Sunday, May 23, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Allandale House: A Cabin of Curiosities
The house links three horizontal extrusions of “leaning,” or asymmetrical A-frames. The skinny A-frame on the western side contains the library, wine cellar and garage. The wide A-frame in the center of the house is dedicated to two floors of bedrooms and bathrooms. The medium A-frame on the eastern side consists of living, kitchen and dining areas. The house aims to undermine the seeming limitations of a triangular section by augmenting and revealing the extreme proportion in the vertical direction, and utilizing the acutely angled corners meeting the floor as moments for thickened walls, telescopic apertures and built-in storage.
The relationship between the need for exposed storage and the interior liner of the house is a reciprocal one. Ostensibly problematic head-height limitations posed by the angled.
William O’Brien Jr. is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and is principal of an independent design practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92
Lena Horne, who broke new ground for black performers when she signed a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night in Manhattan. She was 92.
Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley. She lived in Manhattan. In a message of condolence, President Obama said Ms. Horne had "worked tirelessly to further the cause of justice and equality."
Ms. Horne first achieved fame in the 1940s, became a nightclub and recording star in the 1950s and made a triumphant return to the spotlight with a one-woman Broadway show in 1981. She might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early: she languished at MGM for years because of her race, although she was so light-skinned that when she was a child other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”
Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” film musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that, she later recalled, could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.
“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.
But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, whose singing voice was dubbed. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage, in 1947, took place in France and was kept secret for three years.
Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing, and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”
Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”
She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)
In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”
“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”
Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”
Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.
This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work.
Although absent from the screen, Ms. Horne found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.
In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests. In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”
She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.
She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.
Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.
“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”
Strayhorn was also “the only man I ever loved,” she said, but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.” Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.
By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.
When she was 16, her mother pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934. At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.
In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale. She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”
Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”
Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc. (The war had scaled down Mr. Young’s ambitions to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor.) He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM. She was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio — MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 — but she was the first to make an impact.
Though she was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio - MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 - Ms. Horne was the first to make an impact.
The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated her contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.”
Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter; Gail Lumet Buckley; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her son died of kidney failure in 1970; her husband died the following year.
Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”
New York Times
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Published: May 9, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
One for the Road? Bar Cars May Face a Last Call
The cocktails started early, before the train left Manhattan, and by 6 p.m. most of the passengers were already on the second round. Tiny vodka bottles and punched ticket stubs littered the floor. A game of dice by the bar was getting rowdy as a couple canoodled in the corner, beers in hand.
The bar car is a mainstay of the commuting life, a lurching lounge on wheels inseparable from the suburbia of Cheever and “Mad Men.” “The commute is so bad as it is,” explained Paul Hornung, a financial worker, as he sipped a Stella Artois. “This is the one thing you can look forward to.”
But perhaps not for long.
Having survived numerous attempts at prohibition and outlasted its brethren in the suburbs of Chicago and New Jersey, the bar car out of Grand Central Terminal is now facing its gravest threat: the great recession.
A new fleet of cars will soon replace the 1970s-era models now used by commuters on the Metro-North Railroad line heading to Connecticut. But with money tight, railroad officials said they could not yet commit themselves to a fresh set of bar cars, citing higher costs for the cars’ custom design.
“They’re being contemplated,” said Joseph F. Marie, Connecticut’s commissioner of transportation. “But we have not made any final decisions.”
Defenders of the boozy commute say it helps raise revenue: After expenses, bar cars and platform vendors made $1.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008. (Officials would not say if a bar car makes more money than a car with the normal number of seats.) So far, 300 new train cars have been purchased, featuring airline-style headrests and graceful luggage racks. But officials say the bar cars remain a low priority, and may not be ordered.
“A decision was made early on that more seats on the trains was our top priority and that bar cars — as popular as they are — could wait,” said Judd Everhart, a spokesman for Connecticut’s department of transportation, which operates New Haven Line trains in conjunction with Metro-North. “It was about that simple.” The existing bar cars, much beloved for their homey wood paneling, cannot be operated with the new fleet, which is expected to be phased in starting at the end of this year.
That prospect did not go down well with the regulars on a recent weekday ride to Bridgeport.
