Bandung Art Deco Indonesia

Bandung is the capital city of West Java, Indonesia. Its roots dated from prehistoric time, when a group of prehistoric people lived on the northern part of an ancient lake. Some thousands' years ago the lake became dry and changed into the present Bandung valley. The city is located on high land surrounded by spectacular hills and mountains, and because of that has a much cooler climate than most of Indonesian cities. The name of Bandung has been known since the fifteenth century as a part of the Hindu Pajajaran kingdom. From 1821 until 1852 the city was closed to the European and Chinese people.

Art Deco

Art Deco is the contemporary Modern Design, Architecture, and a broad spectrum of Decorative Arts. It drew renewed inspiration from ancient arts and primitive arts, and was purified by ideas of the functionalists. In the United States it was known as "Modernism," and in France as "Art Moderne." Some said that it was a reaction to "Art Nouveau," and the other said that it was an extension of "Art Nouveau."

The term "Art Deco" was first used in 1968, in a book written by Bevis Hillier to describe the interrelated art and design movement of the era. Parallel to the movements in the United States were the three main movements in Europe. The first one was started in Austria and Germany, known as "Jogendstil." In contrast to "Art Nouveau," it emphasized the functional design that was based on logic and geometry. The second one was the decorative movement as an extension of "Art Nouveau," that can be identified from the highly colorful and ornamental style which ruled Paris in the immediate post World War years. Instead of maidens and flower sprays, arches, sunbursts, colorful geometric patterns, and floral abstraction themes were introduced. The third movement was the principle of Dutch Modern Decorative Art and Decorative Movement in Architecture, as the peak of the Amsterdam School from 1910 to 1930. It was the Dutch modern expressionist architectural style, a rational architecture which elements were derived from the structure.

The climax of Art Deco came in 1925 with the "Paris Exposition International des Arts Decorative et Industries." It had originally been proposed in 1912 for 1915, in order to inspire the French designers to develop works equal to that produced by their German contemporaries. The designers produced various abstract floral ornamentation's derived from "Art Nouveau."

In Architecture, the 1920's style was characterized by the design of pavilions with zigzagged setbacks, the use of unusual materials, the incorporation of decorative wall paintings, ornamental metalwork's, and decorative glasswork on geometric and floral themes. Many examples of the works from the peak of Amsterdam School era can be seen throughout the Netherlands. Many buildings are of an exceptional quality and have superb details.

Art Deco and the Amsterdam School in Bandung

Just like the influence of Hindu and Buddhist cultures in the 7th century, followed by the Islamic and Chinese cultural influence in 13th century, the Dutch cultural influence can be seen as just another part of other influences from abroad which shaped the Indonesian culture.

After the first World War, there were various movements in design and architecture, two of which were the Amsterdam School and De Stijl. The Amsterdam School stream has often defined as a reaction to the strict rationalism of Berlage in mid 20s. It is described as a non-theoretical and unsystematic in character, the very antithesis of Berlage's concept of communal architecture. It emphasized the individual artistry. It has same concept of decoration and design as Art Deco.

The Amsterdam School was a plastic and organic expressionist architectural movement with reference to Wright, and followed more constructional and functional principles. The Amsterdam School architects designed building masses of craftsmanship in wood, brick, iron, and painted glass. The architectural works were dominated by the undulating organic forms, used rough wrought stones, concrete, and iron. Their new communal housing projects were much more plastic in their accumulation and related fully to their immediate surroundings. The design concept showed the appearance of organic architectural plans. Building structures were not concealed and clearly visible. The decoration was derived from the structure.

There is an eastern cultural influence on the architectonic conception, including the Sundanese roof style. Of the important people in this movement are Van der Mey, De Klerk, Luthman and Kramer, who are among the most admired influence in Indonesia. These architects seem to have design influences on Indonesian architecture.

