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Join us for the 1st Free Minds, Free People Chicago gathering!

Wed, 16 May 2012 22:57:53 +0000

Chicago activists, educators, students, academics and parents are coming together June 2 to talk about how we can use Free Minds, Free People, the powerful national gathering on education justice, to support the development of a national education movement. Be part of this critical discussion about how to connect the burgeoning, city-wide education movement in Chicago to education for liberation work across the country.

The Education for Liberation Network is organizing local groups in different cities to help shape the agenda of Free Minds, Free People and strengthen the connections within and among these cities. The next Free Minds, Free People will take place in Salt Lake City, June 27-30, 2013.

We invite members of the Free Minds, Free People family and beyond to our first Chicago gathering on Saturday, June 2 from 10:00 am to 12:30 pm. The gathering will largely take the form of conversations among allies. Together we will explore questions such as:

· What does Chicago do well in terms of education for liberation? What can we teach other cities?

· What are the biggest challenges we face in Chicago with regards to education? What can we learn from others?

· What are the common threads that link our struggles?

· What conversations would we like to have with teachers, students, parents, academics and activists from other places? How can we connect our struggle to theirs?

Chicago is the birthplace of Free Minds, Free People, and one of the most important sites in the fight for education justice in this country. We expect Chicago to have a powerful voice in shaping the direction of this critical national gathering. Please join us!

Date: Saturday, June 2, 2012

Time: 10:00 am to 12:30 pm

Location: University of Illinois at Chicago

Jane Addams College of Social Work

1040 W. Harrison St. Chicago, IL

4th floor, room 4013

Transportation: Blue line--UIC-Halstead

Pay parking lots at Harrison structure or Morgan and Harrison open lot

Street parking about a block away

Breakfast and childcare will be provided. You must register your child in advance.

(Donations for food are appreciated)

Please RSVP here: http://www.fmfp.org/register/chigathering

We look forward to seeing you there.

The FMFP 2012 Planning Committee

John Forte: "The Russian Winter"

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:54:17 +0000

A Rapper’s Strange Trip to Russia

SOURCE: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/...to-russia/

Why has it taken so long for someone to make a movie about the musician John Forté? His life story certainly has the requisite sweep: Forté grew up fatherless and poor in Brownsville, Brooklyn, only to get a scholarship to one of the best prep schools in the country, Phillips Exeter. He received a Grammy nomination for his work with the Fugees, then embarked on a critically acclaimed solo career, before getting arrested at Newark Airport for carrying $1.4 million in liquid cocaine. He was sentenced to a mandatory 14 years in prison, served seven, and then had his sentence commuted in 2008 by George W. Bush at the urging of a pair of unlikely allies: the singer Carly Simon and the Republican Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.

“The Russian Winter,” which has its debut tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a documentary about Forté, but it has very little to do with the Fugees, jail, Carly Simon or growing up poor in Brooklyn. Instead, this strangely moving film, which Forté co-produced, centers around a nine-week music-making journey that he took across Russia in 2011 — a trip for which he had to obtain special permission from his parole officer.

Forté is 37, handsome, bearded and very impressively dreadlocked. When we met, on Tuesday, he was dressed in a plaid shirt and his sun-baked dreads were swept up into a giant coil about his head. We were sitting by the rooftop pool of the Soho House, in the meatpacking district, sipping on sparkling mineral water; it was a curious perch from which to look back on his time in prison, not to mention whatever impulse had sent Forté to Russia.

“I think the knee-jerk reaction of coming home was to make a documentary about my life preceding prison, and what took place in prison, leading up to me coming home. But something about it just didn’t feel right. It felt exploitative,” Forté said. “You know, I went to prep school. When I came back to the ‘hood, it wasn’t like people slapped me on the back and said, ‘Wow, you got your stripes now.’ But there were so many guys that went [to prison] for a year, went away for two years, went away for five years. And when they came back, it was almost like they were praised. And that’s the last message I wanted to send. There was nothing cool about my time away.”

The film, which is directed by Petter Ringbom, tracks Forté as he collaborates with Russian musicians across the country and holds a series of concerts for local charities. It begins in Moscow, where Forté is met by an adoring audience at Spaso House, the official residence of the American ambassador to Russia. His reception is frostier at the Miss Russia 2011 beauty competition, held at an oligarchs’ playground on the outskirts of Moscow. As Miss Tartarstan and Miss Vladivostok stilt-walk across the stage on their stilettos, Forté and his bandmates play background music, looking like they have no idea where they are or how exactly they got there.

Almost every performance or press interview they do in Russia is preceded by Soviet-style bureaucratic hiccups. Delays are constant. Forté is told one thing, then the opposite. No one understands him, and people in the street stare at his dreadlocks. He meets Artemy Troitsky, an adorable aging bohemian rock critic, who explains to Forté why the advertisements he paid for were never put up around Moscow. “You’ve been duped,” he says. “It’s always this story with Russia, great culture, wonderful people, blah, blah — but it has always been criminally, badly managed.”

The culture clash culminates in a showdown with a young composer hired to do orchestral arrangements for one of Forté’s songs. The composer demands co-author credit, which infuriates Forté. “I will terminate everything right now. This is my song, not our song,” he shouts. “Don’t try to come in and take anything of mine.” He storms out of the room and, a little later, the composer backs off.

“I didn’t want to editorialize this thing so I came off looking like a saint or everything was perfect,” Forté told me. “The fact of the matter is we had a number of incredible moments but we also had a few bumps along the way.”

Forté finds his groove in smaller cities, like Nizhny Novgorod, where he meets up with the coquettish Lithuanian Alina Orlova, who performs her sung poetry in a trancelike state. Tentatively, they try to make music together. “If you have any kind of song that has an open verse, I can come up with something right now,” Forté explains. Orlova throws herself into the enchantingly delicate ballad “Lijo,” and when she finishes, Forté looks defeated. “Some pieces of art are too beautiful to be touched,” he says. But a few minutes later, she’s tapping out something different on the keyboard, then he belts out a few verses before throwing it back to her: “Now I want you to find a one-line refrain.”

It’s this same kind of on-the-fly collaborative process that Forté tries out with a range of stellar Russian artists, including the Tom Waits-influenced jazz quartet Billy’s Band and the vocal wizard Sunsay. (He was the whinier half of 5’nizza, a superb Ukrainian acoustic duo that disbanded in 2007.) As the collaborations mount and more concerts are held across the country, “Dzhon For-tay” actually becomes something of a local celebrity, and a video he makes with Sunsay, ”Wind Song,” goes viral.

Most of the Russian artists involved with the film have flown in for the Tribeca premiere. But Carly Simon, whom Forté calls his “spiritual godmother” and who had fought so tirelessly for Forté’s release from prison, cannot make the event. “She’s receiving a lifetime achievement award in Los Angeles, and she’s so devastated that she won’t be able to be there,” Forté said. “But I screened it for her a few months back at Martha’s Vineyard, and she cried.”

On Sunday, Forté will perform with the cast of “The Russian Winter” at the Bowery Ballroom. “We have a huge, huge list of guest artists who are appearing,” said Forté, mentioning Natasha Bedingfield, Talib Kweli and Carly Simon’s son, Ben Taylor. “That goes back to the mission I had with doing this film in Russia, which is to not just make this film about me, but to collaborate. I know I didn’t do this alone. I didn’t find success alone. I didn’t find failure alone. But when you do find success, I think it’s important to pay homage to those that helped you get there.”

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Sat, 31 Mar 2012 22:27:19 +0000

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The Song Machine: The hitmakers behind Rihanna and today's industry

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:30:33 +0000

SOURCE
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/...t_seabrook

THE SONG MACHINE: The hitmakers behind Rihanna.

Ester Dean, center, has written smash hooks for Rihanna and Nicki Minaj.

On a mild Monday afternoon in mid-January, Ester Dean, a songwriter and vocalist, arrived at Roc the Mic Studios, on West Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan, for the first of five days of songwriting sessions. Her engineer, Aubry Delaine, whom she calls Big Juice, accompanied her. Dean picked up an iced coffee at a Starbucks on Seventh Avenue, took the elevator up to Roc the Mic, and passed through a lounge that had a pool table covered in taupe-colored felt. Two sets of soundproofed doors led to the control room, a windowless cockpit that might have been the flight deck of a spaceship.

Tor Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen, the team of Norwegian writer-producers professionally known as Stargate, were waiting there for Dean. Both are tall and skinny ectomorphs with pale shaved heads who would not look out of place in a “Matrix” movie. Dean, who is black, is neither skinny nor tall; she reached up to give them big hugs, which is how she greets almost everyone. They chatted for a while. Dean has a comical, Betty Boop-ish speaking voice, which will be featured in the upcoming animated film “Ice Age: Continental Drift.” (Sid, the giant ground sloth voiced by John Leguizamo, is finally getting a girlfriend, Dean’s Sloth Siren.) After ten minutes or so, she pronounced herself “ready to work.”

Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean. The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”

The top-liner is usually a singer, too, and often provides the vocal for the demo, a working draft of the song. If the song is for a particular artist, the top-liner may sing the demo in that artist’s style. Sometimes producers send out tracks to more than one top-line writer, which can cause problems. In 2009, both Beyoncé and Kelly Clarkson had hits (Beyoncé’s “Halo,” which charted in April, and Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” which charted in August) that were created from the same track, by Ryan Tedder. Clarkson wrote her own top line, while Beyoncé shared a credit with Evan Bogart. Tedder had neglected to tell the artists that he was double-dipping, and when Clarkson heard “Halo” and realized what had happened she tried to stop “Already Gone” from being released as a single, because she feared the public would think she had copied Beyoncé’s hit. But nobody cared, or perhaps even noticed; “Already Gone” became just as big a hit.

A relatively small number of producers and top-liners create a disproportionately large share of contemporary hits, which may explain why so many of them sound similar. The producers are almost always male: Max Martin, Dr. Luke, David Guetta, Tricky Stewart, the Matrix, Timbaland, the Neptunes, Stargate. The top-liners are often, although not always, women: Makeba Riddick, Bonnie McKee, and Skylar Grey are among Dean’s peers. The producer runs the session and serves as creative director of the song, but the top-liner supplies the crucial spark that will determine whether the song is a smash. (When I asked Tricky Stewart to define “smash,” he said, “A hit is just a hit; a smash is a life changer.”) As Eric Beall, an A. & R. executive with Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., a music publisher, puts it, “The top-line writer is the one who has to face a blank page.” Stargate works with about twenty top-liners a year, and creates some eighty demos. These are sent out to A. & R. departments at record labels, to artists’ managers, and, finally, to the artists, for approval. Around twenty-five of Stargate’s songs end up on records each year.

