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Ending the Nuba Genocide

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 06:22:08 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pla...kcek9Ppg#!

I just watched this -- two dudes from Memphis go to Sudan to the warfront to see the Nuban people being mass murdered as genocide while the international community does not intervene.

I remembered the liberator Magazine article on Sudan and U.S. imperialism -- sorry I can't remember the details -- but yeah when "intervention" is just for u.s. to control the oil, etc. This seems different. It's related to Dafur -- but anyway watch the vid and let me know! thanks.

{Atlanta} The Boxcar Grocer

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:27:00 +0000

249 Peters St SW
Atlanta, GA 30313
Neighborhood: Castleberry Hill
(404) 883-3608
http://www.boxcargrocer.com

The Approach
A strange thing has been happening for years. Organic food has been made to seem elitist, out of reach, and just plain unavailable to most people. As a result, health disparities between communities that do have access to nutritious, organically grown foods and those that lack healthy choices, have increased faster than a runaway train.

By shortening the supply train and working directly with local farms, we are changing what it means to make healthy food accessible – especially to urban communities previously lacking the availability of choice.

Our idea to create a store where everyone would feel comfortable led us to design an environment highly compatible with urban living. This meant balancing an aesthetic appeal with a local lifestyle focus, partnering with urban farms, and offering a space that fosters community.

Enter the trains. The railroad theme that runs deeply through The Boxcar Grocer concept is rooted in the fact that trains are great connectors. They are a fact of modern society that can be appreciated by all ages, ethnicities, and genders. We were deeply inspired by the courageousness of people such as A. Philip Randolph and his organizing of the Pullman Porters. Reclaiming one’s dignity was an uphill battle back then but one that solidified a position of pride for many men who were once treated without respect for their work and their lives.

Eating organic food is so not special. If you travel outside this country to the most remote regions of the world where people have not heard of half the things that we in America think we need to have to survive, eating ‘organically’ is the norm. Subsisting on diverse foods grown in the immediate vicinity, by natural means, without reliance on pesticides is exactly how normal people live. When our grandparents were alive –and their parents before them– and they stepped out to get food, chances are they had plenty of good, old fashioned, organic food growing right in their own yard. And if your grandparents were anything like ours, they had significantly less money than you and I have right now, at this moment in time but still ate better than most of us eat today.

Our engagement with local farmers and our surrounding neighborhoods allows The Boxcar Grocer to be the connection that is sorely needed in many communities across America. It allows our communities to reclaim health by making it easier to make the right choices.

Source: http://www.boxcargrocer.com

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:53:25 +0000

(thanks to Rob Bland for sharing)

SOURCE
http://gawker.com/5927452/how-to-slowly-...emembrance

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance
by Kiese Laymon

I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I've helped many folks say yes to life but I've definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.
***
I'm 17, five years younger than Rekia Boyd will be when she is shot in the head by an off duty police officer in Chicago. It's the summer after I graduated high school and my teammate, Troy, is back in Jackson, Mississippi. Troy, who plays college ball in Florida, asks me if I want to go to McDonald's on I-55.

As Troy, Cleta, Leighton and I walk out of McDonald's, that Filet-o-Fish grease straight cradling my lips, I hold the door for open for a tiny, scruffy-faced white man with a green John Deere hat on.

"Thanks, partner," he says.

A few minutes later, we're driving down I-55 when John Deere drives up and rolls his window down. I figure that he wants to say something funny since we'd had a cordial moment at McDonald's. As soon as I roll my window down, the man screams, "Nigger lovers!" and speeds off.

On I-55, we pull up beside John Deere and I'm throwing finger-signs, calling John Deere all kinds of clever "motherfuckers." The dude slows down and gets behind us. I turn around, hoping he pulls over.

Nope.

John Deere pulls out a police siren and places it on top of his car. Troy is cussing my ass out and frantically trying to drive his Mama's Lincoln away from John Deere. My heart is pounding out of my chest, not out of fear, but because I want a chance to choke the shit out of John Deere. I can't think of any other way of making him feel what we felt.

Troy drives into his apartment complex and parks his Mama's long Lincoln under some kind of shed. Everyone in the car is slumped down at this point. Around 20 seconds after we park, here comes the red, white and blue of the siren.