The city of Bandung architecture of that era was strongly influenced by Dutch design. It is the amalgam of Western and Eastern culture, which is sometimes called the "Indo-European" culture. In the first generation of Bandung Art Deco buildings, the similarity of the modern expressionist design concept of Van der May and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings were seen, for example in the Preanger Hotel designed by C.P. Wolff Schoemaker, with its geometric decorative elements on the exterior walls.

In the second generation of Bandung Art Deco buildings, the volume is the effect of static solidity, and is more accurately of plane and surfaces. The pure architectural symbol is the open box, as well as planes surrounding a volume, a geometrically bounded and weightless space. The villa of Ang Eng Kan designed by F.W. Brinkman in 1930 exhibits this aesthetical quality. In the second half of the period, the architects used more simple design patterns like lines, and the towering cylinder that has a basic design similarity with the Isola design by Wolff Schoemaker in 1931. The dynamic interior space concept is clearly seen in the interior lay-out of the building.

A.F. Albers and the Late Art Deco

Architecture expresses the life of the epoch. The architectural concept of the modernist architect was defined by the aesthetic demand for return to simplicity of form. The play of basic form of masses brought together in light and shade. Some of the buildings designed by Brinkman, like the Singer building in jalan Asia Afrika and the villa Ang Eng Kan in jalan Sangkuriang which were built in 1930, expressed the modern composition of boxes of De Stijl.

The other beautiful basic building form which produces plastic power and aesthetical emotion, instead of the box composition mentioned before, is the cylindrical composition of form as the IKIP building design by C.P. Wolff Schoemaker built in 1928, and located in the northern hills of Bandung.

Decorative Art in the late period of Art Deco was related to the style of the modern dynamic and plastic architecture. It is the "streamline" architecture, and is one of the stylistic references of world modern architectural technology. The lightness of the building structure and the dynamic streamline facade of Homann hotel, Bank Pembangunan Daerah, Three Colour Villa, and the Dago Thee Villa, designed by A.F. Aalbers between 1935 to 1938 are the four examples that we can find in the city.

People sometimes called it the "Ocean Liner" style, its reference to the ship design expressing the goal of a modern society. It is the translation of machines into architectural terms; the expression of motion, modern technology, optimism, and social order.

The Decorative Art and the architectural development shows how the acceptance of the later and best of Western architecture allowed the Dutch influence to be absorbed without destroying the city's long term identity. We should see the cultural mixture as an integral part of a cultural continuity and part of the whole history of Indonesia. The buildings of the period are the treasure of learning, the delight in the work of another era and have to be taken more care of.

References:

Akihary, Huib, "Architectuur en Stedebouw in Indonesie", Grafiplan, Geeuweebrug, 1988.

Duncan, Alistrair, "American Art Deco", Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1989.

Hartono, Dibyo (et.al.), "Studi Sejarah Arsitektur Pusat Kota Bandung", Bandung Society for Heritage Conservation, Bandung, 1989.

Miss Atom 2008

Meet Yulia Nagayeva. She's a Russian beauty queen. No, not the winner of the Russian prison pageant I wrote about last week; she's the winner of Miss Atom 2008. The contest was held earlier this month, and Yulia beat out many other stunning women of Russia's extensive nuclear industry. Of course, the U.S. in the past had its own version, Las Vegas' Miss Atom Bomb. What makes Russia's contest particularly unique, however, is that it is only open to workers in Russia's nuclear industry.

Miss Atom works for the TVEL Corporation, which is described on its website as "one of the world leading manufacturers of nuclear fuel." Tvel's fuel is reportedly in every sixth reactor in the world. And they have Yulia working there, too.

The concourse is determined by voters (Yulia got almost 4,000 votes). No word on whether she's going back to nuclear fuel, or has plans for bigger and better things.

Last year, Arms Control Wonk tried to rig the voting (and at least one commenter seemed to think the contest was rigged anyhow).

By the way, Yulia's hobbies include: photography, cooking, studying foreign languages and travel.

Sharon Weinburger, Wired Blog, 18 March.