“It raises my anxiety level,” said Tom Skinner, a marketing executive from Westport and proprietor of BarCar.com, a Web site devoted to the steel-wheeled saloon. “There’s always people trying to scuttle the bar cars. It’s just a fact of life.” Smoking was banned on the cars in the 1980s, much to riders’ chagrin, but the diehards fought back against any attempt to end liquor service. The most recent threat, in 2007, would have banned alcohol from being sold on the trains and on platforms at Grand Central and Pennsylvania Station, but an outcry prompted officials to reject the proposal.
Full-fledged bar cars — complete with lounge-style leather seating, cupholders and stools — have been phased out on the Long Island Rail Road (although bartending carts are occasionally wheeled onto trains during the evening rush), and Metro-North trains to much of Westchester County and other points upstate no longer offer the amenity. (Even Ossining, home to Don Draper, is out of luck.)
Which makes Connecticut riders (and a few who get off before the border) all the more territorial about their rare perk.
“This is a civility of days gone past,” said Michael Mahan, a commuter since 1984, as Stamford sped by and he took another sip of white wine. “I would miss them very much.”
Among the anxious is Cesar Vergara, a Ridgefield, Conn., resident and a veteran train designer who created the interior of Metro-North’s new commuter cars, known as M-8s. As part of his contract, Mr. Vergara designed several concepts for a modern-day bar car, including more space for group seating and a smaller, more streamlined bar to replace the current cramped setup. But he acknowledged that his vision may never become a reality.
“The M-8 bar car, right now, is in a very political realm,” Mr. Vergara said.
Indeed, Connecticut rail officials would not provide images of the prototype designs, which have been reviewed by focus groups, although Mr. Marie, the commissioner, mused a bit on what might work. “It would be nice to create a row-bench type of environment,” he said. “Kind of like in a pub.”
Modeled after the private club cars of the early 20th century, the Grand Central bar car sought to bring a perk of high society to the everyday commuting class. Still, the car’s current incarnation is more bar-around-the-corner than Tavern on the Green.
The cars tend to break down, air-conditioning is creaky, and commuters have been known to sneak duct tape aboard for impromptu repairs.
“I wouldn’t care if they went,” Pat Charla, an environmental consultant on the Bridgeport-bound train, said of the bar cars. “It’s one of those holdovers from the past.”
But some would not have it any other way. Jeffrey Maron, a rider from Stamford, said that the new designs floated by officials reminded him of a “snack shop” and that his only request for a new design would be “more cupholders.”
No satellite TVs?
“Nah,” Mr. Maron said. “Half the crowd are Yankees fans and half the crowd are Red Sox fans. You’d have a war in there figuring out what to watch.”
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Inspiration Information - Mulatu
Broadcast this year on national TV channel, France 2, the awards were first created with the support of the late Martinique poet and political commentator Aimé Césaire, in 2006. One of the founders of the concept of ‘Negritude’ during the ‘30s, reacting against the ‘cultural alienation’ which took place during French colonisation of the Caribbean, Césaire was an ardent supporter and promoter of Afro-Caribbean culture during his lifetime.
The award for Astatke and The Heliocentrics caps a great year for the band following strong critical reaction to their album and a hectic touring schedule: “everyone from the band has worked very hard and I thank The Heliocentrics, !K7 / Strut, Karen P and Red Bull Music Academy very much,” explains Mulatu. “This award was entirely unexpected and is great for Ethiopia and for Ethio jazz.”Other winners at this year’s awards included Ivory Coast’s Magic System (Best Group), Guadeloupe singer Erik (Best Newcomer) and Reunion vocalist Davy Sicard (Best Artist).
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
For High Line Visitors, Park Is a Railway Out of Manhattan
It has its own mobile skyline in the steady stream of heads (or, in the rain, umbrellas) bobbing above the trestle. It has its own economy, including the $15 High Line Picnic Baskets for sale at Friedman’s Lunch at the Chelsea Market (sandwich, cole slaw, pickle, chips, cookie, beverage). It has its own art scene, drawing students from Parsons sketching panoramas, and photographers armed with devices from cellphones to Leicas. It has its own neighborhoods and hot spots, shifting in feel throughout the day.
It even inspires crusty New Yorkers to behave as if they were strolling down Main Street in a small town rather than striding the walkway of a hyper-urban park — routinely smiling and nodding, even striking up conversations with strangers.