We hear a car door slam, then a loud knock on the back window. John Deere has a gun in one hand and a badge in the other. He's telling me to get out of the car. My lips still smell like Filet-o-Fish.

"Only you," he says to me. "You going to jail tonight." He's got the gun to my chest.

"Fuck you," I tell him and suck my teeth. "I ain't going nowhere." I don't know what's wrong with me.

Cleta is up front trying to reason with the man through her window when all of a sudden, in a scene straight out of Boyz n the Hood, a black cop approaches the car and accuses us of doing something wrong. Minutes later, a white cop tells us that John Deere has been drinking too much and he lets us go.

16 months later, I'm 18, three years older than Edward Evans will be when he is shot in the head behind an abandoned home in Jackson.

Shonda and I are walking from Subway back to Millsaps College with two of her white friends. It's nighttime. We turn off of North State Street and walk halfway past the cemetery when a red Corolla filled with brothers stops in front of us. All of the brothers have blue rags covering their noses and mouths. One of the brothers, a kid at least two years younger than me with the birdest of bird chests, gets out of the car clutching a shiny silver gun.

He comes towards Shonda and me.

"Me," I say to him. "Me. Me." I hold my hands up encouraging him to do whatever he needs to do. If he shoots me, well, I guess bullets enter and hopefully exit my chest, but if the young Nigga thinks I'm getting pistol whupped in front of a cemetery and my girlfriend off of State Street, I'm convinced I'm going to take the gun and beat him into a burnt cinnamon roll.

The boy places his gun on my chest and keeps looking back and forth to the car.

I feel a strange calm, an uncanny resolve. I don't know what's wrong with me. He's patting me down for money that I don't have since we hadn't gotten our work-study checks yet and I just spent my last little money on two veggie subs from Subway and two of those large Chocolate Chip cookies.

The young brother keeps looking back to the car, unsure what he's supposed to do. Shonda and her friends are screaming when he takes the gun off my chest and trots goofily back to the car.

I don't know what's wrong with him but a few months later, I have a gun.

A partner of mine hooks me up with a partner of his who lets me hold something. I get the gun not only to defend myself from goofy brothers in red Corollas trying to rob folks for work-study money. I guess I'm working on becoming a black writer in Mississippi and some folks around Millsaps College don't like the essays I'm writing in the school newspaper.

A few weeks earlier, George Harmon, the President of Millsaps, shuts down the campus paper in response to a satirical essay I wrote on communal masturbation and sends a letter to over 12,000 overwhelmingly white Millsaps students, friends and alumnae. The letter states that the "Key Essay in question was written by Kiese Laymon, a controversial writer who consistently editorializes on race issues."

After the President's letter goes out, my life kinda hurts.

I receive a sweet letter in the mail with the burnt up ashes of my essays. The letter says that if I don't stop writing and give myself "over to right," my life would end up like the ashes of my writing.

The tires of my Mama's car are slashed when her car was left on campus. I'm given a single room after the Dean of Students thinks it's too dangerous for me to have a roommate. Finally, Greg Miller, an English Professor, writes an essay about how and why a student in his Liberal Studies class says, "Kiese should be killed for what he's writing." I feel a lot when I read those words, but mainly I wonder what's wrong with me.

It's bid day at Millsaps.

Shonda and I are headed to our jobs at Ton-o-Fun, a fake ass Chuck E. Cheese behind Northpark Mall. We're wearing royal blue shirts with a strange smiling animal and Ton-o-Fun on the left titty. The shirts of the other boy workers at Ton-o-Fun fit them better than mine. My shirt is tight in the wrong places and slightly less royal blue. I like to add a taste of bleach so I don't stank.

As we walk out to the parking lot of my dorm, the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma fraternities are in front of our dorm receiving their new members. They've been up drinking all night. Some of them have on black face and others have on Afro wigs and Confederate capes.

We get close to Shonda's Saturn and one of the men says, "Kiese, write about this!" Then another voice calls me a "Nigger" and Shonda, a "Nigger bitch." I think and feel a lot but mostly I feel that I can't do anything to make the boys feel like they've made us feel right there, so I go back to my dorm room to get something.