Let's Be Frank

Though many people have recently woken up to the need to go green, for a few, living in harmony with nature has been a long-held ethos. One such person is Frank Harmon, a North Carolina architect who has been designing sustainably for almost three decades. His projects—mostly in his home state—include churches, arts and educational buildings, and houses that embody the ideals of new regionalism. Harmon hews to the notion that a structure should be specific to its place in terms of materials and its relationships to geography and climate. Raised in North Carolina but educated at London’s influential Architectural Association, Harmon worked for Richard Meier, the New York–based architect known for his impeccably detailed—if somewhat cold—white, glassy buildings. So what made Harmon turn toward his warmer brand of regionalism? He had a couple of very strong influences.

You’re an avid proponent of regionalism. How did you get there?

In my late 30s, I met Harwell Hamilton Harris, who became a very important mentor to me. He was the first modern architect to fuse modern principles with traditional materials like wood and stone and to illustrate a respect for climate and region. His thought was that every building is a portrait. It’s a portrait of the owner, or it’s the story of the site or the particular climate or materials of a region. In other words, he felt that all great architecture started with the particulars of climate or site or materials. The more I thought about that, the more I thought that was entirely true.

Also, as a child growing up, I used to love North Carolina barns and farmhouses; but, going off to school in England, then working in New York, I felt they were rather provincial. Then I moved back to North Carolina and realized the inherent intelligence in those buildings.

I was also influenced by my childhood home. I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a suburban development at the edge of the city where some very forward-thinking planner had created greenways and parks, preserving the streambeds. I grew up playing on the banks of those streams, and I can say now that most of what I know about architecture I credit to playing by those streams. To this day I thank the anonymous architect who planned those pathways.

That doesn’t sound like the stereotypical 1950s alienating suburb.

No, it was built before World War II—sometime around 1920—and consisted of small houses, on small lots, and there were sidewalks. There was a huge change in suburban design in the 1950s. One reason for that was air-conditioning; the other was the bulldozer, which really came into its own after the war.I never use a bulldozer. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful tool, but unfortunately one of the cheapest things that can be done is to level a site, which destroys vegetation and wildlife and causes polluted runoff to flow right into our rivers and estuary systems. Prior to [its inception] you had to move earth by mule, and prior to air-conditioning you had to have porches for cooling. My grandmothers spent their time sitting on porches.I am sure the storytelling tradition in the South comes from sitting on porches.

How have you woven these kinds of regional traditions, like porches, into your work?

I have just completed a church in historic Charleston, South Carolina. It builds on an existing vernacular of Charleston architecture, a wonderful building type known as a “single house,” because they were only one room deep and always had [a] large porch across the south or southwest side of the house. So for this church, I said, “You need hallways, but why don’t we put them out on porches to reduce the heated area by a third?” So now it is one room deep and cross ventilated. It also has the first green roof in Charleston.

So the church is a kind of modern vernacular?

Yes, but I am not interested in vernacular to be sentimental. I am interested in what it can teach us. All vernacular architecture is sustainable. It is always inherently related to the region. But let me emphasize that regionalism should not be confused with parochialism any more than you would call Faulkner a local Southern writer.

You’ve been building sustainably for decades. Does the current green awareness represent a real shift?

Yes, I think it does. I’ve been doing green stuff for 25 years, and over that time I’ve had to educate my clients, and that has been very difficult. Today they all come to me and want something sustainable. The single biggest impact we have energy-wise is our buildings, not cars, and our clients get that. I think there is general unease about how we treat the world, and people want [to] build in a sustainable way. The pastor at the church in Charleston said that building sustainably is a moral issue. Architecture is arguably the most important issue of the day.

What about suburban development, which carpets so much of the country and seems to be the antithesis of regionalism? Is the message getting though there?

It is, I think. Almost all major builders are talking about how their buildings can be more sustainable. The greatest difference I can hope for is that houses and buildings can respond to places where they are. In our country we have the greatest geographical difference, so why is it that houses in Washington State look the same as buildings in Florida? The most sustainable—and liberating—thing we can do is to acknowledge the places we are in.