Dean has a genius for infectious hooks. Somehow she is able to absorb the beat and the sound of a track, and to come out with its melodic essence. The words are more like vocalized beats than like lyrics, and they don’t communicate meaning so much as feeling and attitude—they nudge you closer to the ecstasy promised by the beat and the “rise,” or the “lift,” when the track builds to a climax. Among Dean’s best hooks are her three Rihanna smashes—“Rude Boy” (“Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”), “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na COME ON”), and “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na, what’s my name?”), all with backing tracks by Stargate—and her work on two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass” (“Boom, badoom, boom / boom, badoom, boom / bass / yeah, that’s that super bass”) and David Guetta’s “Turn Me On” (“Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”).

“Talk That Talk,” a Dean-Stargate song that’s the title track of Rihanna’s most recent album, is built around one chord progression—F-sharp minor, E minor, B minor, D. The music combines genres that, twenty years ago, were distinct: the hard beats of hip-hop and the big melody “money notes” sung by nineties stars such as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion. The first hook comes right away, in an abbreviated chorus that precedes a Jay-Z rap. Then comes the main hook: “One and two and three and four / come and let me know if you want some more,” a salacious-sounding bit of rhythm singing, backed by dirty-sounding synths, which opens the chorus. Then there’s a verse, which delivers the third hook: “Say what you want, say what you like / Say what you want me to do and I got you.” The chorus rolls around again, this time with the lift, followed by the bridge, which delivers yet another hook: “What you say now, give it to me baby / I want it all night, give it to me baby,” sung over a nasty-sounding snare drum (which, like all the instrumental sounds, is machine-made). The bridge also conveys the “breakdown,” when the song’s momentum pauses momentarily. Then comes the chorus for a final time. The song is neither clever nor subtle—we are a long way from Cole Porter here—but it is deeply seductive all the same.

Dean’s preferred method of working is to delay listening to a producer’s track until she is in the studio, in front of the mike. “I go into the booth and I scream and I sing and I yell, and sometimes it’s words but most time it’s not,” she told me. “And I just see when I get this little chill, here”—she touched her upper arm, just below the shoulder—“and then I’m, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the hook.’ ” If she doesn’t feel that chill after five minutes, she moves on to the next track, and tries again.

In advance of Dean’s arrival at Roc the Mic, Stargate had prepared several dozen tracks. They created most of them by jamming together on keyboards until they came up with an “idea”—generally, a central chord progression or a riff—around which they quickly built up a track, using the vast array of preprogrammed sounds and beats at their disposal. Hermansen likens their tracks to new flavors awaiting the right soft-drink or potato-chip maker to come along and incorporate them into a product.

Their plan with Dean was to finish one or two songs at each session. Given their record of success, they dared hope that one of these would be a smash. The others would be relegated to the “good but not good enough” file. Around Roc the Mic, writing songs for any reason other than making hits is a waste of time.

Top Forty radio was invented by Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, the operator and program director, respectively, of KOWH, an AM station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early fifties. Like most music programmers of the day, Storz and Stewart provided a little something for everyone. As Marc Fisher writes in his book “Something in the Air” (2007), “The gospel in radio in those days was that no tune ought to be repeated within twenty-four hours of its broadcast—surely listeners would resent having to hear the same song twice in one day.” The eureka moment, as Ben Fong-Torres describes it in “The Hits Just Keep on Coming” (1998), occurred in a restaurant across from the station, where Storz and Stewart would often wait for Storz’s girlfriend, a waitress, to get off work. They noticed that even though the waitresses listened to the same handful of songs on the jukebox all day long, played by different customers, when the place finally cleared out and the staff had the jukebox to themselves they played the very same songs. The men asked the waitresses to identify the most popular tunes on the jukebox, and they went back to the station and started playing them, in heavy rotation. Ratings soared.

By the end of the decade, Top Forty was the most popular format in the nation. It thrived in the sixties, but began to struggle with the popularity of FM radio, and the rise of album-oriented rock, in the seventies. Rock music, with its artistic aspirations, didn’t fit the nakedly commercial format as well as the bubblegum pop of the pre-rock era had. Also, mainstream pop began to splinter into “adult contemporary,” “easy listening,” and “urban,” among other formats. Rock, meanwhile, gave birth to “classic,” “modern,” and, in the nineties, “alternative” formats. Top Forty never went away—Casey Kasem’s syndicated radio show, “American Top Forty,” kept the format going into the twenty-first century—but by the eighties it could no longer claim to be America’s soundtrack.

In the past decade, however, Top Forty has come back stronger than ever. You hear it in shops, in restaurants, and at sporting events; it’s the music my thirteen-year-old son and his friends listen to on their iPods and dance to at parties. Paradoxically, in an age when an unprecedented range of musical genres is easily available via the Internet, the public’s appetite for hits has never been greater. (The best-selling-singles chart on iTunes, which is calculated from digital sales, and YouTube’s most popular songs, based on online views, match up closely with Billboard ’s Hot 100, which is mainly derived from radio play and sales.) In New York City, contemporary hit radio now dominates FM stations, a remarkable turn of events for anyone old enough to remember when FM radio was the antithesis of Top Forty.

How did this happen? How did mainstream rock, once the source of the catchiest hooks in popular music, become robotic, unimaginative, and predictable, while pop, always the soul of artifice, came to seem creative, experimental, and alive? (Billboard ’s list of the top ten songwriters of the past decade includes only one rock writer, Rob Thomas, who ranks fifth, between Alicia Keys and Max Martin; Stargate comes in ninth.) Whereas rock is about the sound of a band playing together (even when its members aren’t actually together) and features virtuoso solos played on real instruments, today’s Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes. The music sounds sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah pah pah. The people who create the songs are often in different places. The artists, who spend much of the year touring, don’t have time to come into the studio; they generally record new material in between shows, in mobile recording studios and hotel rooms, working with demos that producers and top-line writers make for them to use as a kind of vocal stencil pattern. (The production notes for Rihanna’s single “Talk That Talk” say that her vocal was recorded on “the Bus” in Birmingham, Alabama, in Room 538 of the Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg, and in Room 526 of the Savoy, in London. When I remarked on this peripatetic recording method to Hermansen, he replied, “It’s music as aspirational travel.”)

As was the case in the pre-rock era, when Phil Spector-produced girl groups led the hit parade, many of the leading artists of the post-rock era are women. Rarely a month goes by without a new song from Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, or Pink near the top of the charts. But the artist who best embodies the music and the style of the new Top Forty is Rihanna, the Barbados-born pop singer. At twenty-four, she is the queen of urban pop, and the consummate artist of the digital age, in which quantity is more important than quality and personality trumps song craft. She releases an album a year, often recording a new one while she is on an eighty-city world tour promoting the last one. To keep her supplied with material, her label, Def Jam, and her manager, Jay Brown, periodically convene “writer camps”—weeklong conclaves, generally held in Los Angeles, where dozens of top producers and writers from around the world are brought in to brainstorm on songs. After an album comes out, she may release remixes, like her recent ill-advised collaborations with Chris Brown, to give singles a boost. She has sold more digital singles than any other artist—a hundred and twenty million.

Rihanna is often described as a “manufactured” pop star, because she doesn’t write her songs, but neither did Sinatra or Elvis. She embodies a song in the way an actor inhabits a role—and no one expects the actor to write the script. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or eleven songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented business of today the artist has only three or four minutes to put her personality across. The song must drip with attitude and swagger, or “swag,” and nobody delivers that better than Rihanna, even if a good deal of the swag originates with Ester Dean.

Several of the tracks that Stargate had prepared for Dean were “cray-zee,” one of two catchall superlatives used around the studio; “dope” is the other. But since they had five days of sessions ahead, and Dean often required time to get into her zone, there was no point in squandering the best tracks right away. So they warmed up with a throwaway number, which all parties knew immediately was not “the one.”

Their second attempt was more promising. Dean carried her iced coffee into the recording booth, which adjoined the control room. She was dimly visible through the soundproofed glass window, bathed in greenish light. She took out her BlackBerry, and as the track began to play she surfed through lists of phrases she had copied from magazines and television programs. She showed me a few: “life in the fast lane,” “crying shame,” “high and mighty,” “mirrors don’t lie,” “don’t let them see you cry.” Some phrases were categorized under headings like “Sex and the City,” “Interjections,” and “British Slang.”

The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—“taking control . . . never die tonight . . . I can’t live a lie”—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been “writing” in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.

After several minutes of nonsense singing, the song began to coalesce. Almost imperceptibly, the right words rooted themselves in the rhythm while melodies and harmonies emerged in Dean’s voice. Her voice isn’t hip-hop or rock or country or gospel or soul, exactly, but it could be any one of those. “I’ll come alive tonight,” she sang. Dancing now, Dean raised one arm in the air. After a few more minutes, the producers told her she could come back into the control room.

“See, I just go in there and scream and they fix it,” she said, emerging from the booth, looking elated, almost glowing.

Stargate went to work putting Dean’s wailings into traditional song structure. As is usually the case, Eriksen worked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’s sixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and lights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only five years ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.

Within twenty minutes, Dean’s rhythmic utterances had been organized into an intro, a verse, a pre-chorus (or “pre”), a chorus, and an “outro”; all that was missing was a bridge. (Friday, the final day of the sessions, was reserved for making bridges.) Delaine, the engineer, who hadn’t said a word thus far, sat down at the computer and began tweaking the pitch of Dean’s vocal. Dean went back into the booth and added more words: “Give me life . . . touch me and I’ll come alive . . . I’ll come alive tonight . . .”

Hermansen listened, his bald head bobbing to the beat. “You don’t want ‘I’ll come alive at night,’ ” he said, over the booth’s intercom. “That’s too zombie.”

“I’ll come a-LI-I-IVE,” Dean tried, drawling out the syllables.

Once the hook was finished, Dean wrote a couple of verses on her MacBook Air. In a little less than two hours, they had a finished demo.

Was this the one? Hermansen wasn’t sure; they would listen to it again tomorrow. Big Juice seemed to like it, though. After hearing the final playback, he spoke for the first time.

“That’s dope,” he said.

Dean was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Her great-grandmother on her mother’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee. She has a country twang in her voice, and uses it on her demos to amplify her swag. Her father drank, and after her parents split up she moved with her mother and five siblings (Ester is the youngest), first to Tulsa, then to Omaha. Dean left school after tenth grade and, after drifting around, wound up in Atlanta, working as a nurse’s aide in various hospitals. One of her sisters and a nephew lived with her in her one-bedroom government-subsidized apartment. Later, her mother moved in, too. Dean wanted to be a singer. She had been writing songs since third grade, and she sang beautifully in school as a child—everyone told her so—but she didn’t know how to break into the music business.