On the way there, Shonda picks up a glass bottle out of the trash. I tell her to wait outside the room. I open the bottom drawer and look at the hoodies balled up on the top of my gun. I pick up my gun and think about my Grandma. I think not only about what she'd feel if I went back out there with a gun. I think about how if Grandma walked out of that room with a gun in hand, she'd use it. No question.

I am her grandson.

I throw the gun back on top of the clothes, close the drawer, go in my closet and pick up a wooden T-ball bat.

Some of the KA's and Sigs keep calling us names as we approach them. I step, throw down the bat and tell them I don't need a bat to fuck them up. I don't know what's wrong with me. My fists are balled up and the only thing I want in the world is to swing back over and over again. Shonda feels the same, I think. She's right in the mix, yelling, crying, fighting as best she can. After security and a Dean break up the mess, the frats go back to receiving their new pledges and Shonda and I go to work at Ton-o-Fun in our dirty blue shirts.

I stank.

On our first break at work, we decide that we should call a local news station so the rest of Jackson can see what's happening at Millsaps on a Saturday morning. We meet the camera crew at school. Some of boys go after the reporter and cameraman. The camera gets a few students in Afros, black face and Confederate capes. They also get footage of "another altercation."

A few weeks pass and George Harmon, the President of the college, doesn't like that footage of his college is now on television and in newspapers all across the country. The college decides that two individual fraternity members, Shonda and I will be put on disciplinary probation for using "racially insensitive language" and the two fraternities involved get their party privileges taken away for a semester. If there was racially insensitive language Shonda and I could have used to make those boys feel like we felt, we would have never stepped to them in the first place. Millsaps is trying to prove to the nation that it is post-race(ist) institution and to its alums that all the Bid Day stuff is the work of an "adroit entrepreneur of racial conflict."

A few month later, Mama and I sit in President George Harmon's office. The table is an oblong mix of mahogany and ice water. All the men at the table are smiling, flipping through papers and twirling pens in their hands except for me. I am still 19, two years older than Trayvon Martin will be when he swings back.

President Harmon and his lawyers don't look me in the eye. They zero in on the eyes of Mama, as Harmon tells her that I am being suspended from Millsaps for at least a year for taking and returning Red Badge of Courage from the library without formally checking it out.

He ain't lying.

I took the book out of the library for Shonda's brother without checking it out and returned the book the next day. I looked right at the camera when I did it, too. I did all of this knowing I was on parole, but not believing any college in America, even one in Mississippi, would kick a student out for a year, for taking and returning a library book without properly checking it out.

I should have believed.

George Harmon tells me, while looking at my mother, that I will be allowed to come back to Millsaps College in a year only after having attended therapy sessions for racial insensitivity. We are told he has given my writing to a local psychologist and the shrink believes I need help. Even if I am admitted back as a student, I will remain formally on parole for the rest of my undergrad career, which means that I will be expelled from Millsaps College unless I'm perfect.

19-year-old black boys can not be perfect in America. Neither can 61-year-old white boys named George.

Before going on the ride home with Mama, I go to my room, put the gun in my backpack and get in her car.

On the way home, Mama stops by the zoo to talk about what just happened in George Harmon's office. She's crying and asking me over and over again why I took and returned the gotdamn book knowing they were watching me. Like a black mother of black boy, Mama starts blaming Shonda for asking me to check the book out in the first place. I don't know what to say other than I know it wasn't Shonda's fault and I left my ID and I wanted to swing back, so I keep walking and say nothing. She says that Grandma is going to be so disappointed in me. "Heartbroken," is the word she uses.

There.

I feel this toxic miasma unlike anything I've ever felt not just in my body but in my blood. I remember the wobbly way my Grandma twitches her eyes at my Uncle Jimmy and I imagine being at the end of that twitch for the rest of my life. For the first time in almost two years, I hide my face, grit my crooked teeth and sob.

I don't stop for weeks.

The NAACP and lawyers get involved in filing a lawsuit against Millsaps on my behalf. Whenever the NAACP folks talk to me or the paper, they talk about how ironic it is that a black boy who is trying to read a book gets kicked out of college. I appreciate their work but I don't think the irony lies where they think it does. If I'd never read a book in my life, I shouldn't have been punished for taking and bringing back a library book, not when kids are smoking that good stuff, drinking themselves unconsious and doing some of everything imaginable to nonconsenting bodies.