Frances Anderton, Dwell, April 2008

Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World

If you're part of a super-secret, clandestine, covert military unit, it seems like you wouldn't want to advertise it.

Turns out, some "black ops" personnel do. They come up with cryptic designs — images like dragons wrapped around the earth or naked women riding killer whales — to put on patches that commemorate their missions. What they mean and the details of the missions are almost impossible to figure out.

Trevor Paglen collects these military black ops patches in a new art and history book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me.

For more information visit http://www.paglen.com/tellyou/index.htm

The Bryant Park Project, NPR, January 14, 2008

Florence Broadhurst

To describe the life of Florence Broadhurst as eventful, or highly unusual would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that her life was a series of phases, each inhabited by a different persona: singer; dancer; actor; couturier; painter; charity worker and fund raiser; car and truck yard operator, fashionista and finally, wallpaper designer.

Florence Maud Broadhurst was born 28 July 1899 at Mungy Station, near Mount Perry Queensland, Australia. She was musical and had some success as a singer in local musical competitions.In 1922, she left Australia for China and South East Asia where she performed in musical comedy under the stage name ‘Bobby Broadhurst’. She became well known for her singing and Charleston dancing.

In 1926, Florence established the Broadhurst Academy in Shanghai. Here, she offered tuition in ‘violin, pianoforte, voice production, banjolele playing (taught by Florence), modern ballroom dancing, classical dancing, musical culture and journalism’.

Three years later in England, Florence married her first husband Percy Kann, and began a new career as designer-cum-dress consultant for Pellier Ltd, Robes & Modes, in New Bond Street, Mayfair.

With her second husband, Leonard Lloyd Lewis, a diesel engineer, Florence lived out the World War II years in England. In 1949, she returned to Australia with Leonard and their son Robert. It was here that she took up painting, and toured around northern and central Australia.

In 1954, the David Jones art gallery in Sydney, held solo exhibitions of her work. There followed further exhibitions, including group shows, in various galleries. During this time Florence became a founding member of the Art Gallery Society of NSW (1953), and a member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (c1954).

Around 1960, Florence established Australian (Hand Printed) Wallpapers Ltd in St Leonards, Sydney. Here Florence, with an initial staff of two, began designing and manufacturing the brilliant, flamboyant wallpapers that were to become her trademark.

The company moved to Paddington in 1969 and changed the name to Florence Broadhurst Wallpapers Pty Ltd. Both Florence and the company flourished. As designs and production techniques developed, the wallpapers found eager buyers in the international marketplace. Meanwhile, Florence became famous for her extravagant clothes and jewellery and vivid red hair.

On 15 October 1977, Florence Broadhurst was brutally murdered at her Paddington premises. The killer has never been identified.

Since her death, Florence Broadhurst’s reputation has been enhanced by a resurgence in popular appreciation of her extraordinary wallpaper designs, re-released by Signature Prints, who hold the licence to reproduce her work.

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, holds a collection also, with a Broadhurst display currently included in the exhibition, Inspired! Design across time. \

by Anne-Marie Van de Ven, curator, visual communication design and photography, Powerhouse Museum

Merchant of Death Arrested

U.S. officials said today they will seek extradition of an infamous Russian arms dealer known as the "merchant of death" who was lured out of hiding and arrested in Thailand in an intricate sting by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Viktor Bout, a former Soviet air force officer who has multiple aliases, has been hit with numerous international and U.S. financial sanctions for his longtime role as a suspected arms dealer to some of the world's most notorious terrorist and insurgency groups, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.U.S. and Thai officials said Bout was arrested in Bangkok on a warrant from the DEA, which alleges that the Russian was about to close a deal to supply as much as $15 million worth of missiles and military assault rifles to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Known by its Spanish initials, FARC, the group is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.