“Here people tend to be more friendly,” Kathy Roberson, who is retired but does volunteer work with the poor, said on Saturday. “Those same people, you might see them someplace else and, you know,” she broke off, raising her eyebrows, “they’re kind of stressed.”
A little more than a month since its first stretch opened, the High Line is a hit, and not just with tourists but with New Yorkers who are openly relishing a place where they can reflect and relax enough to get a new perspective on Manhattan.
Despite the complaints about noise, gentrification and tour buses spewing forth their cargo, many locals have fallen so hard and fast for the park that they are acting as impromptu tour guides, eager to show off their new love interest.
“It just gives you a whole new appreciation of Chelsea,” Amy Goodman, co-host of the radio and television news program “Democracy Now!,” was saying with an enthusiastic sweep of her arm to her companions early on a Friday. “It’s such an incredible celebration of urban architecture.”Later, the evening found one of her group, Brenda Murad, leading a tour of her own for a friend from Mexico City.
Since its southernmost section — from 20th Street near 10th Avenue to the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets — opened to the public on June 9, the park has attracted more than 300,000 visitors, said Patrick Cullina, vice president of horticulture and park operations for the High Line. Plans call for the park to reach as far north as 34th Street.
Weekdays it draws from 3,000 to 15,000 through its entrances at 20th, 18th, 16th, 14th and Gansevoort Streets. Weekends are busier, with roughly 18,000 to 20,000 visitors a day; but the park’s legal capacity is 1,700, so officials have often resorted to “special entry” for an hour or two, limiting entry to Gansevoort Street and, for those needing an elevator, 16th Street.
On Saturday around noon, the park was lively, but there was still plenty of room. Ms. Roberson had brought her mother, Josephine, and her neighbor Louis Smart, a retired opera singer and teacher, from their apartments on West 43rd Street, wanting to show them something a little different.
They were sitting on the topmost row at the Sunken Overlook, the centerpiece of 10th Avenue Square, which hovers over 16th and 17th Streets. In daylight the space functions like a central plaza, with trees scattered around benches, open areas and rows of amphitheater-style seating that offer a windowed view of cars and trucks rushing below on 10th Avenue.
Mealtimes tend to be most crowded, when people picnic, chat or just stare blankly at the traffic underfoot, often with children running serpentines through the seats. At night, the overlook turns into a Warholian conceptual installation, with its art-house vibe and screenlike windows.
But on Saturday, it was a stop on Amy Chin’s “urban birthday safari,” a daylong tour of attractions far above the ground, she said, inspired by the High Line. Ms. Chin, a consultant to nonprofit arts groups, was celebrating her 47th birthday with friends and family over lunch and a cake frosted in thick chocolate butter cream and poppy-red and saffron-orange flowers (“Van Gogh colors,” as her sister, Lily, put it).
Back at the top of the overlook, Mr. Smart was transfixed by the cake. “Now, I’ve got to see that,” he said. “You’ve seen a cake before,” Kathy Roberson said. “Not like that!” Mr. Smart countered, descending. After his return a few minutes later, Amy Chin approached, offering to share the confection. Josephine Roberson accepted. The High Line had not yet seemed to impress her much, but the cake did. “She’s smiling now,” Kathy Roberson said, laughing.
There are other gathering places, like the passage beneath the Standard Hotel near Little West 12th Street, where the arching structure has created a breezeway with perpetual shade and cooling winds. The Standard is itself a draw, attracting people hoping for a glimpse of the racy displays in the huge plate-glass room windows of the hotel, which seeks out exhibitionist guests by promoting itself as a sleek sex palace. (“And now, the floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the High Line at the Standard New York offer direct views to your most intimate moments,” read a notice on its blog).
There is plenty to see below the hotel, especially near 13th Street. On Friday around 7 p.m., a shifting cluster was leaning over the railing there, snapping pictures of the creative types sipping champagne at an open-air lounge, and of Marni Halasa, a figure skating instructor and “parade junkie” who was posing, arms held high — for a National Enquirer photo shoot, she said.
She was wearing what she called her mermaid outfit: long, form-fitting aquamarine sequined skirt slit nearly to the waist, halter top, shimmering cape held like angel wings, Rollerblades.