That's what I tell all the newspapers and television reporters who ask. To my friends, I say that after stealing all those Lucky Charms, Funyons, loaves of light bread and over a hundred cold dranks out of the cafeteria in two years, how in the fuck do I get suspended for taking and returning the gotdamn Red Badge of Courage.

The day that I'm awarded the Benjamin Brown award, named after a 21-year-old truck driver shot in the back by police officers during a student protest near Jackson State in 1967, I take the bullets out of my gun, throw it in the Ross Barnett Reservoir and avoid my Grandma for a long, long time.

I enroll at Jackson State University in the Spring semester, where my mother teaches Political Science. Even though, I'm not really living at home, everyday Mama and I fight over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me use the car to get to my second job at an HIV hospice since my license is suspended. Really, we're fighting because she raised me to never ever forget I was on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the king's English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students and most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, white folks will do anything to get you.

Mama's antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it's to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain't no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.

One blue night my mother tells me that I need to type the rest of my application to Oberlin College after I've already hand-written the personal essay. I tell her that it doesn't matter whether I type it or not since Millsaps is sending a Dean's report attached to my transcript. I say some other truthful things I should never say to my mother. Mama goes into her room, lifts up her pillow and comes out with her gun.

It's raggedy, small, heavy and black. I always imagine the gun as an old dead crow. I'd held it a few times before with Mama hiding behind me.

Mama points the gun at me and tells me to get the fuck out of her house. I look right at the muzzle pointed at my face and smile the same way I did at the library camera at Millsaps. I don't know what's wrong with me.

"You gonna pull a gun on me over some college application?" I ask her.

"You don't listen until it's too late," she tells me. "Get out of my house and don't ever come back."

I leave the house, chuckling, shaking my head, cussing under my breath. I go sit in a shallow ditch. Outside, I wander in the topsy turvy understanding that Mama's life does not revolve around me and I'm not doing anything to make her life more joyful, spacious or happy. I'm an ungrateful burden, an obese weight on her already terrifying life. I sit there in the ditch, knowing that other things are happening in my mother's life but I also know that Mama never imagined needing to pull a gun on the child she carried on her back as a sophomore at Jackson State University. I'm playing with pine needles, wishing I had headphones—but I'm mostly regretting throwing my gun into the reservoir.

When Mama leaves for work in the morning, I break back in her house, go under her pillow and get her gun. Mama and I haven't paid the phone or the light bill so it's dark, hot and lonely in that house, even in the morning. I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.

I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.

I start to spend more time at home over the next few weeks since Mama is out of town with her boyfriend. Mama and I still haven't paid the phone bill so I'm running down to the pay phone everyday, calling one of the admissions counselors at Oberlin College. He won't tell me whether they'll accept me or not, but he does say that Oberlin might want me because of, not in spite of, what happened at Millsaps.

A month passes and I haven't heard from Oberlin. I'm eating too much and dry humping a woman just as desperate as me and lying like its my first job and daring people to fuck with me more than I have in a long time. I'm writing lots of words, too, but I'm not reckoning. I'm wasting ink on bullshit political analysis and short stories and vacant poems that I never imagine being read or felt by anyone like me. I'm a waste of writing's time.

The only really joyful times in life come from playing basketball and talking shit with O.G. Raymond "Gunn" Murph, my best friend. Gunn is trying to stop himself from slowly killing himself and others, after a smoldering break up with V., his girlfriend of eight years. Some days, Gunn and I save each other's lives just by telling and listening to each other's odd-shaped truth.

One black night, Ray is destroying me in Madden and talking all that shit when we hear a woman moaning for help outside of his apartment on Capitol Street. We go downstairs and find a naked woman with open wounds, blood and bruises all over her black body. She can barely walk or talk through shivering teeth but we ask her if she wants to come upstairs while we call the ambulance. Gunn and I have taken no Sexual Assault classes and we listen to way too much The Diary and Ready to Die, but right there, we know not to get too close to the woman and just let her know we're there to do whatever she needs.

