steeped in irony.

In No Country for Old Men, the Coens are at last reunited with the Texas mesa, and one can almost hear a long-held breath being slowly exhaled. This is an austere and purposeful film, as laconic as the brothers' recent comedies were verbose, with only a few twinges of music here and there to distract from the sound of a dry wind blowing or boots scraping across crusted earth. At last, the Coens are taking their time.

Their reward is what is likely the best film of their career and certainly their best in many years. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is a crime film, but also a meditation on chance and destiny, on growing old and on dying young. Like Blood Simple, it is a film in which wrongs are done and there is precious little anyone can do to make them right again. And like Blood Simple, it begins with an older man's voiceover, though in this case one more rueful than ruthless. "I was sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old," begins Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), reminiscing about friendlier days, when some lawmen didn't even carry guns. "The crime we see now, it's hard even to take its measure," he continues. "I don't want to push my chips in and go out and meet something I don't understand."

We meet just such a something moments later, when Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a dead-eyed drifter with a Beatles mop-top, is arrested and taken to a police station by a young, unlucky patrolman. When Chigurh subsequently strangles him, the scuff marks from his frantic, dying kicks radiate out across the floor like an exploding sun. Chigurh helps himself to a police cruiser and, pulling over a motorist, asks, "Will you please hold still, sir." He then calmly uses a cattle gun to punch a hole through the man's forehead as neat and round as a half-dollar. This is clearly not someone with whom you want to push your chips in.

We next encounter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), drawing a rifle bead on a herd of antelope in the Texas scrub. "You hold still," he echoes Chigurh, another hunter addressing his prey. Moss misses his antelope but finds something else: A collection of bullet-ridden trucks and bodies, evidence of a drug deal gone very badly wrong. A short hike from the carnage, Moss finds something more interesting still: another dead man and, at his feet, a briefcase containing two million dollars. Moss decides to take it, and his die is cast. As he later explains to his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), "Baby, things happen. I can't take 'em back."

From here, the film unfolds as a chase, though one conducted at a measured pace. Moss hits the road with his case full of cash, and Chigurh is hired to find him, as are sundry Mexican enforcers and a slightly dandyish cowboy named Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson). Jones's avuncular Sheriff Bell hopes to track Moss down, too, if only to rescue him from the fate that will certainly befall him if Chigurh catches him first.

Bardem is a marvel as the implacable Chigurh, a killer at once casual and calculated. I would be tempted to describe him as the most indelible monster to stalk the big screen since Hannibal Lecter, but it seems unfair to compare his performance to Anthony Hopkins's thick slice of ham. Bardem's villain is more original and more understated: Though there is clearly a diabolical intelligence behind his murderousness, he feels little need to share it. Amusing himself is enough; why bother amusing anyone else when they will soon be dead anyway? Even the few words he speaks seem to be swallowed when they are halfway out of his mouth. Chigurh is simultaneously less than human and more, a blunt instrument and a philosophical ideal.

Jones picks up where he left off in In the Valley of Elah. Like Hank Deerfield in that film, his Sheriff Bell is a man of formidable capacity who nonetheless knows that his best days are behind him. The difference is that Bell begins with the knowledge that Deerfield attains only at the end of his journey: that there are evils in the world too unrelenting to be pushed from their courses, unhappy fates than cannot be denied. Jones's lined face conveys pride and acumen, as always. But there's a weary patience as well, as if each crease and fold his features have accumulated contains a lesson he might rather not have learned.

As Moss, Brolin delivers easily the best performance of his breakout year. After two decades of consistent but largely under-the-radar work, Brolin is suddenly everywhere: Grindhouse, In the Valley of Elah, American Gangster, and now the lead role here. (I'm not sure how it is that he abruptly became so indispensable, though I imagine it has something to do with the moustache. Perhaps his Dad, James, advised him on the professional compensations of facial hair?) The role of Moss is a challenging one: Brolin has long stretches without dialogue, and when he does speak, it's often to himself, the half-grunted conclusion--"Yeah," "There just ain't no way"--of an internal conversation to which we have not been privy. Yet Brolin manages to embody Moss despite the lack of exposition, to convey the ego of a man who's been underestimated by others for so long that he's come to overestimate himself.