But there is no spot more coveted than the sundeck facing the Hudson River between 14th and 15th Streets, where the row of dark brown ipe wood lounge chairs brings bikini-clad sunbathers, picnicking families and affectionate couples throughout the day and evening. If it were the late 1980s, this would be Nell’s, albeit without the cocaine and cocktails: roving park security officers are vigilant about drinking, which is prohibited.
The visibility of the staff — maintenance workers, gardeners, volunteers wearing “Ask Me About The High Line” buttons — is important, Mr. Cullina said, in promoting the sense that the park is well maintained.
So on Sunday night, before the park’s 10 p.m. shutdown and 7 a.m. reopening, a maintenance worker was wheeling a garbage can along the sundeck.
“I’m looking for trash donation,” he called out, as if hawking hot dogs at a ball field. “Can I get a trash donation, y’all?”
A few along the way obliged. Meng Li, a bond analyst with a fondness for magic tricks, playfully fanned out a deck of cards. The pinks in the sky deepened toward purple, the red neon W of the hotel across the Hudson grew brighter, and the strains of Hector del Curto’s Eternal Tango Orchestra on Pier 54 drifted overhead.
One of Mr. Li’s companions, Nikoleta Kasa, took it all in, saying, “I’m lucky to live here.”
Article by Diane Cardwell New York Times 21 July
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Swiss Bunkers - Part 1
For over four years, I have developed a photographic documentary work on Swiss fortified constructions – bunkers. Each element of these photographs has a relation with Switzerland and particularly the mountain landscape that is an inherent part of our identity. The bunkers are a integral part of a finely developed popular defense military system in Switzerland, a military with historically strong links to the landscape.
After the cold war ended many of the bunkers became obsolete. The tendency is to forget them or even to renounce them, my approach on the contrary, aims to expose them from a new angle. This approach has led me to discover a great number of bunkers, some in remote areas, sometimes difficultly accessible, covering the whole of the Swiss territory. The relations between these basic shaped bunkers and the often-sumptuous landscape surrounds them became an essential part of the study. I looked for the most spectacular bunkers, notable for their camouflage devices, true theatre scenery made with the utmost care. A quality indeed fully Swiss.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Malcolm X Jazz Festival - East Oakland
The last Oakland posting for the evening. Nostalgia has consumed the nine variables. The Malcolm X Jazz Festival is an annual treat held in San Antonio Park in East Oakland. The Festival is endorsed by the nine variables who attended in 2003.
Bad Granddad
Johnny Talbot strides into Berkeley's Funky Riddms Records like a man on a soul mission. He's casually stylish, dressed in a khaki shirt with metal tips on the collars, black pants, a black jacket, and blue-tinted sunglasses. What really completes the look, however, is his short, processed coiffure, almost identical to that of James Brown's on the Live at the Apollo Vol. II record the shop sells for $20 (used). He still looks good, he says, "because the music keeps me young."
Talbot is like your funky uncle, or perhaps the cool dad you wished you had. This grandpa of groove can claim to be an originator of the Oakland funk sound, although his soft-spoken modesty won't allow him to brag that much about it. To hear Talbot talk is to be taken on a trip down memory lane, when Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye routinely used to recruit East Bay bands for their touring outfits, when Sly Stone was a radio disc jockey, when Bill Graham owned and booked the Fillmore Auditorium. Talbot can even recall playing concerts there before Graham's tenure.
Talbot's roots are in Texas, but he is East Bay-bred. He was raised in Oakland, and attended Berkeley High School, where he was involved in the doo-wop scene, the flavor of the day back then. Because of his Lone Star State heritage, it was natural for him to pick up the guitar -- just as a person from New Orleans might gravitate toward the piano. He played in local blues and R&B bands, worked the West Coast circuit from Los Angeles to Seattle, and gigged frequently in the Bay's then-thriving bar scene. Eventually, Talbot became the front man for a band called Da Things, who inspired numerous other musicians -- among them Tower of Power -- to learn the nuances of Oakland-style funk, an urban variant of the Texas blues guitar sound, based around a gritty, syncopated rhythm section.