She slowly makes her way into the apartment because she's afraid the men might come back. Blood is gushing down the back of her thighs and her scalp. She tells us the three men had one gun. When she makes it up to the apartment, we give the woman a towel to sit on and something to wrap herself in. Blood seeps through both and even though she looks so scared and hurt, she also looks so embarrassed. Gunn keeps saying things like, "It's gonna be okay, sweetheart," and I just sit there weakly nodding my head, running from her eyes and getting her more glasses of water. When Gunn goes in his room to take his gun in his waistband, I look at her and know that no one man could have done this much damage to another human being. That's what I need to tell myself.

Eventually, the ambulance and police arrive. They ask her a lot of questions and keep looking at us. She tells them that we helped her after she was beaten and raped by a three black men in a Monte Carlo. One of the men, she tells the police, was her boyfriend. She refuses to say his name to the police. Gunn looks at me and drops his head. Without saying anything, we know that whatever is in the boys in that car, has to also be in us. We know that whatever is encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by knowingly mangling the body and spirit of this shivering black girl, is probably the most powerful thing in our lives. We also know that whatever is in us that has been slowly encouraging us to kill ourselves and those around us slowly, is also in the heart and mind of this black girl on the couch.

A few weeks later, I get a letter saying I've been accepted to Oberlin College and they're giving me a boatload of financial aid. Gunn agrees to drive me up to Oberlin and I feel like the luckiest boy on earth, not because I got into Oberlin, but because I survived long enough to remember saying yes to life and "no" or at least "slow down" to a slow death.

My saying yes to life meant accepting the beauty of growing up black, on parole, in Mississippi. It also meant accepting that George Harmon, parts of Millsaps College, parts of my state, much of my country, my heart and mostly my own reflection, had beaten the dog shit out of me. I still don't know what all this means but I know it's true.

This isn't an essay or simply a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don't want to lie.

I want to say and mean that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really ask nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths and the lives and deaths of folks all around us over and over again.

Then I want to say and mean that I am who my Grandma thinks I am.

I am not.

I'm a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dreamer, a teacher, a student, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay red, and I'm a child of this nation.

I know that as I've gotten deeper into my late twenties and thirties, I have managed to continue killing myself and other folks who loved me in spite of me. I know that I've been slowly killed by folks who were as feverishly in need of life and death as I am. The really confusing part is that a few of those folk who have nudged me closer to slow death have also helped me say yes to life when I most needed it. Usually, I didn't accept it. Lots of times, we've taken turns killing ourselves slowly, before trying to bring each other back to life. Maybe that's the necessary stank of love, or maybe — like Frank Ocean says — it's all just bad religion, just tasty watered down cyanide in a styrofoam cup.

I don't even know.

I know that by the time I left Mississippi, I was 20 years old, three years older than Trayvon Martin will be when he is murdered for wearing a hoodie and swinging back in the wrong American neighborhood. Four months after I leave Mississippi, San Berry, a 20-year-old partner of mine who went to Millsaps College with Gunn and me, would be convicted for taking Pam McGill, a social worker, in the woods and shooting her in the head.

San confessed to kidnapping Ms. McGill, driving her to some woods, making her fall to her knees and pulling the trigger while a 17-year-old black boy named Azikiwe waited for him in the car. San says Azikiwe encouraged him to do it. Even today, journalists, activists and folks in Mississippi wonder what really happen with San, Azikiwe and Pam McGill that day. Was San trying to swing back? Were there mental health issues left unattended? Had Ms. McGill, San and Azikiwe talked to each other before the day? Why was Azikiwe left in the car when the murder took place?

I can't front, though. I don't wonder about any of that shit, not today.

I wonder what all three of those children of our nation really remember about how to slowly kill themselves and other folks in America the day before parts of them definitely died under the blue-black sky in Central Mississippi.

Kiese Laymon is currently an Associate Professor of English and the co-director of Africana Studies at Vassar College. This essay was originally published on his blog, Cold Drank , and was republished with permission. It is an excerpt from Laymon's forthcoming book, On Parole: An Autobiographical Antidote to Post-Blackness. Laymon is also the author of the forthcoming novel, Long Division, which will be released in early 2013.