Early in 2005, Dean was at an outdoor concert given by the Gap Band, a funk ensemble made up of the three Wilson brothers, who, like Dean, are from Oklahoma. Dean, in the crowd, was singing along with Charlie Wilson, the lead singer. The producer Tricky Stewart happened to be nearby. “I heard this singing coming from somewhere around me,” he told me, “and I’m trying to listen to Charlie Wilson, but my producer’s ear is hearing this other voice, and I’m thinking, Wow, that is not natural. Charlie Wilson is a damn good singer, but this other voice is keeping right up, executing all the tricky little runs perfectly. Finally, I just had to find who that was.” He followed the sound of the voice to Dean, and introduced himself. “I said, ‘Do you have any musical training?’ ” he recalled. “She said she didn’t. I said, ‘Well, a person who can sing like you has a gift.’ ”

Stewart invited Dean to his studio, RedZone Entertainment, in Atlanta. “I just wanted to put her in a room with some other talented musicians to see what she could do,” he told me. In addition to singing, they worked on writing, because, he added, “I truly believe if you can sing you can write songs.” Dean sang some of her songs for Stewart, and he offered her a contract with his publishing company. She made some extra money by singing on demos, but she was still broke, living with her family in her cramped apartment and working at the hospital.

On Super Bowl weekend, 2008, Dean saw a movie called “The Secret.” It purports to demonstrate “the law of attraction,” an ancient principle, long suppressed by nefarious powers, that states that if you want something badly enough, and if you “manifest” your dreams clearly in your mind and remove any doubts you harbor about attaining them, they will come true. As an aid to this kind of thinking, the film (and the subsequent best-selling book, by Rhonda Byrne) advocates making a “vision board”: a poster with taped-up pictures of people, achievements, and things you admire, aspire to, or covet. After watching the film, Dean took the plastic cover off a storage container in her apartment and taped to it a picture of Ciara, a pop singer and songwriter who happened to be from Atlanta. She cut out pictures of a house, a car, and an American Express card, and taped those up, too.

In the fall of 2008, another producer, Polow da Don, brought Dean to Los Angeles, and she met Jimmy Iovine, the head of Interscope Records. She soon began writing for Ciara, and then for Christina Aguilera and Mary J. Blige. Dean describes herself as a “prude,” and she neither smokes nor drinks, nor does she frequent clubs or parties, but when she gets on the mike she becomes a person who does all those things, and more. (She told me that her raunchiest lyric, for Rihanna’s “S&M”—“I may be bad but I’m perfectly good at it / Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it”—came to her on a Sunday, adding, “Father forgive me.”) It is when writing for Rihanna that her inner bad girl gets freest rein; she becomes the woman she imagines Rihanna might be, which Rihanna herself, tall and slim and sexy, would never aspire to with such urgency. If you listen to Dean’s demos for her Rihanna hits on YouTube (which someone uploaded without her permission), it’s hard to tell whether Dean is channelling Rihanna or Rihanna is copying Dean. “People put comments on my YouTube demos saying stuff like ‘This cover sucks,’ ” she told me indignantly. “I ain’t never covered a song in my life!”

Dean’s hits have made her a lot of money, both from record sales and from performance income, which writers earn when songs are played on the radio. (A No. 1 single can earn the writer a million dollars or more, and Dean has cowritten five.) She has a nice home in the Brentwood section of L.A., and another house nearby, which she uses as a recording studio. She generally prefers to have producers e-mail her tracks; she writes the top line and records her vocal in her own studio with the help of Delaine, who is her full-time engineer. “When I’m working alone, I have no feedback, just the occasional nod or ‘I like it’ from Aubry,” she said. “Stargate is the only producer where I go to their place, ’cause everyone else is so hit-minded. They’re always looking at you, going, ‘Didja get it? Didja get it? Is that the hit?’ And I don’t know what I’m going to give them. I never try to tap and find out what it is; I just do what I do.”

In only a few years, Dean has achieved all the goals she taped up on her vision board. But she has one more goal (and another vision board for that): to be a recording artist herself. She had a modest hit with her recording of her 2009 song “Drop It Low,” featuring Chris Brown, but an EP or an album did not follow. In fact, Dean’s becoming an artist is the very last thing many people in the music industry want, because, as Dean put it to me, “to them, I’m a check. So their attitude is ‘Why you want to take away my check?’ ”

Nevertheless, Dean has declared—and Jay Brown, who became her manager last December, has agreed—that 2012 will be the year of Ester Dean. She sees herself as the second coming of Missy Elliott, in accordance with her somewhat mystical belief in artistic reincarnation: Beyoncé is Diana Ross, Lady Gaga is Madonna, Usher is R. Kelly, and Ester is Missy. She added, “I’m lucky I got people who truly believe in me, like Jay.” “Ester has an idea of what she wants to do,” Brown said. “And there’s a long precedent for it, from recent writers who became artists, like Ne-Yo and John Legend, and going back to people like Carole King and Smokey Robinson.” Shortly before Christmas, Polow da Don helped broker a deal with Jimmy Iovine, at Interscope Records, who signed Dean and plans to bring out an album of hers later this year. “Jay be, like, ‘I know what to do with you,’ ” Dean told me, “and I’m, like, ‘Yes! Finally somebody who sees me as more than a check!’ ” There is talk of calling the album “UnderESTAmated.”

In Dean’s mind, that was what these sessions with Stargate were for: to create songs for her own album. (A first single, “Gimme Money,” showed up online in February, though it hasn’t been officially released.) Stargate was paying for the sessions, so they were under no obligation to give any of the songs to a particular artist or label. They only had to work it out among the three of them.

Growing up in Trondheim, a small seaside city in Norway, Mikkel Eriksen was nuts for American R. & B. and hip-hop, but there was no Norwegian urban-music scene. He made hip-hop drum loops on his Commodore 64 computer, and he kept all his electronic gear under the bed—keyboard, tape machine, reverb, sequencer. “That was my whole life,” he told me, “buying gear, and playing in cover bands to make money to buy more gear.” One day in 1998, a friend said to him, “You should meet this guy Tor Hermansen—you are the only two guys who listen to urban music in Norway.”

Hermansen’s parents divorced when he was five, and he lived with his father, who drove a backhoe for work. He wasn’t around when Tor came home from school, so Tor listened to lots of music, to pass the time. “I got hooked on American culture from movies—Steven Spielberg, ‘Grease,’ and ‘Beat Street,’ ” he said. “I was obsessed with the South Bronx, from songs like ‘The Message,’ without even knowing where it was.” He started writing stories and taking pictures for local newspapers when he was thirteen. He wrote frequently about music, and eventually got a job at Warner Bros. in Oslo, where he worked his way up to head of A. & R.

Eriksen made an appointment with Hermansen and took along a demo of an artist he was working with. Hermansen didn’t like the artist, but he liked the backing track. “He said, ‘Did you make this music? It’s good,’ ” Eriksen recalled. Before long, Hermansen had quit his job and joined forces with the other half of Norway’s urban-music fan base.

Their big break came when they met Tim Blacksmith and Danny D., a British management duo, who brought them to London to remix American urban hits for the European market and to produce U.K. acts. Their job was to add Euro-pop sweetness to the city grit. “The idea at the time was that urban music needed to have more sparkly, brighter choruses, and more of a lift, to work in Europe,” Eriksen said. He added, “Our experience with remixing really has helped us in the way we work today, because we know that if we have a good vocal we can strip out the music and replace it with other music.” Their dream was to be on the radio in the United States. “We had tried a few times with labels in the U.S., without success,” Eriksen said, but “it wasn’t our time.” From around 2000 to 2003, hip-hop was dominated by big beats, created by producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. “We loved it, but couldn’t make that kind of music,” Eriksen said. Hermansen added, “As much as we wanted to do the typical stripped-down hip-hop record, we were better at the melodic stuff.”

In 2004, things suddenly slowed down for Stargate in the U.K. “People got fed up with Stargate’s sound—things change fast in the music business—and there was no work,” Eriksen told me. “We were sitting back in Norway wondering, What do we do now? Should we shut it down? Our manager, Tim, said, ‘Let’s just go to New York, book a studio, and give it a shot there.’ We didn’t have much money left, but we paid for the trip. No one here knew who we were. We had a few sessions with writers, but nothing substantial. Our goal was to sell one song, and we did, we sold one, so we came back for one more week of sessions, and then we were going to call it quits.”

They reserved a room in the old Sony Music Studios, on Tenth Avenue. One day, they met the vocalist and songwriter Ne-Yo wandering the halls, and invited him into the studio. Hermansen says, “He heard our track and couldn’t believe two white guys had made this kind of music. So we set up a session, and ‘So Sick’ came out of that—Ne-Yo wrote it in twenty minutes. Afterward, we were just jumping up and down, buzzing.” “So Sick” went to No. 1 in 2006. “Irreplaceable,” written by Stargate and Ne-Yo and recorded by Beyoncé, spent ten weeks at the top of the U.S. singles chart in 2007, making it a bona-fide smash. Eriksen said, “We thought we’d have to adapt to the beat-driven music here, but it turned out that it was our more choral, melodic music that people gravitated toward.” Hermansen told me, “When we first got here, American pop music was linear and minimalistic, with few chord changes, and no big lift in the chorus. If you listen to radio today, there are big breakdowns, buildups, instrumental parts, and more tempo.” That is due in no small part to Stargate: by bringing a European remixer’s sensibility to the crunchy beats of hip-hop, they created a new kind of urban pop.

At Roc the Mic, Stargate carries on a glorious and disappearing New York tradition that stretches back to the Brill Building days of the late fifties and early sixties, when songwriting teams such as Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry cranked out hits for the top pop acts of the day; and further back still, to the nineteen-tens and twenties, when the Broadway-to-Sixth Avenue reach of West Twenty-eighth Street, known as Tin Pan Alley, for the sound of pianos coming from the upper floors, was the center of the music-publishing industry. With their managers, Blacksmith and Danny D., orchestrating demand, Stargate has become one of the very few writer-producers whom labels approach when they absolutely must have a hit single, or a “bullet,” as Hermansen calls it, to market an album with. Often, panicked label execs approach them in the final weeks, or even days, before an album is mastered, because Stargate has a reputation for speed. “You can have two or three hot singles on an album, or no singles,” Hermansen explained, “and that’s the difference between selling five million copies worldwide and launching an eighty-date sold-out world tour, and selling two hundred thousand copies and having no tour. That’s like a twenty-million-dollar difference.”

“I’ll Come Alive,” the best song from Monday’s session, wasn’t sounding as dope on the following day. Before Dean arrived, Hermansen listened to a playback and delivered his verdict: “That’s not the one.” He added that Ester, in creating top lines for songs she wanted to record herself, seemed to be suppressing the overtly sexual lyrics that emerged when she was writing for other singers, and which were, for better or worse, her trademark.

Dean arrived, dressed in a floppy knit hat, leather jacket, jeans, and boots—her usual “casual but fly” style. Stargate began the session by playing one of their craziest tracks. It started with a snare drum layered with handclaps, with an evil-sounding, distorted guitarlike synth moving in and out of the foreground. Dean listened to the track for about twenty seconds, until she began humming a melody softly. “O.K., got it,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

She went into the booth, got out her phone, and as the music started she began vocalizing: “How do I get it . . . walkin’ in the cold to get it . . . you gotta, I’m-a wanna.” She had the core of the melody, but it needed words. About a minute in, she hit on the main hook, “How you love it,” in which the words played syncopated rhythm with the beat. It was classic Dean, freestyle and suggestive-sounding. This was followed by a secondary hook: “Do you do it like this, do you do it like that, if you do it like this can I do it right back.”