"Oakland funk is sort of a mixture of the blues and R&B," Talbot attempts to explain. "It originated on the streets of Oakland. It's hard to just describe it without hearing it. When I say 'sound,' I mean, musicians from a certain place have a certain sound." The band's name came about, Talbot recalls, when they were sitting around trying to come up with a moniker and one member said, "I can't think of a thing." The name stuck, and for a while, Da Things were the hottest thing happening in the local scene. Although the band cut only one album, for the Kent label, its legacy lives on through the innumerable Bay Area funk, R&B, and soul bands of the '70s and '80s, all the way up to Too $hort, Oakland's first rap star. Talbot speaks glowingly of $hort (who has maintained the attitude of Oakland funk more than any other rapper, according to Talbot), just as he speaks disparagingly of Los Angeles bands, who in his mind weren't as funky as Da Things and their peers.
Talbot got introduced to a younger generation of listeners through the recent Bay Area Funk compilation, which included his song "Pickin' Cotton," a killer jam that contains all the hallmarks of heavy funk. He also played live at the record release party at the Shattuck Down Low (284 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, 510-548-1159), a show that went over so well, he's reprising it Friday night at the same venue. The local legend is careful to distinguish his brand of original Oakland funk from the later permutations, which commercialized and even applied a jazz paradigm to the sound. "To be a funk band, you have to have people in the band who are funky," he reasons. The statement speaks for itself.
Article courtesy of East Bay Express - Eric Arnold - 17 March 2004
The ninevariables attended Johnny's record release party many moons (and whiskys) ago. it was indeed a funky affair.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Diddy Wah and the Underdog
1. Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels - Devil With A Blue Dress On
2. The Monks - Oh, How To Do Now
3. Ray Charles - Hit The Road Jack
4. Link Wray - Switchblade
5. Brian Auger - Tiger
6. Sweet Charity Orchestra - The Pompeii Club (Rich Man's Frug)
7. Gong - Pot Head Pixies
8. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Obeah Man
9. The Byrds - Artificial Energy
10. Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band - Apache
11. Spanky Wilson - Sunshine Of Your Love
12. Esther Marrow - Chains Of Love
13. Sly & The Family Stone - Underdog
14. Martha Reeves & The Vandellas - Easily Persuaded
15. Isaac Hayes - Run Fay Run
16. Otis Redding - Papas Got A Brand New Bag
17. Maceo & The Macks - Cross The Tracks
18. Idris Muhammad - Super Bad
19. Tom Jones - Venus
20. Candido - 1000 Finger Man
19. The Lebron Brothers - Summertime Blues
20. Trinidad Oil Company - Feelin' Alright
Visit the Diddy Wah website to download tunes:
http://diddywah.blogspot.com/search/label/mixtape/
Shacking Up In The Mississippi Delta
The Shack Up Inn says it all – if this ain’t your kind of place, don’t bother stopping because there are plenty of others who see the charm in spending the night in a shotgun shack. More people than you’d think.
At a time when most hotels are struggling to find ways to attract new guests, the Shack Up Inn, which rents out renovated share cropper shacks on a former cotton plantation, has seen its business grow amid the recession.“We’ll turn down 50 to 70 people every weekend,” said Guy Malvezzi, one of the owners.
“We’re a cheap thrill,” Malvezzi said, adding that as he saw the unemployment rate rise, he thought reservations might drop off, but “I just sat and watched our business start climbing.” Most recent guests seem to come from within a 400-mile radius, indicating that more people may be choosing to stick closer to home for more affordable vacations.
Michael and I discovered the place--it calls itself a "B&B," but that's bed and beer, not breakfast, thank you) as we drove through the heart of the Mississippi Delta, but the inn doesn't make itself easy to find. Business is so good that that the Shack Up Inn might be one of the only places nowadays that spends less energy trying to lure new guests than discouraging a certain type from stopping there. The owners chase away tour buses, refuse to rent rooms to adults younger than 25 (“drunken frat boys stay away,” as the inn's web site puts it) and warn potential guests, “The Ritz, we ain’t.”
“We don’t have the place listed in the phone book," Malvezzi said. "We don’t have a sign or billboard anywhere. You talk with any tourism person and they’ll tell you how we’re [messing] up. But we do it for a reason. We’re not desperate for anybody’s money.”
Instead, they cater to guests who can appreciate stains on a table and hand-scrawled graffiti on a door. The barely-rehabbed shacks, named after the people who once lived in them or the places where they were originally located, are weathered wood outside and modern appliances inside. They have air conditioning units, electric coffee makers and television sets. But the comforts stop well short of luxury, with much of the furniture looking like it's seen better days. To complete the rustic look, tree branches hold up curtains, bathroom walls are made of corrugated tin and room decorations depend on roadside finds and estate sale buys.