The Return of D'Angelo / GQ Mag Profile

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:05:18 +0000

Amen! (D'Angelo's Back)

SOURCE
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/20...table=true

He was once hailed as the next Marvin Gaye. Then, after his ripped body threatened to overshadow his music, he vanished into addiction. So what the hell was he doing recently singing his heart out in a Pentecostal church in Stockholm? And how are his abs? Amy Wallace witnessed D'Angelo's ecstatic return to the stage—and hung out with the master of the sacred and the profane as he finishes his first album in a dozen years

The massive weight gain didn't make Michael "D'Angelo" Archer see the darkness that was looming. Neither did the hermit-like isolation, the shattered friendships, the years wasted without a new record in sight, or even the car accident that nearly killed him. By the time he careened off a lonely stretch of road near Richmond, Virginia, in September 2005, hitting a fence and rolling his Hummer three times, he'd already failed two stints in rehab—including one where his counselor was Bob Forrest, the guy on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. Bob had been cool, D'Angelo says, but his message of sobriety didn't take. "I went in under a fake name so people wouldn't know who I was, right?" D'Angelo tells me, in his first sit-down interview in twelve years. "So, you know, Michael never got treatment. It was this other character that was in there. And the moment I left, I went straight to the fucking liquor store."

Which helps explain why, months later, high on cocaine and drunk off his ass, D'Angelo found himself ejected from his car on that balmy Virginia night, hurtling through the pitch-blackness, flying. When he hit the ground, he broke all the ribs on his left side—and dealt another blow to his foundering career. Once he'd been the heir apparent to the giants of soul: Marvin, Stevie, Prince. (The rock critic Robert Christgau was so transported by D'Angelo's live show that he called him R&B Jesus.) But shortly after the wreck, discussions ended with several top music executives, including Clive Davis at J Records, who'd been considering signing him to a $3 million contract. Then D'Angelo's manager told him he was done with him, too.

Still, D'Angelo couldn't feel the bottom, even though it was right beneath him. He shows me how close, reaching toward the floor with his well-muscled left arm, the one inked with 23:4, for the Twenty-third Psalm. It's early March, just a few weeks after he's finished a sixteen-day mini-tour of Europe—his first live performances (not counting church) in more than a decade. We're sitting on a black leather couch in a Manhattan recording studio on Forty-eighth Street off Broadway, a quiet sanctum despite its proximity to the circus of Times Square. Through a bank of windows is the room where he has recorded many songs for his (very) long-awaited third album. Dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair in short tiny braids, D'Angelo looks good at 38—more solid than in his famously shirtless six-pack years, but clear-eyed and radiantly handsome. "I didn't really think I had a problem like that," he says, taking a hit off a Newport. "I felt like, you know, all I got to do is clean up and I'll be fine. Just get in the studio and I'll be fucking fine."

What finally made him see, he says, was the passing of J Dilla, the revered hip-hop producer, on February 10, 2006. They'd just talked on the phone, D'Angelo says, when suddenly, J Dilla was gone at 32 after a long battle with lupus. It was like a blinding light had been switched on. Why did so many black artists die so young? He'd been haunted by this thought for years. Marvin. Jimi. Biggie. "I felt like I was going to be next. I ain't bullshitting. I was scared then," he says, recalling how shame engulfed him, preventing him from attending the funeral. "I was so fucked-up, I couldn't go."

Shame, guilt, repentance—D'Angelo knows them well. To say that he was raised religious doesn't begin to capture it. He's the son and the grandson of Pentecostal preachers. To D'Angelo, good and evil are not abstract concepts but tangible forces he reckons with every day. In his life and in his music, he has always felt the tension between the sacred and the profane, the darkness and the light.

"You know what they say about Lucifer, right, before he was cast out?" D'Angelo asks me now. "Every angel has their specialty, and his was praise. They say that he could play every instrument with one finger and that the music was just awesome. And he was exceptionally beautiful, Lucifer—as an angel, he was."

But after he descended into hell, Lucifer was fearsome, he tells me. "There's forces that are going on that I don't think a lot of motherfuckers that make music today are aware of," he says. "It's deep. I've felt it. I've felt other forces pulling at me." He stubs out his cigarette and leans toward me, taking my hand. "This is a very powerful medium that we are involved in," he says gravely. "I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself. We could stir the pot, you know? The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you've got to be careful."