As for the Coens, No Country for Old Men carries echoes of many of their past successes: Blood Simple, surely, and Fargo, another somber noir featuring a cop who functions less as enforcer than as moral compass, an observer of the hurts men inflict on one another for "a little money." But there are less obvious cousins, too, such as Raising Arizona, whose "lone biker of the apocalypse," Leonard Smalls, is the comic twin of Chigurh. (As Nicholas Cage described the former, "I didn't know where he came from or why. I don't know if he was dream or vision. But I feared that I myself had unleashed him.") There are even hints in Sheriff Bell of Sam Elliot's cowboy-narrator in The Big Lebowski.

But even as No Country for Old Men recalls past Coen brothers films, it represents something new. Though they have mined literary sources in the past (Hammett for Miller's Crossing, Homer for O Brother), this is the Coens' first true adaptation. And while their trademark flourishes still appear--the meticulous compositions (a pickup on a hill silhouetted against the night sky), the ominously amplified sounds (a candy wrapper uncrinkling, a light bulb being unscrewed), the snatches of absurdist dialogue ("You get a lot of people who come in here with no clothes on?" "No, it's unusual")--they are anchored to something weightier. McCarthy's ferocious tale gives the Coens room to unleash their cinematic gifts, but keeps them from wandering too far afield and losing themselves in the marshes of technical prowess or easy irony.

The result is a masterpiece, a film by turns harrowing and contemplative. There are moments when it is difficult to stay in one's seat--a scene in which Moss is chased down a river by a dog-paddling pit bull; a hotel encounter with Chigurh that is as extraordinary an exercise in sustained suspense as I can recall--and moments when it feels hard to get up out of it. Like the novel, the film ends on one of these latter moments, with the recounting of a dream. It is a dream about death, but a death more welcoming than feared. "You can't stop what's coming," a character advises late in the film, and indeed there's only one thing that comes for all of us. For some people it will be sudden and unexpected, perhaps the violent outcome of an unlucky coin toss. For others, it will accumulate over time, enough time for them to recognize what's been lost, to fall out of step with the world. The very title of No Country for Old Men suggests which people might be the luckier.

CHRISTOPHER ORR. New Republic 09 November 2007.

Style Wars

New York City 1982......rockin the city with your name on a train.

Norman Mailer 1923-2007

Pulitzer Prize-Winner Norman Mailer Dies at 84

By Bart Barnes
The Washington Post Saturday, November 10, 2007

Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote compellingly about sex and violence, conflict and politics, love and war, as the tempests of his personal life complemented the turbulence of his prose, died today at age 84. Mailer, who died of kidney failure at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, achieved literary fame at the age of 25 with his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," which was based on his experiences in the Army in the Pacific during World War II. The book led the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks in 1948 and 1949 and was later made into a movie.

Its publication launched Mailer on a parallel career as a celebrity who became notorious in a variety of roles. He was widely known as a drinker and brawler, womanizer, political campaigner, social critic, talk-show guest, self-promoter and symbol of male chauvinism. He had six wives and nine children. In his career as a writer, Mailer produced novels, essays, social commentaries, movie scripts and nonfiction narratives about national events and public figures. His subjects included ancient Egypt, political conventions, actress Marilyn Monroe, the CIA, Adolf Hitler and the first landing on the moon. He won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for "The Armies of the Night" (1968), based on his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam.

Mailer used fictional techniques in "Armies of the Night" to describe his arrest during the protest and to address the philosophical underpinnings of the nation's military involvement in Vietnam. The title of one of the book's chapters, "Why Are We in Vietnam?," became a popular slogan in the antiwar movement.

Mailer won his second Pulitzer Prize for "The Executioner's Song" (1979), which he described as a "true life novel" about Gary Gilmore, who in Utah in 1977 became the first convict to be executed in the United States in more than a decade.