In the control room, the Stargate guys sensed something special was happening, and they worked quickly to capture it in song structure.

“Let’s loop the first half.”

“Do the synth chords and then use the arpeggiator to set the rise.”

“I love the straightness of the beginning. Put a couple more notes in the pre.”

In the booth, Dean, feeling the chill, put her hands in the air and did a snaky dance, testing the effect of the hooks on her hips.

Back in the control room, Dean wrote a verse, which Eriksen looped. He copied parts of the vocal and stacked two or three copies on top of one another to create a choral effect, a technique known as double-tracking. Now they had half of a great song, but it “runs out of ammo in the middle,” as Hermansen put it. Then Eriksen remembered a rap that Nicki Minaj had written for another Dean-Stargate song that hadn’t made it onto Minaj’s début album. He stripped out Minaj’s vocal and added it to their new track. “Let’s see if it fits,” he said, and it did. Another playback, and it sounded sensational.

“It’s a smash!” Hermansen declared.

Everyone was giddy, like children on Christmas morning. Blacksmith and Danny D. came into the control room and listened to the playback, whooping raucously at the choruses, perhaps the very first of countless revellers who would bounce to the song. Dean danced. Delaine bobbed his head and smiled. When it was over, everyone cheered.

Then Danny D. said, “Let me just interject one word. You know who’s looking? Pink.”

“I’m keeping that one for myself,” Ester said, firmly.

“I know. I’m just saying. Pink’s looking for an urban song with a contemporary beat.”

“No!”

“Kelly Clarkson’s supposedly looking. And Christina!”

Friday, the final day of sessions, was quiet. Dean came in, later than usual, to add bridges and some extra verses to the songs they had worked on. While waiting for her, Hermansen reviewed their output for the week. Besides “How You Love It,” there was a fiery up-tempo number called “Edge.” (Dean had also claimed this one for herself, on Wednesday, when they wrote it, but by Friday the song was being referred to as “the Katy Perry song.”) There was also a promising R. & B. song they had composed on Thursday, although the hook wasn’t strong enough yet.

I asked Hermansen what would happen if a well-known artist wanted to record “How You Love It.” “If it’s a super-smash, and a Beyoncé or a Rihanna wants to do it, we’re going to want to do it with them,” he replied. “Because artists like that don’t come along every day. So Ester is going to have to make a decision.” He paused. “But Ester is smart.”

But what about her own album?

Eriksen said, “A lot of writers want to be artists. Most of them can sing, and a lot of them can sing really well. But, to be an artist, that’s another story. To be able to perform, to be the person everyone looks at when you walk into the room, with all the publicity and touring, and then to be able to get that sound on the record—that’s not easy. You can be a great singer, but when you hear the record it’s missing something.”

What is that? I asked.

Eriksen thought for a while. “It’s a fat sound,” he said, “and there’s a sparkle around the edges of the words.”

Dean arrived, with her iced coffee, but she couldn’t seem to get down to work. She chatted with her friend Traci Hale, whom she had brought along to help her write; she danced around the control room to playbacks; she played a game called Fruit Ninja on her iPad; she checked the iTunes ranking of her latest smash, David Guetta and Nicki Minaj’s “Turn Me On” (it had reached No. 1). Tim Blacksmith came in and tried to goose her along. Big Juice maintained his Buddha-like cone of silence.

The Stargate guys hung around for as long as they could, but they wanted to get home to their wives and young children. They were heading to Los Angeles the following week, for ten days of sessions at Westlake Recording Studios; the Grammys were coming up, and a lot of writers and artists would be in town. Stargate was nominated for record of the year (Katy Perry’s “Firework”) and rap song of the year (Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow”).

Dean had never been to the Grammys, although she has received multiple songwriter nominations and has been invited each time she’s been nominated. This year, she was nominated for her contributions to Rihanna’s “Loud,” which was up for album of the year, but she still wasn’t planning to go. “I don’t have anything to wear,” she said. “Anyway, Adele’s going to win everything.”

“You never know!” Blacksmith declared, trying to be positive. But with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.

Finally, the Norwegians left, saying they hoped they’d see Dean in Los Angeles. Dean decided she’d go get something to eat, and then she’d come back to Roc the Mic and “knock the bottom out of these songs.” ?

More, More, More...Future [theater]

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:25:43 +0000

more, more, more...future reflecta on the political, social, and cultural history and present day struggles of the Congo. The dancers move to the dark poems of Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, a political prisoner in Kinshasa and childhood friend of Linyekula’s, set to driving music by Congolese guitarist Flamme Kapaya and his five-member on-stage band. The work seeks to present hope for a better future in the Congo.

SOURCE: http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_articl...yful-ones/

Frieze Magazine

The odd couple: agitprop and the griot tradition

A former Sudanese child soldier who now raps about his life in often-bland verse is seated next to a lithe Congolese dancer and choreographer who, in his youth, dreamt that he would rewrite African literature. In Johannesburg for a conference entitled ‘Art in Troubled Times’ at the Goethe-Institut, they pick over the hurt that makes their life stories so compelling, so exportable. Following the routine exegeses, they are asked back on stage and then it happens: they disagree, not about the hurt, but rather about what to do with it, how to contain and direct it. Their disagreement escalates. It is as Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe once said: ‘[When] African writers emerge onto the world stage they come under pressure to declare their stand.’

Neither Emmanuel Jal, a tireless 30-something social activist whose birth date is unknown, his mother a casualty of South Sudan’s wars of liberation, nor Faustin Linyekula, a literature and theatre student who first dabbled in choreography while living in exile in Nairobi during his early 20s, are writers in the conventional Western sense. Jal, however, fulfils the role of griot, that tradition of the itinerant African poet, musician and storyteller, who Linyekula also claims affiliation with. It is an uneasy kinship.

‘If it’s impossible for us to send to hell a future that we never had, if it’s difficult to go on ruining our pile of ruins, let’s try to dream,’ asserts Linyekula in the notes for his travelling production More, more, more … future (2011) a shambolic, celebratory piece of agitprop dance and live music performance that recalls the ecstatic collaborative spirit of Michael Clark and Merce Cunningham. Performed both at The Kitchen in New York and London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the piece melds punk attitude with Congo’s driving rumba rhythms and features lyrics by Linyekula’s childhood friend, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, a political prisoner accused of murdering a former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, in 2001. ‘Look at the flags,’ reads a line of Muhindo’s poetry, ‘clumsy Fauvist paintings for the half blind.’

Seated next to Jal – who believes that by constantly retelling his story of loss, wandering, cannibalism and, finally, grace, he will shift consciousness – Linyekula affirms his stand. Jal is first to speak: ‘I went back to school and completed my degree because I want to change the world,’ he says. ‘Do I really want to be a voice to others?’ interjects Linyekula. ‘Maybe not. When will I be able to talk about beauty without having to feel guilty about all these other things? One of the dramas of my generation is that we haven’t learnt to be individuals. We are never totally individuals, we are always part of a mass, always statistics. I hate this thing.’ Jal: ‘Everyone is different, you know. My past is lost, there is nothing I can do about it, but if I can use my past to bring about change, if we tell our stories, other people can be helped. I want to reach out to as many people as possible: Africa will not go forward until we raise a new generation of accountability, responsibility and integrity.’ Linyekula: ‘When will Africa ever care about me? When will Africa ever care about us? How long will it be like this? We also need to give the example of Africa as the caring mother. When will that ever be possible?’ Jal: ‘We are all different. I was in the same situation as you before, thinking why should I care about other people.’ Linyekula: ‘Don’t you wish it was possible for it to be different as well?’ Jal: ‘I wish things would change, but I say let me try to make something happen. I will die trying to see the change I want to see, rather than sit down cursing because I already lost it.’ Linyekula: ‘Maybe that is the difference: I haven’t lost it yet. No! I refuse to take it from that point, that it is already lost. My life is in front of me, and I want it to be better. I want the life of those around me to be better.’

The moderator intervenes; it’s time to wrap. Here’s a thought. In 1972, Achebe visited Harvard University and famously declared Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s landmark debut novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) – a brooding story of a nameless man negotiating his own existential torpor amidst a society marked by pervasive psychological and material corruption – to be horseshit. ‘Armah imposes so much foreign metaphor on the sickness of Ghana that it ceases to be true,’ wrote Achebe. ‘Unfortunately Ghana is not a modern existentialist country. It is just a West African state struggling to become a nation.’ One wonders what the granddaddy of modern African letters would make of this exchange, of Jal and his Tupac routine, of Linyekula, who uses foreign metaphors and refuses the air-conditioned bunkers of exile in favour of Kisangani, a city in a Central African country still struggling to become a nation. Does it matter? No. The beautyful ones have been born.

Michael Kiwanuka, "Tell Me A Tale" [video]

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:26:40 +0000

[video=youtube]http://youtu.be/xTa28a8QKo4[/video]

White Elephant [Trailer]

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:21:24 +0000

WHITE ELEPHANT is a documentary about the Central Post-Office and its employees in Kinshasa, DR Congo.
This grandiose relic of the colonial past has trapped its employees in a frozen timewarp from which they are planning their escape.

From past to present, through the cracks in the walls,
and leaks in the ceilings, we glimpse present-day Congo.

Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:00:48 +0000

SOURCE:
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2...ntists/?hp

Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?

I’ve visited Singapore a few times in recent years and been impressed with its wealth and modernity. I was also quite aware of its world-leading programs in mathematics education and naturally noted that one of the candidates for president was Tony Tan, who has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. Tan won the very close election and joined the government of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who also has a degree in mathematics.

China has even more scientists in key positions in the government. President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer and Premier Wen Jiabao as a geomechanical engineer. In fact, eight out of the nine top government officials in China have scientific backgrounds. There is a scattering of scientist-politicians in high government positions in other countries as well. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a doctorate in physical chemistry, and, going back a bit, Margaret Thatcher earned a degree in chemistry.

One needn’t endorse the politics of these people or countries to feel that given the complexities of an ever more technologically sophisticated world, the United States could benefit from the participation and example of more scientists in government. This is obviously no panacea — Herbert Hoover was an engineer, after all — but more people with scientific backgrounds would be a welcome counterweight to the vast majority of legislators and other officials in this country who are lawyers.

Among the 435 members of the House, for example, there are one physicist, one chemist, one microbiologist, six engineers and nearly two dozen representatives with medical training. The case of doctors and the body politic is telling. Everyone knows roughly what doctors do, and so those with medical backgrounds escape the anti-intellectual charge of irrelevance often thrown at those in the hard sciences. Witness Senator Bill Frist, Gov. Howard Dean and even Ron Paul.

This showing is sparse even with the inclusion of the doctors, but it shouldn’t be too surprising. For complex historical reasons, Americans have long privately dismissed scientists and mathematicians as impractical and elitist, even while publicly paying lip service to them.