“Blue Mike” Spence showed me the floor of the staircase he constructed inside the inn. The wood changes at each level, transitioning from oak to distressed maple to two kinds of bamboo. All came from scraps; their irregularity fits right in. The inn is a place where every object and nook seems to have a story: A nightstand made from a coffee-bean holder, a strand of ivy turned into art, a ceiling constructed from distressed tin (purchased from a man who considered it trash).
“Nowadays when something’s broken, you just throw it away,” Spence said. “There are some things I refuse to throw away.”
Spence moved here from Ft. Lauderdale, taking on the task of “making the old stuff look new and the new stuff look old”--a job he came to crave after his first visit, as a guest in the Robert Clay shack. Spence wrote in the guest book then that he felt he was “stepping back in time.”
"You can feel the blues," he said. He has scraped the dirt and grime from the walls of these shacks, where black sharecroppers lived and raised families. “The difference is that you want to come and stay in it. But they had to live in them."
The shacks are less an exploitation of the region's history than an attempt to preserve what would have inevitably been torn down with time, Malvezzi said. One by one, he and the other owners have had the shacks moved from the surrounding area to the Hopson Plantation, which is famous for developing the first mechanized cotton picker. The Inn opened in 1998 and, now, for a starting price of $60 a night, you can rent one of 19 shacks, an old tractor shed converted into a three-bedroom house or one of the 10 rooms carved into the top level of a cotton gin.
Malvezzi said there are also plans to build “shackominiums," or shacks for sale, in the 18-acre lot across the way from the Inn, creating an eventual “Shackville.”
“I knew when we got into this, it would be a good business,” Malvezzi said. “But I didn’t think it’d create such a demand.”
He couldn’t have guessed he would be turning away people or putting up signs like “Juke Joint Chapel” that either draw you in or scare you off.
On its website, the inn does what it can to “keep people away”--the wrong people, anyway. The inn's desired clientele would be the history and music buffs who drive through the Delta in search of the spirits of Sam Cooke, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and the other great blues pioneers.
“Discounts – try Motel 6 or 8,” the Inn's site warns. “Roof leaks – only if it rains. Room service – call the Peabody in Memphis. Wake up call – yea right, automatic one minute after check-out time, it consist of a foot on your door at 11:01 AM.”
The ninevariables endorses the Shack Up Inn. Having sold our soul to the devil at the crossroads (and eaten some fine Bar-B-Q at Abe's), a memorable evening was had on 2 January 2008. Amen.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Soviet Album Covers
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
638 Ways to Kill Castro
638 Ways to Kill Castro is a Channel 4 documentary film, broadcast in the United Kingdom on 28 November 2006, which tells the story of some of the numerous attempts to kill Cuba's leader Fidel Castro.
The film reveals multiple methods of assassination, from exploding cigars to femmes fatales; a radio station rigged with noxious gas to a poison syringe posing as an innocuous ballpoint pen. Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuban Intelligence, the man who has had the job of protecting Castro for many of the 49 years he’s been in power, alleges that there were over 600 plots and conspiracies known to Cuban agents, all dreamt up to end the life of the “red menace”. Some were perpetrated by the CIA, especially during the first half of the 1960s. From the seventies onwards, the attempts were most often made by Cuban exiles who had been trained by the CIA shortly after Castro took power in 1959.
On the trail of Castro’s would-be killers, the filmmakers meet a series of would-be assassins – several are also accused terrorists, still living in America. Orlando Bosch, accused by many of being the greatest terrorist in the hemisphere, is found living peacefully in his Miami home, surrounded by an adoring family. Curiously, both Bosch and his companion in arms and fellow accused terrorist Luis Posada Carriles turn out to be keen amateur landscape painters.