The author Sinclair Lewis once called Mailer the greatest writer of his generation. But critics were neither uniform nor consistent in their evaluations of his work. Orville Prescott of the New York Times praised "The Naked and the Dead" as "the most impressive novel about the second World War that I have ever read." But Time magazine condemned Mailer's second novel, "Barbary Shore" (1951), as "paceless, graceless and tasteless." When his 1983 novel, "Ancient Evenings," received tepid reviews, Mailer responded with full-page newspaper advertisements, juxtaposing the attacks on his book with similar criticism of such classics as "Moby Dick," "Anna Karenina," and "Leaves of Grass." He considered "Ancient Evenings" to be his finest work.

He broke new ground in political commentary with his 1960 essay about John F. Kennedy, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," which deftly described the aura of sexuality and romance surrounding the Massachusetts senator. Published in Esquire magazine three weeks before Kennedy's election as president, the essay helped establish the Kennedy mystique.
"For a heady period, no major public event in the United States seemed complete until Mailer had observed himself observing it," a Time critic wrote in 1983.

As a nationally known celebrity, Mailer made headlines by running for mayor of New York in 1969 on a ticket with columnist Jimmy Breslin. They finished fourth in a field of five.

There was a mystique of personal violence about Mailer, which he encouraged. He often wrote about boxing, and he liked to spar with boxer Jose Torres, who was among his friends.

Mailer's reputation as a rowdy, unpredictable writer was confirmed during a bacchanal at his New York apartment in 1960, when he stabbed his second wife with a penknife. In 1970, while Mailer was directing the film "Maidstone," actor Rip Torn attacked Mailer with a hammer. In a fight that lasted several minutes and was captured on film, Mailer bit off part of Torn's ear.
Another time, Mailer punched author Gore Vidal in the mouth after tossing a drink in his face. The confrontation, which Vidal would later call "the night of the tiny fist," had its origins in a bitter verbal battle between Mailer and leaders of the feminist movement.

Over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, Mailer asked Gloria Steinem what women had against him. "You might try reading your books," Steinem told him. Kate Millett, in her 1970 study, "Sexual Politics," described Mailer's prose as "blatantly and comically chauvinist."

Never one to retreat from a battle, Mailer declared on a talk show, "Women should be kept in cages." In a Harper's magazine essay titled "The Prisoner of Sex," he wrote: "The prime responsibility of a woman is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species."

Vidal then entered the fray with an article in the New York Review of Books, finding "a logical progression" from Henry Miller to Mailer to Charles Manson.

The two authors later traded insults on ABC television's "Dick Cavett Show." Then, at a 1977 Manhattan dinner party, Mailer threw his scotch whiskey in Vidal's face, butted him with his head and punched him in the mouth. When the hostess, journalist Lally Weymouth, begged other guests to pull the two apart, Clay Felker, then editor of Esquire, told her, "Shut up. This fight is making your party."

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J., and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant from South Africa who worked as an accountant.

As a schoolboy, the young Mailer managed to convince both his parents that he was a genius. His mother, Fanny, expected great things from him. When he received a low mark on a report card in the third grade, she marched into his school to protest.

In September 1939, the 16-year-old Mailer entered the freshman class at Harvard University. Partly at the urging of his family, who wanted him to acquire practical skills, and partly because he liked making model airplanes, he majored in engineering. He graduated cum laude, but it was also clear that literature and writing were his primary loves.

At Harvard, he began reading the novels of John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Especially compelling for the young Mailer was James T. Farrell and his character Studs Lonigan.

"In the figure of Studs Lonigan, Mailer found the first of his many Irish alter egos," wrote Carl E. Rollyson in his 1991 biography, "The Lives of Norman Mailer." "Studs swaggers. He is a small guy who has the nerve to take on bigger men . . . He is a romantic who dreams of conquering the world and of mastering beautiful women, but he is also one of the boys, embarrassed by his mother's coddling of him."

In his first year at Harvard, Mailer began writing short stories, one of which won a first prize award from Story magazine. After graduating in 1943, Mailer went back home to Brooklyn to work on a novel. In March 1944, one month after his first marriage, he was inducted into the Army and later shipped out to the Pacific, joining the 112th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Philippines.

He was a rifleman in an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon that engaged in a few skirmishes but saw no heavy action.