One reason is that an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs and scientists are sometimes tone-deaf to the social environment in which they state their conclusions. A more politically sensitive approach to problems and issues, on the other hand, often leads to positions that simply don’t jibe with the facts, no matter how delicately phrased. Examples as diverse as stem cell research and the economic stimulus abound.

Politicians, whose job is in many ways more difficult than that of scientists, naturally try to sway their disparate constituencies, but the prevailing celebrity-infatuated, money-driven culture and their personal ambitions often lead them to employ rhetorical tricks rather than logical arguments. Both Republicans and Democrats massage statistics, use numbers to provide decoration rather than information, dismiss, or at least distort, the opinions of experts, torture the law of the excluded middle (i.e., flip-flop), equivocate, derogate and obfuscate.

Dinosaurs cavorting with humans, climate scientists cooking up the global warming “hoax,” the health establishment using vaccines to bring about socialism – it’s hard to imagine mainstream leaders in other advanced economies not laughing at such claims.

Often too interested in politics as entertainment, the media is complicit in keeping such “controversies” running. Doing so isn’t hard since vivid, just-so stories and anecdotes usually trump (or should that be Trump) dry, sometimes counterintuitive facts and statistics.

Skepticism enjoins scientists — in fact all of us — to suspend belief until strong evidence is forthcoming, but this tentativeness is no match for the certainty of ideologues and seems to suggest to many the absurd idea that all opinions are equally valid. The chimera of the fiercely independent everyman reigns. What else explains the seemingly equal weight accorded to the statements of entertainers and biological researchers on childhood vaccines? Or to pronouncements of industry lobbyists and climate scientists? Or to economic prescriptions like 9-9-9 and those of Nobel-prize winning economists?

Americans’ grandiose (to use Newt Gingrich’s malapropism) egalitarianism also helps explain why the eight or nine original Republican presidential candidates suffered little for espousing, or at least not clearly opposing, scientifically untenable positions. Jon Huntsman, the only exception, received excessive kudos for what seems a rather lukewarm acceptance of climate change.

To avoid receiving the candidates’ canned responses on these and other issues, I sometimes wish that a debate moderator would forgo a standard question about immigration or jobs and instead ask the candidates to solve a simple puzzle, make an elementary estimate, perform a basic calculation.

Of course, the other side of the “two cultures” chasm should bear some of the onus for this lack of communication between politicians and scientists. Too few scientists are willing to engage in public debates, to explain the relevance of their fields clearly and without jargon, and, in the process, to risk some jeering from a few colleagues. Nevertheless, American scientists do more on this front than those in most other countries.

Perhaps because the words rhyme, it’s sometimes said that attitude is more important than aptitude in helping to bring about innovation, economic progress and social change. The dubious corollary is that freewheeling Americans who question authority and think outside the box have an abundance of attitude that helps make up for a declining performance in science and technology.

Maybe so, but attitude can only go so far. There is certainly no requirement for a Singaporean science background, but scientifically literate government leaders who push for evidence-based policies and demonstrate a scientific outlook are needed more than glib panderers with attitude.

Pres. Sarkozy on Africa // "..it lives...in nostalgia for a lost childhood paradise"

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:04:27 +0000

Address by Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic, at the University of Dakar, Senegal, on July 26, 2007.
Source: http://www.africaresource.com/index.php?...Itemid=346

My dear friends, the black child of Camara Laye on his knees in the silence of the African night will know and understand that he can raise his head and look with confidence to the future. And this black child of Camara Laye will feel in himself the two parts of himself reconciled. And he will at last feel himself to be a human being like all members of humanity.

Ladies and gentlemen

Allow me first of all, to thank the Senegalese Government and people for their warm welcome. Allow me to thank the University of Dakar that allows me for the first time to address myself to the elite of the youth of Africa in the capacity of President of the French Republic.

I have come to talk to you with the frankness and sincerity that one owes to friends that one appreciates and respects. I appreciate and respect Africa and the Africans.

Between Senegal and France history has woven ties of a friendship that no one can undo. This friendship is strong and sincere. It is for this reason that I wanted to address, from Dakar, the fraternal greeting of France to all of Africa.

This evening I want to address myself to all the Africans who are so different the one from the other, who don’t have the same language, who don’t have the same religion, who don’t have the same customs, who don’t have the same culture, who don’t have the same history and yet recognize the other as being African. Here one finds the first mystery of Africa.

Yes, I want to address myself to all the people of this wounded continent and in particular to the youth, to you who have fought each other so much and often hated much, who at times still fight and hate each other but still recognize each other as brothers, in suffering, in humiliation, in revolt, in hope, in the sentiment that you are living a common destiny, brother through this mysterious faith that binds you to the African soil, a faith that transmits itself from generation to generation and which even exile cannot erase.

I have not come, youth of Africa, to lament with you the misfortunes of Africa. Because, Africa has no need of my laments. I have not come, youth of Africa, to take pity on your fate, because your fate is first of all in your hands. What would you do, proud youth of Africa, with my pity?

I have not come to erase the past because the past cannot be erased.

I have not come to deny mistakes or crimes – mistakes were made and crimes committed.

There was the black slave trade, there was slavery, men, women and children bought and sold as so much merchandise. And this crime was not only a crime against the Africans, it was a crime against man, it was a crime against all of humanity. And the black man that eternally “hears rising from the ship’s hold the chained curses, the sobs of the dying, the noise of one of them thrown into the sea”. This black man that can’t help repeating endlessly “and this country cried that we are brutal creatures”. This black man, I want to say here in Dakar, has the face of all humanity.

This suffering of the black man, and I don’t speak here in the sense of gender, I speak of man in the sense of a human being and off course of women and of man in its general use. This suffering of the black man is the suffering of all men. This open wound in the soul of the black man is an open wound in the soul of all men.

But no one can ask of the generations of today to expiate this crime perpetrated by past generations. No one can ask of the sons to repent for the mistakes of their fathers.

Youth of Africa, I have not come to talk to you about repentance. I have come to tell you that I consider the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity. I have come to tell you that your pain and your suffering are ours and therefore are mine.

I have come to propose to you to look together, as Africans and as French, beyond this pain and this suffering.

I have come to propose to you, youth of Africa not to forget this pain and this suffering that cannot be forgotten, but to move beyond it.

I have come to propose to you, youth of Africa, not to dwell on the past, but for us to draw together lessons from it in order to face the future together.

I have come, youth of Africa, to face with you our common history.

Africa is partly responsible for its own misfortune. People have killed each other in Africa at least as much in Europe. But it is true that a long time ago the Europeans came to Africa as conquerors. They took the land of your ancestors. They banished their gods, their languages, their beliefs, the customs of your forefathers. They told your forefathers what they had to think, what they had to believe, what they had to do. They have cut your forefathers from their past, they have torn their souls from their roots. They stole Africa’s spell. (Could also be translated as They killed Africa’s enthusiasm).

They were wrong.

They did not see the depth and the wealth of the African soul. They believed that they were superior, that they were more advanced, that they were progress, that they were civilisation.
They were wrong.

They wanted to convert the African, they wanted to make them in their image. They believed that they had all the rights and that they were all powerful, more powerful than the gods of Africa, more powerful than the African soul, more powerful than the sacred ties that men have woven patiently during thousands of years with the sky and earth of Africa, more powerful than the mysteries that came from the depths of time.

They were wrong.

They ruined a way of life. They ruined a marvellous imaginary world, they ruined an ancestral wisdom.

They were wrong.

They created anguish and misery. They fed hatred. They made it more difficult to open up to others, to exchange and to share because in order to open up oneself, to exchange and to share one must be sure of ones own identity, values and convictions. Before the coloniser, the colonised lost all confidence in himself, did not know who he was anymore, let himself be overwhelmed by fear of the other, by fear of the future.

The coloniser came, he took, he helped himself, he exploited. He pillaged resources and wealth that did not belong to him. He stripped the colonised of his personality, of his liberty, of his land, of the fruit of his labour.

The coloniser took, but I want to say with respect, that he also gave. He built bridges, roads, hospitals, dispensaries and schools. He turned virgin soil fertile. He gave of his effort, his work, his know-how. I want to say it here, not all the colonialists were thieves or exploiters.

There were among them evil men but there were also men of goodwill. People who believed they were fulfilling a civilising mission, people who believed they were doing good. They were wrong, but some were sincere. They believed to be giving freedom, but they were creating alienation. They believed they were breaking the chains of obscurantism, of superstition and of servitude. They were actually forging much heavier chains, they imposed a heavier servitude because it was the spirit, the soul that was enslaved. They believed they were giving love without seeing that they were sowing revolt and hatred.

Colonisation is not responsible for all the current difficulties of Africa. It is not responsible for the bloody wars between Africans, for the genocides, for the dictators, the fanaticism, the corruption, the prevarication, the waste and the pollution.

But, colonisation was a huge mistake that was paid for by the bitterness and the suffering of those who believed they had given all and did not understand why they were so hated.

Colonisation was a huge mistake that destroyed the colonised’s self-esteem and in his heart gave birth to this self-hatred that always results in hatred of others.

Colonisation was a huge mistake, but from it was born the embryo of a common destiny. And this idea is of particular importance to me.

Colonisation was a mistake that changed and intertwined the destinies of both Europe and Africa. And this common destiny was sealed by the blood of Africans that came to die in European wars.

And France does not forget this African blood spilled for its liberty.

No one can pretend that nothing happened.

No one can pretend that this mistake was not committed.

No one can pretend that this history did not transpire.

For better or for worse colonisation has transformed African and European.

Youth of Africa, you are heir to the most ancient African traditions and you are heir to all that the West has placed in the heart and soul of Africa.

Youth of Africa, European civilisation was wrong to believe itself to be superior to that of your ancestors, but now, the European civilisation belongs to you too.

Youth of Africa, do not yield to the temptation of purity (exclusivity) because it is a disease, it is a disease of the intellect that is the most dangerous in the world.

Youth of Africa, do not cut yourself off from that which enriches you, do not amputate a part of yourself. Purity (in the sense of exclusivity) is confinement, it is intolerance, it is a fantasy that leads to fanaticism.

I want to say to you, youth of Africa that the tragedy of Africa is not in the so-called inferiority of its art, its thought, its culture. Because, in what concerns art, thought and culture it is the West that learnt from Africa.

Modern art owes almost all to Africa. The influence of Africa contributed to changing not only the idea of beauty itself, not only the sense of rhythm, of music, of dance, but as Senghor said even the way of walking or laughing of the world in the 20th Century.

I therefore want to say, to the youth of Africa, that the tragedy of Africa does not come from the idea that the African soul would be impervious to logic and to reason. Because, the African is as logic and as reasonable as the European.

It is by drawing from the African imaginary world that your ancestors have left you, it is by drawing from their stories, their proverbs, their mythologies, their rites, by drawing from all these forms that, since the dawn of time were transmitted to and enriched generation after generation, that you will find the imagination and the power to invent a future for you. A unique future that does not resemble any other, where you will at last feel free, free youth of Africa to be yourselves, free to decide for yourselves.