The deal was part of a sting arranged by the DEA using undercover informants who posed as FARC operatives and convinced Bout to leave the safety of Russia to finalize the transaction, according to a complaint unsealed this afternoon in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. One of Bout's close associates, Andrew Smulian, was also arrested, authorities said.

Bout's odds-defying career as an amoral arms merchant who often supplied both sides in military conflicts has been the subject of lengthy journalistic exposes, a recent book and, loosely, the Hollywood movie "Lord of War," starring Nicolas Cage. He is believed to have at least five passports and to be fluent in six languages, according to media and government reports. He is believed to have been born in Tajikistan in 1967, according to the DEA complaint.

Bout operates a broad network of delivery companies with as many as 50 cargo planes, primarily old Soviet aircraft, that specialized in running supplies to conflict zones. His alleged customers over the years have included al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, former Liberian despot Charles Taylor, Unita rebels in Uganda, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, and rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s. Cargo companies connected to Bout also were linked to hundreds of supply flights into Iraq for private contractors and the U.S. military early in the Iraq war.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Bout in 2004 for alleged war profiteering because of his ties to Taylor, and froze the assets of 30 companies and four individuals linked to Bout in 2006. Bout also is accused of violating United Nations arms embargoes.

In an interview with the Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy in 2002, Bout denied many of the allegations, saying he does "aviation lifts. This is my main business." He said he "never supplied anything to or had contacts with the Taliban or al-Qaeda," and did not have multiple passports."It sounds more like a Hollywood blockbuster," he said. "It seems so interesting to find a Russian track in it."

The news agency RIA-Novosti said Russian officials may seek Bout's extradition home if they get to review Thai investigative materials, but Bout could be in the United States before that happens. Interfax, citing an anonymous Russian law enforcement source, said there is no criminal case against Bout in Russia.

by Dan Eggen, Washington Post, 6 March.

Color Chart

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today

March 2–May 12, 2008

The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol's "I want to be a machine;" the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's "Straight out of the can; it can’t get better than that." Color Chart is the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.

KLAX Berkeley - Best Various Artists 2007

Various Artists - NEW YORK LATIN HUSTLE (Soul Jazz)
Various Artists - DIRTY SPACE DISCO (Dirty)
Various Artists - GREATEST HITS OF GAMM (GAMM)
Azymuth - Azimuth (reissue) (Far Out)
Various Artists - RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE (Soul Jazz)
Matthew Dear - Asa Breed (Ghostly International)
Various Artists - OM HIP HOP VOL. 1 (Om Hip Hop)
The Blackhorse Project - Input (Molaman)
Barbara & Ernie - Prelude To.(reissue) (Fallout)
Sugar & Gold - Creme (Antenna Farm)
Budos Band - The Budos Band (Daptone)
Cake - B Sides and Rarities (Upbeat)
Various Artists - SISTER FUNK 2 (Jazzman)

Oakland Slam Poetry - Tourettes Without Regrets

Oakland.....My Dear Old Neighborhood

People Say - Jackie Orszaczky Band

Music lovers mourn band leader Jackie Orszaczky

JACKIE ORSZACZKY, a renowned bass guitarist and one of the nation's most influential band leaders of the past 25 years, has died after a long illness.

Orszaczky, 60, died in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital on Sunday from complications in his treatment for lymphoma. He had been admitted after collapsing at home.

His last gig was at the Macquarie Hotel in Surry Hills on January 24, a night the trombonist James Greening described as unbelievable. "Since his illness he continued to sing better and better every time I played with him," said Greening, who played with Orszaczky for 25 years. "It was inspiring and really empowering."

On Sunday night some of Orszaczky's close friends returned to the hotel to play and to remember a giant of the music scene.

Greening said Orszaczky's legacy was the way he demonstrated how to create a band that worked in total unity. "He had absolute clarity about what was important in music. Because of this he led with total clarity … and allowed everyone in the group to play at their best."

In his wry and humble way he passed on knowledge not only to those he worked with but to "the hundreds of players who came to see him play," Greening said.