The film also contains extensive material shot with Antonio Veciana, the Cuban exile who got close to killing Castro on three occasions, spanning 17 years. He is found running a marine supplies store in Miami. All these men, the film reveals, were supported and funded by the United States. At one point, staggeringly, the CIA even sought the help of the Mafia in the hope they would be able to succeed where so many others had failed. Other characters are Félix Rodríguez, the CIA operative who took part in three planned assassination attempts against Castro, and gave the order for Che Guevara's execution in 1967 in Bolivia, and Enrique Ovares, possibly the first man to make an attempt on Castro's life after he took power. Robert Maheu is interviewed, the Hughes associate who served as liaison between the CIA and mobsters "Johnny" Roselli and Sam "Momo" Giancana, in another plot to kill Castro, this time using poison pills.
In 2006, the documentary was the centre of a controversy surrounding US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. In it the Miami Republican, who had been recently tapped to become the top Republican on the House International Relations Committee, states “I welcome the opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people.” A clip of her statement made its way to the popular website YouTube where the newsmedia quickly picked up the story. There was a subsequent public questioning of Ros-Lehtinen's morals and suitability for her job. She responded by asserting that the clip was spliced together and that it was taken out of context; but after her account was contested by the film's director, she eventually released a statement, on Christmas Eve, accepting that she had made the remark.
The sub-text of the film is a comment on the contemporary War on Terror. The film's executive producer was Peter Moore. It was directed by Dollan Cannell and the commissioning editor was Meredith Chambers.
Courtesy of Wikipedia
Monday, April 13, 2009
Pritzker Prize Goes to Peter Zumthor
But on Monday the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is to be named the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize, the highest recognition for architects.
"He has conceived his method of practice almost as carefully as each of his projects," the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury says. "He develops buildings of great integrity — untouched by fad or fashion. Declining a majority of the commissions that come his way, he only accepts a project if he feels a deep affinity for its program, and from the moment of commitment, his devotion is complete, overseeing the project’s realization to the very last detail."
For Mr. Zumthor, 65, winning the Pritzker, which is awarded annually to a living architect and regarded as architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, is a kind of vindication. "You can do your work, you do your thing, and it gets recognized," he said in a telephone interview from Haldenstein, the Swiss village where he lives and works.Mr. Zumthor is the 33rd laureate to receive the prize, which consists of a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion and is awarded at a different architecturally significant location each year. This year’s ceremony is to be held on May 29 in Buenos Aires.
The project most closely associated with Mr. Zumthor is the spa he completed in 1996 for the Hotel Therme in Vals, an Alpine village in Switzerland. Using slabs of quartzite that evoke stacked Roman bricks, Mr. Zumthor created a contemporary take on the baths of antiquity.
He is also known for his use of wood, as in St. Benedict Chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland, which evokes a giant hot tub.
The Pritzker jury praised Mr. Zumthor’s use of materials. "In Zumthor’s skillful hands, like those of the consummate craftsman, materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted glass are used in a way that celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the service of an architecture of permanence," the citation said, adding, "In paring down architecture to its barest yet most sumptuous essentials, he has reaffirmed architecture’s indispensable place in a fragile world."
Mr. Zumthor said that his projects generally originated with materials. "I work a little bit like a sculptor," he said. "When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It’s not about paper, it’s not about forms. It’s about space and material."
Mr. Zumthor’s buildings do not share a common vernacular. They range from tall and circular to low-slung and boxy. For his Field Chapel to St. Nikolaus von der Flüe, completed in 2007, in Mechernich, Germany, Mr. Zumthor formed the interior from 112 tree trunks configured like a tent. Over 24 days, layers of concrete were poured around the structure. Then for three weeks a fire was kept burning inside so that the dried tree trunks could be easily removed from the concrete shell. The chapel floor was covered with lead, which was melted on site and manually ladled onto the floor.
For an art museum in Bregenz, Austria — a four-story cube of concrete, steel and glass that opened in 1997 — Mr. Zumthor used glass walls that at night can become giant billboards or video screens.
His Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, Germany, completed in 2007, rises out of the ruins of the Gothic St. Kolumba Church, destroyed in World War II. The Pritzker jury called the project "a startling contemporary work, but also one that is completely at ease with its many layers of history."
Mr. Zumthor said that he deliberately kept his office small— no more than 20 people. "That’s the way it’s going to be so that I can be the author of everything," he said."I’m not a producer of images," he added. "I’m this guy who, when I take on a commission, I do it inside out, everything myself, with my team."