I have come to tell you that you don’t have to be ashamed of the values of African civilisation, that they do not drag you down but elevate you, that they are an antidote to the materialism and the individualism that enslave modern man, that they are the most precious of legacies against the dehumanisation and the “uniformisation” of the world of today.

I have come to tell you that modern man, who experiences the need to reconcile himself with nature, has much to learn from the African that has lived in a symbiotic relationship with nature for thousands of years.

I came to tell you that this divide between two parts of yourselves is your greatest force, or your greatest weakness, according to the extent to which you bring yourself to unite them in a synthesis, or not.

But I also came to tell you that there are in you, youth of Africa, two legacies, two wisdoms, two traditions that have struggled with each other for a long time: that of Africa and that of Europe.

I came to tell you that this African part and European part of yourselves form your torn identity.

I did not come, youth of Africa, to lecture you.

I did not come to preach, but I came to tell you that the part of Europe that is in you is the fruit of a great sin of pride of the West, but that this part of Europe in you is not unworthy.

Because it is the call of freedom, of emancipation and of justice and of equality between women and men.

Because it is the call to reason and to the universal conscience.

The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. The African peasant, who for thousands of years have lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time, rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words.

In this imaginary world where everything starts over and over again there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress.

In this universe where nature commands all, man escapes from the anguish of history that torments modern man, but he rests immobile in the centre of a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand.

This man (the traditional African) never launched himself towards the future. The idea never came to him to get out of this repetition and to invent his own destiny.

The problem of Africa, and allow a friend of Africa to say it, is to be found here. Africa’s challenge is to enter to a greater extent into history. To take from it the energy, the force, the desire, the willingness to listen and to espouse its own history.

Africa’s problem is to stop always repeating, always mulling over, to liberate itself from the myth of the eternal return. It is to realise that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return because it has never existed.

Africa’s problem is that it lives the present too much in nostalgia for a lost childhood paradise.

Africa’s problem is that too often it judges the present in terms of a purity of origin that is totally imaginary and that no one can hope to achieve.

Africa’s problem is not to invent for itself a more or less mythical past to help it to support the present, but to invent the future with suitable means.

Africa’s problem is not to prepare itself for the return of misfortune, as if that is supposed to repeat itself indefinitely, but to want to give itself the means to combat misfortune, because Africa has the right to happiness like all the other continents of the world.

Africa’s problem is to remain true to itself without remaining immobile.

Africa’s challenge is to learn to view its accession to the universal not as a denial of what it is but as an accomplishment.

Africa’s challenge is to learn to feel itself to be heir to all that which is universal in all human civilisations.

It is to appropriate for itself human rights, democracy, liberty, equality and justice as the common legacy of all civilisations and of all people.

It is to appropriate for itself modern science and technology as the product of all human intelligence.

Africa’s challenge is that of all civilisations, of all cultures, of all peoples that want to protect their identity without isolating themselves because they know that isolation is deadly.

Civilizations are great to the extent that they participate in the great mix of the human spirit.

The weakness of Africa, which has known so many brilliant civilizations on its soil, was for a long time not being able to participate fully in this great engagement. Africa has paid dearly for its disengagement from the world and that has rendered it so vulnerable. But from its misfortunes Africa has drawn new strength by re-engaging with itself. This re-engagement, regardless of the painful conditions of its origin, is the real force and the real chance for Africa at the moment when the first global civilisation is emerging.

The Muslim civilisation, Christianity and colonisation, beyond the crimes and mistakes that were committed in their name and that are not excusable, have opened the African heart and mentality to the universal and to history.

Youth of Africa, don’t let your future be stolen by those who only know how to combat intolerance with intolerance and racism with racism.

Youth of Africa, don’t let your future be stolen by those who want to deprive you of a history that also belong to you because it was the painful history of your parents, of your grandparents and those who went before.

Youth of Africa, don’t listen to those who want to remove Africa from its history in the name of tradition because an Africa where nothing changes anymore will again be condemned to servitude.

Youth of Africa, don’t listen to those who want to prevent you from taking your part in the human adventure, because without you, youth of Africa, who are the youth of the world, the human adventure will not be as wonderful.

Youth of Africa, don’t listen to those who want to deprive you of your roots and of your identity, want to erase all that is African, all the mystique, the religiousness, the sensitivity, the African mentality. Because in order to exchange it is necessary to have something to give, to talk to others, it is necessary to have something to say to them.

Youth of Africa, rather listen to the great voice of President Senghor who tried his whole life to reconcile the legacies and cultures at the cross-roads of which chance and the tragedies of history had placed Africa.

He, the child of Joal, who had been cradled by the rhapsodies of Griots said: “We are cultural half-breeds, and if we feel “in Black”, we express ourselves in French, because French is a language of universal vocation that addresses our message as much too the French as to others”.

He also said: “The French has given us the gift of their abstract words - so scarce in our maternal languages. Our words are naturally haloed with vigour and blood; French words radiate with a thousand fires, like diamonds, rockets that light up our nights”.

Thus spoke Leopold Senghor, who honoured all that which humanity understands of intelligence. This great poet and African wanted that Africa should start talking to all of humanity and wrote on its behalf poems in French for all people.

These poems were songs that spoke to all men of fabulous beings that guard fountains, sing in the rivers and hide in the trees.

Poems that made them hear the voices of the dead of the village and their ancestors.

Poems that lead through forests of symbols to return to the sources of the ancestral memory that every people hold at the core of its conscience like an adult holds at the core of his conscience the memory of childhood happiness.

Because every people have known this time of the eternal present, where they search not to dominate the universe but to live in harmony with it. The time of feeling, of instinct, of intuition. The time of mystery and initiation. Mystical times were the sacred and signs where everywhere. The time of magicians, sorcerers and shamans. The time when the spoken word was important because it was revered and repeated from generation to generation, and transmitted, from century to century, legends as ancient as the gods.

Africa has reminded all the peoples of the earth that they shared the same infancy. Africa has reawakened the simple joys thereof, the ephemeral happiness and this need, in which I believe so much, to believe rather than to understand, to feel rather than to reason, this need to be in harmony rather than to conquer.

Those who consider African culture to be backward, those who consider Africans to be big children, all those have forgotten that ancient Greece, which has taught us so much about the use of reason, also had its sorcerers, its diviners, its mysterious cults and secret societies, its mythology that came from the depths of time and from which we still draw today an inestimable treasure of human wisdom.

Africa, which also has its great dramatic poems and tragic legends, when listening to Sophocles, has heard a more familiar voice than it would have thought possible, and the West has recognized in African art forms of beauty that had been its a long time ago and that it felt the need to resuscitate.

Listen then, youth of Africa, how much Rimbaud is African when he places the colours on the vowels as your ancestors put colours on their masks. “Black mask, red mask, black and white masks”.

Open your eyes, youth of Africa, and don’t look anymore, as your elders do too often, at global civilisation as a threat to your identity but as something that belongs also to you.

When you would recognise within the universal wisdom also part of the wisdom that you received from your forefathers, and when you would have the will to make it grow, then will start what I wish to call the African Renaissance.

When you would proclaim that the African is not doomed to a tragic destiny and that everywhere in Africa there would be no other goal but happiness, then the African Renaissance will start.

When you, youth of Africa, would declare that there will be no other objective for an African policy but African unity, and the unity of the human species, then the African Renaissance will start.

When you would fully face the reality of Africa and come to grips with it, then the African Renaissance will start. Because the problem of Africa is that it has become a myth that everyone reconstructs for the requirements of their cause.

And this myth prevents one from facing the reality of Africa.

Africa’s reality is demographic growth that is too high for an economic growth that is too low.

Africa’s reality is that there is still too much famine, too much misery.

Africa’s reality is scarcity that provokes violence.

Africa’s reality is that development is too slow, agriculture produces too little, the shortage of roads, schools and hospitals.

Africa’s reality is a great waste of energy, of courage, of talent and of intelligence.

Africa’s reality is that of a great continent that has everything to succeed, but that does not succeed because it cannot free itself from its myths.

You and you only, youth of Africa, can achieve the Renaissance that Africa needs because only you have the force to do so.

I came to propose this Renaissance to you. I came to propose it to you so that we can achieve it together, because the African Renaissance depends to a large extent on the Renaissance of Europe and the Renaissance of the world.

I know the desire to leave that so many amongst you experience, confronted with the difficulties of Africa.

I know the temptation of exile that pushes so many young Africans to go to look elsewhere for what they don’t find here to maintain their families.

I know that it requires will and courage to attempt this adventure, to leave one’s fatherland, to leave the land where one was born and grew up, to leave behind the familiar places where one was happy, the love of a mother, a father or a brother and this solidarity, this warmth, and this communal spirit that are so strong in Africa.

I know that it requires strength of soul to confront this disorientation, this separation, this solitude.

I know what the majority of them must confront in terms of trials, difficulties and risks.

I know that some times they would go as far as to risk their lives to reach what they believe to be their dream.

I know that nothing would hold them back.

Because nothing would ever hold back the youth when they believe they are carried by their dreams.

I do not believe that the African youth are pushed to leave only by the need to flee misery.

I believe that the African youth leave, because, like all youth, they want to conquer the world.

Like all youth they have a taste for adventure and the open sea.

They want to go and see how the others live, think, work and study elsewhere.

Africa will not achieve its Renaissance by cutting the wings of its youth. But Africa has need of its youth.

The African Renaissance will start by teaching the African youth to live with the world, not to refuse it.

The African youth must feel that the world belongs to them as it does to all the youth of the world.

The African youth must feel that all will be possible, as all seemed possible to the men of the Renaissance.

Now, I know well that the African youth must not be the only youth in the world confined to home. They cannot be the only youth of the world that only have a choice between living clandestinely and withdrawing into themselves.

They must be able to acquire, outside of Africa, the competence and knowledge that they would not find in their country.

But they also owe it to Africa to place at its service the talents that they will have developed. It is necessary to return to build Africa, it is necessary to bring to the continent the knowledge, the competencies and the dynamism of these managers. It is necessary to put an end to the pillaging of the African elite of which Africa has need in order to develop.

The African youth do not want to be at the mercy of unscrupulous human traffickers who play with their lives.

What the youth of Africa want is that their dignity should be preserved. To be able to study, to work, to live decently. In the final analysis it is what all of Africa wants. Africa does not want charity or help or privileges.

What Africa wants and what it should be given are solidarity, understanding and respect.

Africa does not want that one should take charge of its future, think in its place or decide in its place.

What Africa wants is the same as what France wants: cooperation, association, a partnership between nations equal in rights and in duties.

African youth, do you want democracy, freedom, justice, law? It is up to you to decide this. France will not decide in your place. But if you choose democracy, freedom, justice and law, then France will join forces with you to build it.

Youth of Africa, globalisation such as it is, does not please you. Africa has paid too high a price dearly for the mirage of collectivism and “progressisme” to yield to that of laisser-faire.