Born in Hungary, Orszaczky moved here in 1974 and soon became an in-demand session bass player and band leader, fronting Marcia Hines's band in the late 1970s. As a muso, arranger and producer he contributed to albums from artists including the Whitlams, Tim Finn, Savage Garden, You Am I, Hoodoo Gurus, Grinspoon and Leonardo's Bride.

John Shand, Herald jazz critic, said this breadth of activity and depth of knowledge set Orszaczky apart. "I can't think of anyone in the entire country who touched so many different musicians in so many different ways."

Orszaczky remained popular in Hungary and attracted 30,000 people at his annual Budapest concerts. He is survived by his partner, the singer Tina Harrod, and two daughters. A private funeral will be held this week and on Sunday from 4pm there will be a wake at the Harold Park Hotel.

By Clare Morgan, Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 2008

The Dog's Master

Pieter Hugo 'Gadawan Kura' - The Hyena Men

These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption 'The Streets of Lagos'. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.

Through a journalist friend I eventually tracked down a Nigerian reporter, Adetokunbo Abiola, who said that he knew the 'Gadawan Kura' as they are known in Hausa (a rough translation: 'hyena handlers/guides').

A few weeks later I was on a plane to Lagos. Abiola met me at the airport and together we took a bus to Benin City where the 'hyena men' had agreed to meet us. However, when we got there they had already departed for Abuja.

In Abuja we found them living on the periphery of the city in a shantytown - a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons. It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were practising a tradition passed down from generation to generation. I spent eight days travelling with them.
The spectacle caused by this group walking down busy market streets was overwhelming. I tried photographing this but failed, perhaps because I wasn't interested in their performances. I realised that what I found fascinating was the hybridisation of the urban and the wild, and the paradoxical relationship that the handlers have with their animals - sometimes doting and affectionate, sometimes brutal and cruel. I started looking for situations where these contrasting elements became apparent. I decided to concentrate on portraits. I would go for a walk with one of the performers, often just in the city streets, and, if opportunity presented itself, take a photograph. We travelled around from city to city, often chartering public mini-buses.

I agreed to travel with the animal wranglers to Kanu in the northern part of the country. One of them set out to negotiate a fare with a taxi driver; everyone else, including myself and the hyenas, monkeys and rock pythons, hid in the bushes. When their companion signalled that he had agreed on a fare, the motley troupe of humans and animals leapt out from behind the bushes and jumped into the vehicle. The taxi driver was completely horrified. I sat upfront with a monkey and the driver. He drove like an absolute maniac. At one stage the monkey was terrified by his driving. It grabbed hold of my leg and stared into my eyes. I could see its fear.

Two years later I decided to go back to Nigeria. The project felt unresolved and I was ready to engage with the group again. I look back at the notebooks I had kept while with them. The words 'dominance', 'codependence' and 'submission' kept appearing. These pictures depict much more than an exotic group of travelling performers in West Africa. The motifs that linger are the fraught relationships we have with ourselves, with animals and with nature.

The second trip was very different. By this stage there was a stronger personal relationship between myself and the group. We had remained in contact and they were keen to be photographed again. The images from this journey are less formal and more intimate. The first series of pictures had caused varying reactions from people - inquisitiveness, disbelief and repulsion. People were fascinated by them, just as I had been by that first cellphone photograph. A director of a large security company in the USA contacted me, asking how to get in touch with the 'hyena group'. He saw marketing potential: surely these men must use some type of herb to protect themselves against hyenas, baboons, dogs and snakes? He thought that security guards, soldiers and his own pocket could benefit from this medicine.

Many animal-rights groups also contacted me, wanting to intervene (however, the keepers have permits from the Nigerian government). When I asked Nigerians, "How do you feel about the way they treat animals?", the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival. Seldom did anyone express strong concern for the well-being of the creatures. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living. Or why they are economically marginalised. Or why Nigeria, the world's sixth largest exporter of oil, is in such a state of disarray.

Little Superstar

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.