After the war ended, he served with occupation forces in Japan, then returned to the United States in May of 1946. He spent the rest of the year in a bungalow near Provincetown, Mass., transmuting his military experiences into "The Naked and the Dead."

His publisher, Stanley Rinehart, insisted that he clean up the language in the book. Mailer complied by inventing the word "fug" as a substitute for an expletive that the publisher found offensive.

In a "word to the reader" on the book's dust jacket, Rinehart compared Mailer's novel with Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," and Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms."

After the 1948 publication of "The Naked and the Dead," Mailer went to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. His next two novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "Deer Park" (1955), drew hostile reviews.

It would be almost 10 years before he wrote his next novel, "An American Dream," about a professor of existential psychology who murders his wife. During the intervening decade, Mailer wrote essays, short stories and commentaries, while becoming increasingly prominent as a public figure.

In 1955, he helped found New York's Village Voice weekly newspaper.
Among his most provocative work of this period was "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster," which caused a sensation when it was published in 1957 in Dissent magazine. In it, Mailer wrote: "The psychopath murders -- if he has the courage -- out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred, then he cannot love."

The essay was included in the 1959 collection "Advertisements for Myself," in which Mailer gathered essays and commented on his literary career, describing the effort as the "biography of a style."

In November 1960, after stabbing his second wife, artist Adele Morales Mailer, during a drunken party, Mailer spent two weeks in a psychiatric unit of New York's Bellevue Hospital.
His wife, who was wounded in the abdomen and back, made a full recovery and declined to press criminal charges. They separated and were subsequently divorced.

Eleven years after the 1962 death of actress Marilyn Monroe, Mailer wrote "Marilyn," in which he suggested that she was murdered by either the FBI, CIA or Mafia because she was "reputed to be having an affair" with Robert F. Kennedy. Writing in Parade magazine, Lloyd Shearer called the book "a shameful, rehashed potboiler."

With the publication in 1979 of "The Executioner's Song," Mailer recorded his last major literary triumph. Even with its success, he was in dire financial straits because of his many marriages and child support payments.

One of the most notorious episodes in Mailer's career occurred when he championed the literary career of Jack Abbott, a felon who had spent most of his adult life in prison after being convicted for armed robbery and killing a man in prison. After they corresponded for several years, Mailer helped publish a collection of Abbott's letters, "In the Belly of the Beast," in 1981. Mailer then helped win Abbott's parole from prison.

Soon after his release, Abbott stabbed a restaurant waiter to death after an argument about using the restroom. Mailer testified for Abbott at his trial and said he was "sorry as hell about the way it turned out."

After his novel, "Ancient Evenings," Mailer wrote a 1984 murder mystery, "Tough Guys Don't Dance," which he later revised into a screenplay for a movie, which he directed himself.
He wrote two interpretive biographies, "Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man" (1995) and "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery" (1995), about the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. His later novels, including "Harlot's Ghost" (1991), about the CIA; "The Gospel According to the Son" (1997), an imagined life of Jesus; and "The Castle in the Forest," a fictional account of the youth of Adolf Hitler (2007), received mixed reviews.

Mailer's first marriage, to Bea Silverman, ended in divorce in 1952. He married Adele Morales in 1954 and divorced her in 1962, the same year he married Lady Jeanne Campbell. They divorced in 1963, and he married actress Beverly Bentley later that year. They separated in 1970 when Mailer began living with Carol Stevens, a nightclub singer, but did not divorce until 1980.

Mailer and Stevens had already separated when he married her in November of 1980 to "legitimize," in his terms, their 9-year-old daughter. Mailer divorced her immediately after the marriage and married his sixth wife, artist Norris Church, with whom he already had a son. His children included a daughter from his first marriage; two daughters from his second marriage; a daughter from his third marriage; two sons from his fourth marriage; a daughter from his fifth marriage; two sons from his sixth marriage; and 10 grandchildren.

Albania. Beyond Pyramid Schemes and Pill Boxes

Albania, Europe’s Rough Corner, Loosens Up

New York Times by Matt Gross December 10, 2006

NOT long ago, to suggest Albania as a destination of any kind, even a frugal one, would have been the height of chutzpah. Within five years of Albania’s abandoning Communism in 1992, a Ponzi scheme destroyed the nascent market economy and widespread rioting turned Albania into a byword for rampant lawlessness. It was not, except for aid workers and smugglers, on anyone’s map.