Youth of Africa, you believe that free-trade is beneficial but that it is not a religion. You believe that competition is a means but not and end in itself. You don’t believe in laisser-faire. You know that if Africa is too naïve it would be condemned to become the prey of predators from all over the world and you don’t want that. You want a different globalisation, with more humanity, more justice and more rules.

I came to tell you that France also wants this. France wants to fight along with Europe, along with Africa and along with all those in the world who want to change globalisation. If Africa, France and Europe together want this, we shall succeed. But we cannot express this will (desire) for you.

African youth, you want development, growth, a higher standard of living?

But, do you really want it? Do you want that injustice, corruption and violence should end, property be respected and money be invested instead of embezzled.

Do you want that the state should again fulfil its responsibilities, that it should be freed from the bureaucracies that smother it, that it should be liberated from parasitism and clientism, that its authority be restored, that it rules the feudal powers and corporate lobbies.

Do you want that the rule of law should govern everywhere? That it allows everyone to know reasonably what to expect from others?

If you want this then France will be at your side to demand it, but no one is going to want it in your place.

Do you want that there should be no more famine in Africa, never again a single child who dies of hunger? Then find a way to be self-sufficient in food production. Develop food. Africa has firstly the need to produce food to feed itself. If that is what you want, youth of Africa, you hold between your hands the future of Africa and France will work with you to build this future.

Do you want to fight against pollution? Do you want that development be sustainable, that the current generations should no longer live to the detriment of future generations, that every country should pay the real cost of what it consumes and that clean technologies are developed? It is for you to decide this. But if you decide, France will be at your side.

Do you want peace on the African continent, collective security, the peaceful settlements of conflicts, an end to the infernal cycle of vengeance and of hate? It is for you, my African friends, to decide this. And if you decide (yes), France will be at your side like an unwavering friend, but France cannot want it in the place of Africa.

Do you want African unity? France also wants it because African unity will return Africa to the Africans.

What France wants with Africa is to confront the realities head-on, to conduct policies of reality and not policies of myths anymore.

What France wants to do with Africa is co-development, that is to say shared development.

France wants to have joint projects with Africa, joint centres of competitivity, joint universities and joint laboratories.

What France wants to do with Africa is to design a joint strategy within the globalisation process.

What France wants to do with Africa is a jointly negotiated policy on immigration, decided together so that African youth can be received in France and in all of Europe with dignity and respect.

What France wants to do with Africa is an alliance between French and African youth so that the world of tomorrow will be a better one.

What France wants to do with Africa is to prepare the advent of Eurafrique, this great common destiny that awaits Europe and Africa.

To those in Africa who regard with suspicion the great project of the Mediterranean Union that France has proposed to all countries bordering the Mediterranean, I want to say that in France’s spirit it is not at all about side-lining Africa, which extends south of the Sahara. On the contrary it is about making this Union the pivotal point of Eurafrique, the first stage of the greatest dream of peace and prosperity that Europeans and Africans are capable of conceiving together.

My dear friends, the black child of Camara Laye on his knees in the silence of the African night will know and understand that he can raise his head and look with confidence to the future. And this black child of Camara Laye will feel in himself the two parts of himself reconciled. And he will at last feel himself to be a human being like all members of humanity.

I thank you.

Why Schools Don't Value Spatial Reasoning

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:33:02 +0000

SOURCE
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/20...ing/print/

Why Schools Don't Value Spatial Reasoning

Yale intelligence researcher Jonathan Wai has an interesting column in which he questions why our educational system doesn’t value spatial reasoning as much as it values math and verbal reasoning.

But what about that kid who is a mechanical genius; who can take apart and put back together just about anything; who is like Robert Downey Jr.’s character in Iron Man, but who really has little interest in words or numbers? Is there a place for this talented kid in our school system? Do we value the talent of this individual as much as the talents of students who can write compelling essays, who can solve complex equations, and who can read great works of literature?

I don’t think we do.

For students who are not talented with words and numbers but who are talented with mentally rotating figures and shapes in their minds, there is often very little offered to recognize and challenge them in the regular school system.

Wai suggests – and I agree – that we need to do more to train students to improve their spatial reasoning, their ability to work with their hands, and search for those who are talented in spatial reasoning.

To do so, though, we need to first understand why the education system isn’t geared towards a lot of spatial reasoning in the first place. I don’t have a lot of hard data, but I can make some educated guesses. First of all, I’d guess that the people most drawn to education in the first place are precisely the people most comfortable with verbal and math reasoning – introducing bias in favor of those skills right away.

Second, I’d guess that it’s a matter of resources. Math and verbal skills can be taught with a minimum amount of equipment – paper, pencils, and books. Spatial reasoning requires hands on learning, which requires more materials and ultimately more resources. In a time of budget crunching and slashing resources from schools, it’s that much harder to get more equipment in – especially when it’s not geared to what’s already taught.

Third, I suspect that testing spatial reasoning, especially in a standardized way, is more difficult than standardizing the testing of math and verbal skills. Again, this has to do with the limitation of resources and the limitation of trying to test 3-dimensional reasoning on a 2-dimensional surface.

Fourth and finally, I think there’s a predominantly cultural attitude regarding spatial abilities. First, manual labor is looked down upon by a solid class of people. You don’t go to college to be a mechanic or a machinist, right? And the other end of the cultural spectrum of people with good spatial reasoning are highly educated architects and engineers – who don’t get into the nitty gritty until college or beyond. That means that for most people who go to college and looking for a career don’t have experience with working with their hands, unless its minor home projects or the like. Which means that such skills are either seen as being “beneath” or unattainably advanced to most people.

I think that this attitude is unfortunate, but it goes hand in hand with the growth of an economy of knowledge workers and service providers.

For my own part, I wish that schools did teach more hands-on, technical skills that involved spatial reasoning. I’m only just now finding I have the time to explore that world and I’m constantly frustrated by basic things that I have to learn that I should have been taught long ago.

I think that there are some interesting counter-trends that may prevail in the future. The Maker and DIY movements for one. The constraints of living in a recession. More interest in food preparation. All of these things point to a trend that people are becoming more and more interested in building things and doing things for themselves. I hope that those trends continue – and there’s good reason to think that they will. If they do, I suspect that there will be more pressure from the public on the education system to improve spatial reasoning education.

Until that cultural change happens, though, I suspect that those kids and their parents interested in the world of spatial intelligence will still have to find avenues outside of school to hone their skills.

Study Fails To Find Differences In Therapy, Meds, Placebo

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:31:44 +0000

SOURCE
http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/20...ebo/print/

Hopeful News For Treating Depression: Study Fails To Find Differences In Therapy, Meds, Placebo

I expected the worst this morning: a subject line of “Uh oh” on a professional listserv posting from a respected colleague. Seems there’s a new study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, one that failed to show any difference between anti-depressant medication, psychotherapy, and placebo in treating depression. This is the kind of “failed trial” drug companies tend not to publicize nor include in FDA approvals, and that can make clinicians really nervous about what we are doing. But rather than calling for anxious Subject lines, I think what this research does is once again demonstrate the power, and limitations, of hope; it illustrates how hope is an active ingredient in treating mild to moderate depression.

The study took a group of depressed patients and assigned them randomly to one of three treatment conditions: medication, psychotherapy, or placebo. Pretty standard clinical research. But this study has one unique feature requiring comment,

(u)nlike most efficacy trials, our sample comprised economically disadvantaged, highly comorbid, chronic, recurrently depressed, urban patients.

via Barber JP, Barrett MS, Gallop R, Rynn MA, Rickels K. Short-term dynamic psychotherapy versus pharmacotherapy for major depressive disorder: a randomized, placebo-controlled trial. J Clin Psychiatry. 2011 Nov 29. [Epub ahead of print]

In other words, they started with a unique group of people, at least from the perspective of previous research. Clinicians know, but research has tended to forget, that patients are all individual people with unique histories and rich lives. As a Reuters piece about this research states, “different people may respond differently to a given type of depression therapy. Barber’s team found some evidence of that.”

Statistically controlling for unique individual characteristics, as is frequently done in efficacy trials, doesn’t mean those factors are not important. It just means they are not influencing the outcome measure being used. Nevertheless, even the research team was surprised by the findings. But maybe we should stop being surprised by surprising findings, maybe even expect them as research gets more complex and moves beyond how to treat a disease or diagnosis to how to treat unique individuals, when it begins to unravel the clinical mystery of how to help this particular patient with this range of problems and symptoms.

So what does this study teach? Sometimes hope comes from a medication making subtle, or maybe not so subtle, changes to someone’s neurochemistry; sometimes from expecting a pill to work; and sometimes from a chance to talk about feelings and experiences with someone who listens and understands. That’s actually pretty good news.

But whether hope springs from a pill, the promise in a pill, or psychotherapy, none of them can lift the ceiling on well-being imposed by economics, other illnesses and problems, or a biography that has known more than a fair share of problems. Sadly, the tools of psychology and psychiatry are often poorly adapted to heal the damage of ongoing socio-economic problems.

The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:57:00 +0000

The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other
Source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertain...10-15.html

Excerpt: "...one of my colleagues who's a social historian, Joseph Featherstone, describes school as society's theater, the place where we see most visibly and transparently the larger social forces that are going on. How is democracy enacted, how is immigration enacted, how is multiculturalism enacted and taking that as a broader metaphor I see this tiny drama of the parent/teacher conference a place where the larger dynamics of race and class and culture and gender and educational background and immigrant status get mirrored and reflected so, in lots of ways, if we look at this tiny drama, we see saturated in it these extraordinary other forces in our society. It's a great place to look."

Summary: This week, as millions of American families prepare for their annual parent-teacher conferences, Jeffrey Brown gets some advice on what they should ask from Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, who recently wrote "The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other."

JEFFREY BROWN: Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist at Harvard's School of Education, a Macarthur Genius Award winner, and author of eight books about American cultural life. Her new book the essential conversation takes us into the heart of the classroom. With a look at the significance of the parent teacher conference. We talked recently at the Lyle's Crouch Traditional Academy, a public elementary school in Virginia.

Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot welcome.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Thank you, glad to be here.

JEFFREY BROWN: We're in a second grade class parent and teacher sit down on chairs like we're sitting on, little chairs, they get together; they start talking about their child and some kind of important drama happens. What is it?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Right. Well, parents are sitting here deeply anxious, very worried, very passionate about their own child wanting to advocate the best that they can for their child. The teacher is feeling a little inhibited, a little defensive, worried about the fact that the parents may judge her professionalism and competence as a teacher and come at this very, very tense, but there is this language about the parent/teacher conference which says that they should be benign and pleasant, collaborative alliances.

JEFFREY BROWN: We're all in this together.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: We're all in this together, and we're here to support the child. Another thing that happens is that the parents sitting in these little tiny chairs are thrown back to the time when they were in second grade and when they experienced this. So they may be feeling sort of powerless. This may feel like an infantilizing experience to them. And that throws them off as well, because in their other lives they're adult and they're mature.