One of Mr. Zumthor’s best-known designs never came to fruition. In 1993 he won the competition for a museum and documentation center on the horrors of Nazism to be built on the site of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Mr. Zumthor’s submission called for an extended three-story building with a framework consisting of concrete rods. The project, called the Topography of Terror, was partly built and then abandoned when the government decided not to go ahead for financial reasons. The unfinished building was demolished in 2004. Born in Basel, Switzerland, Mr. Zumthor as a teenager served a four-year apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker. He studied at the Basel Arts and Crafts School and spent a year at Pratt Institute in New York. In the 1970s he moved to Graubünden, Switzerland, to work for the Department for the Preservation of Monuments. He established his own practice in 1979 in Haldenstein, where he and his wife, Annalisa Zumthor-Cuorad, brought up their three children.
Mr. Zumthor said that his village had been an inspiration and a refuge. "It helps you concentrate," he said. "And also collaborators coming here are not distracted by all the things of the big city. To come up with me, you’re in the Alps. It’s sort of a commitment. It’s a beautiful feeling. Of course you have to like the mountains."
New York Times
by Robin Pogrebin
April 12 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Hank Crawford, Prolific Saxophonist, Dies at 74
Hank Crawford, whose fluidly emotional saxophone solos as a sideman for Ray Charles led to a long career as a leader of jazz and soul bands and a lengthy discography for Atlantic, Kudu and Milestone Records, died Thursday at his home in Memphis. He was 74.
The cause was complications of a stroke he had in 2000, his sister Delores said.
Beginning in the early 1960s, when Mr. Crawford was music director for Charles’s big band and also recorded on his own as a bandleader, he was best known as an alto saxophonist who melded a wailing blues style to the melodic and rhythmic exigencies of modern jazz, funk and soul. He proved an especially flexible musician over the decades as styles of popular music swiveled hither and yon.
A sampling of his recorded tracks from the ’60s and ’70s would encompass, say, “The Peeper,” a bluesy swing number reminiscent of the Duke Ellington tunes he first listened to at home as a child; “New York’s One Soulful City,” an example of the rhythmically funky if melodically saccharine sounds of some television themes of the ’70s; and “I Hear a Symphony,” a soulful disco cover of the 1965 Supremes hit.
But Mr. Crawford’s distinctively piercing sound remained constant, a forceful and urgent plaintiveness that was rooted in the blues and delivered with a preacher’s fervor. In addition to working with Charles, over the years he was an arranger, co-leader or sideman for blues masters of several different stripes, among them Eric Clapton, Etta James, B. B. King and Jimmy McGriff. “He has a rich, throbbing tone and a way of phrasing like a blues singer,” Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times in 1986. “Mr. Crawford’s solos are artfully shaped, but they convey a naked emotionality.”
Bennie Ross Crawford Jr. was born in Memphis on Dec. 21, 1934, into a large family and “a jazz and gospel household,” as Delores Crawford described it in a phone interview Monday. A pianist who played in church, he attended Manassas High School, an incubator of musical talent with alumni including Jimmie Lunceford and Isaac Hayes. Among Mr. Crawford’s own schoolmates were the future jazz notables George Coleman, Harold Mabern and Charles Lloyd.
Mr. Crawford’s father was a truck driver who badly wanted to play the saxophone but did not have the chops; still, he contributed to the history of music.
“He was a confused saxophone player,” Ms. Crawford said. “But he brought a saxophone home with him from the Army, and put it in Hank’s hands.”Mr. Crawford was given his nickname as a teenager by some fellow musicians who thought he sounded like a local saxophonist named Hank. He attended Tennessee State University in Nashville and was just short of a degree when Ray Charles came to town and offered him a gig in his band playing baritone sax.
Mr. Crawford played baritone on several of Charles’s records, including “Ray Charles at Newport” and “What’d I Say.” During his years with Charles, the saxophone section also included David (Fathead) Newman, with whom he later collaborated frequently, and Leroy (Hog) Cooper. Both Mr. Newman and Mr. Cooper also died in January.
Mr. Crawford, whose first marriage ended in divorce, was a widower. In addition to Delores Crawford, he is survived by two brothers, Danny and Ceylon; three sisters, Shirley, Marva and Alma; a son, Michael; a daughter, Sherri; and a granddaughter. All live in Memphis.
New York Times
By Bruce Weber
Published: February 2, 2009