In the last several years, however, Albania has made enormous strides in democracy and development — and revealed itself to be not only ripe for tourists, but affordable to boot. The capital, Tirana, with its brightly painted apartment buildings and molto Italiano cafe culture, is a fantastic starting point, especially since it’s hard to spend more than $15 a person at the city’s nicest restaurants. But it’s the southern part of this Balkan country that holds the most intriguing sights and bargains.

Start in Gjirokaster, a beautifully warped city that produced two of Albania’s most important 20th-century figures: Enver Hoxha, the country’s dictator for 40 years after World War II, and Ismail Kadare, the novelist perennially mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate. Gjirokaster is built on slippery, cobblestoned hills so steep they seem to defy human habitation, yet the town of stately slate-roofed Ottoman houses bustles.

One house, now an Ethnographic Museum, happens to be Hoxha’s birthplace. Another is the Hotel Kalemi (355-84-63-724; hotelkalemi.tripod.com), where for $40 a night you can sleep under a carved-wood ceiling that’s 200 years old.

During the day, your legs will get a workout wandering the streets and exploring the massive fortress overlooking the city. At night, recuperate with roast tongue of veal and yogurt soup at the friendly Festivali restaurant. And don’t leave Gjirokaster without a handmade carpet from Ruha’s shop (355-69-254-2122); they start at $40.

Your reward for enduring Gjirokaster’s hills is Sarande, a busy port on the Strait of Otranto. At the Hotel Kaonia (355-85-22-600), right on the boardwalk, a simple but modern double room with great water views runs just 30 euros ($40 at $1.36 to the euro).

The pebbly beach in the center of Sarande may not be too exciting, but there are white sand stretches nearby, including the popular beach at Ksamili, 10 miles to the south. And if you’re hankering for a taste of classical Europe, the Greek island of Corfu is a quick hydrofoil ride away.

Southern Albania’s greatest treasure, however, is Butrint, a 2,500-year-old city that was inhabited by successive generations of Illyrians, Greeks, Epireans, Romans, Byzantines and Venetians, before dwindling to a tiny fishing village in the late 19th century. It’s the kind of place where history is still waiting to be discovered.
Situated on a hilly, forest-shrouded promontory south of Sarande, near the Greek border, Butrint (a Unesco World Heritage Site) was first excavated by Italians in the 1920s, who unearthed an amphitheater and Greek-built walls. Archaeologists later discovered early Christian basilicas, a baptistery and as many as eight bathhouses.

Butrint is large — about 11 square miles — and still shrouded in mystery, so you’ll want a guide. Vasil Barka (355-69-227-6460) has 25 years of experience and knows where to find Cleopatra’s name in a string of Greek letters on a huge stone block outside the amphitheater. In the basilica, where the frescoed floor is covered in sand to protect the tiles from the elements, he knows just where to brush aside the grains to reveal a spectacular red-and-blue bird.

And at the Venetian fort-turned-museum, he can tell you which statues have just been dug up and which recovered from looters.

Afterward, head straight to the nearby Livia Hotel (355-891-2040) for a feast of mussels, shrimp, eel and squid.

Like Albania itself, this lost city harbors untold treasures for the intrepid — and at a price that just about anyone can afford.

Royal with Beats

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Albany Bulb: A Favourite Old Haunt

The Hour by Michael Lind

Maybe the moment recurs daily at six, when commuters,

freed from the staring computers,

elbow and bump in unsought intimacy on a station

platform with you, and frustration

rots what is left of your strength. Maybe the hour comes after

dinner, when televised laughter

seeps from a neighboring room; maybe the time is the dead of

night, when you ponder, instead of

dreaming. Whatever the time, you will escape it—by sinking

down with a book, or by drinking secretly out in the dark studio, or by unbuckling

pants on a stranger, or chuckling,

one with a mob, in a deep theater. Soon, though, the hour

comes to corrode all your power,

pleasure and faith with the damp dread that it daily assigns you.

How you evade it defines you.