JEFFREY BROWN: You call this the ghosts in the classroom. So I am the parent I come in and I bring in everything, all of the baggage from when I was perhaps in second grade in a class like this.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Exactly. And those ghosts hover all around and there has to be a way to remove that distraction and to focus on the child who you have come to talk about.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you call this "The Essential Conversation." so what is essential about it, what's at stake?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Well, the achievement and development and learning of our children. That's what's at stake. We know that what's most important for a child, even more important than the parents' educational background, is how the parent engages with the teaching and learning of their child in school.

So that matters more than the social, cultural, racial, class background of the parent to the achievement of the child. It's also essential because it's ubiquitous, it happens 100 million times a year, actually in grades pre-kindergarten through high school, and so we need to make these meaningful and productive occasions.

JEFFREY BROWN: You use a very striking term in one of your chapters where you talk about how parents and teachers are in a sense natural enemies.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: There is a lot of tension there, don't you think?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: There is a lot of drama there, but it's not my term. I confess. It was a term used by Willard Waller, who was a sociologist, a truth teller, a terrific scholar who wrote in the middle 1930s and he talked about teacher and parents as being inevitably adversarial because parents come what he called a particularistic orientation, that is, their orientation toward their child, it's subjective, it's intimate, it's protective, very loving, so they say, I want you to be fair to Susie, my daughter, Susie and what they mean by is that is I want you to see her special gifts and what an extraordinary child she is.

JEFFREY BROWN: That strikes home. You wrote that you were using your personal experience. Let me bring you mine. I walk into the room and I say, who is this person who is spending so much time with my child, --

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: -- who has so much power over my child, does she or he see my child amidst all these others?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: It's very important that the parent/teacher conference not be a generic experience, that is the conference for Susie can't look like the conference for Jeffery. They have to be very different. They have to really describe in very specific idiosyncratic, individual terms who your child is so you as parents recognize oh, yeah, that's my kid. I know that person and that perspective really strikes home to you.

JEFFREY BROWN: You know, one of the important things you bring out is that the focal point of this meeting between the parent and teacher if course the child; typically the child is not there. Do you think that's wrong?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: I think it's stunning, absolutely, that the person who knows the most, the child, is not present at a parent/teacher conference. Here's the only person who knows both the home school... the home scene and the school scene and walks this path every single day. Children can be wonderful authorities, very wise, very honest, very candid, very insightful about what their experience is. And that's a valuable perspective to have in a parent/teacher conference.

JEFFREY BROWN: There must be...

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Parent/teacher/child conference.

JEFFREY BROWN: There must be sometimes when it would be inappropriate for a child to be there.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Absolutely. I mean, parents and teachers have to make this adult judgment something scary, threatening, confusing, something that children shouldn't hear, then the child shouldn't there will be but I think as a rule children should be present. And I saw conferences where six-year-olds held their own with such amazing insight and discernment about themselves.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you also right that the little drama that happens here stands for something bigger in our society, tells us about our educational system and even beyond.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: What did you mean by that?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Well one of my colleagues who's a social historian Joseph Featherstone describes school as society's theater, the place where we see most visibly and transparently the larger social forces that are going on.

How is democracy enacted, how is immigration enacted, how is multiculturalism enacted and taking that as a broader metaphor I see this tiny drama of the parent/teacher conference a place where the larger dynamics of race and class and culture and gender and educational background and immigrant status get mirrored and reflected so, in lots of ways, if we look at this tiny drama, we see saturated in it these extraordinary other forces in our society. It's a great place to look.

JEFFREY BROWN: So even more is at stake?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Even more is at stake, right.

JEFFREY BROWN: I know that because you write that for you this is not only a professional interest but of course personal interest because you have two children of your own.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is that what brought you to this?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Absolutely. I experienced what owe most parents across this country experienced: the dread, anxiety, the terror, the fear as I approach parent/teacher conferences and I really very much wanted to understand what that feeling of being off balance and uneasy was, because in my ordinary life I typically feel sort of adult and put together. And why was I suddenly coming to the classroom sitting in these tiny chairs and feeling impotent and feeling worried and feeling defensive not only about my children but about my own parenting. So this is a deeply personal investigation.

JEFFREY BROWN: So it's early fall and most of us are now just about to go to a parent/teacher conference, what should we do; what do you leave us with?

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Well, a good teacher is going to want to know from you who your child is, because this is very early in the year. A good teacher is going to want to listen to who you think your child is and know that you have a much more complex, holistic view of your child. So I would go in with wonderful anecdote stories, illustrations of who your child is. They don't have to be all positive. You can talk about the challenges as well but we very, very vivid in your story telling.

I would also go in ready to ask very specific questions, that is so much of what passes for parent/teacher conferences is just full of these abstractions and generalities; to get under those we have to be willing to ask specific and penetrating questions and then we have to be willing as parents and this is the hard part, to hear the truth come back at us; you know, we have to be ready not to be defensive but be engaged in an experience of problem solving and experience in which we come together as we, not you and me in opposition, but we working collectively and together on behalf of the child.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay. We'll try.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Yes. It's all we can do.

JEFFREY BROWN: The book is The Essential Conversation. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, thank you for having this conversation with us.

SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT: Glad to be here.

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The Year of Frantz Fanon

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SOURCE
http://africasacountry.com/2011/12/21/th...ntz-fanon/

The Year of Frantz Fanon

Four moments that stirred heated debate in France this year were the cases against rapper Youssoupha and IMF Head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the unveiling of the Paris exhibiton Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, curated by former French footballer Lilian Thuram, and the 50th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. With the latter came the publication in French of Fanon’s Œuvres (La Découverte, 800 p.), with a preface by Achille Mbembe (‘L’universalité de Frantz Fanon’). When we approached Mbembe for an English version of the text, he sent us the following shorter essay — which we offered to translate from the original French.

By Achille Mbembe

Fifty years ago, Frantz Fanon passed away leaving us with his last testimony, The Wretched of the Earth.

Written in the crucible of the Algerian war of independence and the early years of Third World decolonization, this book achieved an almost biblical status. It became a living source of inspiration for those who opposed the Vietnam War, marched with the civil rights movement, supported revolutionary black struggles in America, the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa and countless insurgent movements around the world.

Fanon’s life had led him far away from the island of Martinique in the Caribbean where he was born a French citizen. He took part at the age of nineteen in the war against Nazism only to discover that in the eyes of France he was nothing but a “Negro”, that is, anything but a man like any other man.

By any means necessary

He would end up feeling a deep sense of betrayal. Black Skin, White Mask – his first book – partly relates the story of this and many other fraught encounters with colonial forms of dehumanization.

But it was in Algeria where he worked as a psychiatrist that Fanon finally cut the cord that bound him to France. The country for which he had almost lost his life in the struggle against Hitler had started to replicate Nazi’s methods during a savage and nameless war against a people which it denied the right to self-determination.

About this war Fanon often said it had taken the look of an authentic genocide. Having sided with the Algerian people, France disowned him. He had betrayed the nation. He became an enemy and long after his death, France treated him as such.

For those committed to the cause of oppressed people or fighting for racial justice, his name nevertheless remained not only a sign of hope, but also an injunction to rise up. Indeed to Fanon we owe the idea that in every human being there is something indomitable which no domination – no matter in what form – can eliminate, contain nor suppress, or at least completely.

Fanon tried to grasp how this “something” could be reanimated and brought back to life under conditions of subjugation.

He argued that this irrepressible and relentless pursuit of freedom required the mobilization of all life reserves. It drew the human subject into a fight to the death – a fight he was called upon to assume as his own task, one he could not delegate to others.

Fanon was also convinced that colonialism was a force animated at its core by a genocidal drive.

To destroy colonialism could only be ensured by violent means, an “absolute praxis” whose goal was to produce life and to free the world from the burden of race.

Post-liberation culture and politics

His diagnosis of life after colonialism was uncompromising.

For him, there was a distinct possibility that post-liberation culture and politics might take the road of retrogression if not tragedy. The project of national liberation might turn into a crude, empty shell; the nation might be passed over for the race, and the tribe might be preferred to the state.

He believed that the liberation struggle had not healed the injuries and trauma that were the true legacy of colonialism.

After liberation, the native élite had been ensconced in intellectual laziness and cowardice. In its will to imitation and its inability to invent anything of its own, the native bourgeoisie had assimilated the most corrupt forms of colonialist and racist thought.

Afflicted with precocious senility, the educated classes were stuck in a great procession of corruption.

The innermost vocation of the new ruling class seemed to be part of the racket or the loot. It had annexed state power for its own profit and transformed the former liberation movement into a trade union of individual interests while making itself into a screen between the masses and their leaders.

Fanon was equally scornful of nationalization which he saw not as a genuine mechanism to build a national economy but as a scandalous, speedy and pitiless form of enrichment.

He warned against the descent of the urban unemployed masses into lumpen-violence. As soon as the struggle is over, he argued, they start a fight against non-national Africans. From nationalism they pass to chauvinism, negrophobia and finally to racism. They are quick to insist that foreign Africans go home to their country. They burn their shops, wreck their street stalls and spill their blood on the city’s pavements and in the shantytowns.

Surveying the postcolony, Fanon could only see a coming nightmare – an indigenous ruling class luxuriating in the delicious depravities of the Western bourgeoisie, addicted to rest and relaxation in pleasure resorts, casinos and beaches, spending large sums on display, on cars, watches, shoes and foreign labels.

In his post-liberation nightmare, he could distinctly see stupidity parading as leadership, patriarchy turning women into wives, vulgarity going hand in hand with the corruption of the mind and of the flesh, all in the midst of hilarity and demobilization.

The spectacle of Africans representing themselves to the world as the archetype of stupidity, brutality and profligacy, he confided, made him angry and sick at heart.

To read Fanon today means to translate into the language of our times the major questions that forced him to stand up, to break away from his roots, and to walk with others, companions on a new road which the colonized had to trace on their own, by their own creativity, with their indomitable will.

All around us, it is easy to see elements of his nightmare. Globally, new forms of colonial warfare and occupation are taking shape, with their share of counter-insurgent tactics and torture, Delta camps, secret prisons, and their mixture of militarism and plundering of far-away resources.

New forms of social Apartheid and structural destitution have replaced the old colonial divisions. As a result of global processes of accumulation by dispossession, deep inequities are being entrenched by an ever more brutal economic system. The ability of many to remain masters of their own lives is once again tested to the limits.

No wonder under such conditions, many are not only willing to invoke once again Frantz Fanon’s heretic name, his sparkling, volcanic and exploding face. They are willing to stand up and rise again.

I myself have been attracted to Fanon’s name and voice because both have the brightness of metal. His is a metamorphic thought, animated by an indestructible will to live. What gives this metallic thinking its force and power is the air of indestructibility and the inexhaustible silo of humanity which it houses.

* Achille Mbembe is a research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand. His latest book, Sortir de la grande nuit, was published in 2010 in Paris.