···
In 1995, when D'Angelo—or D, as he's known to his friends—released his platinum--selling debut album, Brown Sugar, he looked, on first impression, like the rappers of the time, with his cornrows, baggy jeans, and Timberland boots. But when he played and sang he instantly stood apart, a self-taught prodigy in touch with the ultimate muse. His groove hearkened to something purer, and whether crooning or caterwauling, he performed with fervor, like he was channeling the masters. A musician's musician, he played his own instruments, arranged and wrote his own songs. He was only 21 years old.

Many would rise to praise him—not just critics, but his peers. Common, who calls D "one of the most impactful artists of our day and age," remembers being in his car when "Lady" first came on the radio. "I was calling people and saying, 'Have you heard this?' " he says. George Clinton, the godfather of P-Funk, compares D's second album, Voodoo, to Gaye's groundbreaking What's Going On. And Eric Clapton's reaction to hearing Voodoo was captured on video. "I can't take much more," he says, reeling. "Is it all like this? My God!"

But for many, it was skin, not just music, that helped D cross over from R&B maestro to mainstream sex object. In 2000 he released the smoldering video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel?)," an instant sensation that made fans everywhere, especially women, lose their lustful minds. It's easy to find on YouTube: 26-year-old D'Angelo, naked from the hip bones up, staring straight into the camera, licking his lips and writhing in ecstasy. The video propelled him to superstardom—but it claimed its pound of flesh. D struggled mightily with the way his body threatened to overshadow his music. Then he all but disappeared.

"Black stardom is rough, dude," Chris Rock tells me when I reach him to talk about D. "I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you're a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?"

After Brown Sugar went platinum, Rock put D'Angelo on The Chris Rock Show. Later, when D was mixing Voodoo, Rock hung out some in the studio. No surprise, then, that the first thing out of Rock's mouth after "Hello" is a joyful "He's back!" But he adds a sobering downbeat: "D'Angelo. Chris Tucker. Dave Chappelle. Lauryn Hill. They all hang out on the same island. The island of What Do We Do with All This Talent? It frustrates me."

I tell Rock that Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the drummer for the Roots and one of D's closest collaborators, has ticked off much the same list. Questlove has a theory about what happens to black genius—what he calls "a crazy psychological kind of stoppage that prevents them from following through. A sort of self-saboteur disorder." Rock says he understands.

For a black star, Rock says, "there's a lot of pressure just to be responsible for other people's lives—to be the E. F. Hutton of your crew. Everything you say is magnified. I mean, street smarts only help you on the streets. Or maybe occasionally they

will help you in the boardroom, but boy, you wish you knew a little bit about accounting." There is pressure to be original but also pressure to be commercial, to make money, to succeed. Sometimes the two run at cross-purposes.

I ask Questlove what he thinks has held D back. He says it's not just the way "Untitled" turned D'Angelo into "the Naked Guy," though of course that didn't help. It's something bigger. "We noticed early that all of the geniuses we admired have had maybe a ten-year run before death or, you know, the Poconos," he says. "That renders D paralyzed. He said he fears the responsibility and the power that comes with it. But I think what he fears most is the isolation"—the kind that fame brings.

Questlove believes D's "eleven-year freeze" must end, not just for the artist's sake, but for the culture's. "I've told him: He is literally holding the oxygen supply that music lovers breathe," Questlove says. "At first, it was cute—'Oh, he's bashful.' But now he's, like, selfish. I'm like, 'Look, dude, we're starving.' When D starts singing, all is right with the world."

···
Michael Archer grew up not knowing Jesus' name. To some black Pentecostals, God is known as Yahweh and the son of God as Yahshua or Yahushua. "We would go to other churches and people would be saying 'Jesus,' " he recalls. "I was like, 'Who are they talking about?' " The piano, on the other hand, was something he understood innately. At 4, he taught himself to play Earth, Wind & Fire's "Boogie Wonderland."

When he was 5, his parents split, and the boys went to live with their father. "Mom was struggling," he says of his mother, then a legal secretary. Michael played the organ at his father's church and helped lead the choir. When he was 9, however, his dad "was battling his own demons," and the boys went to live with their mom for good. After that, "me and my father really didn't have much contact with each other."

What the Hell Happened to Neo-Soul?
When Marvin got shot, Aretha gained weight, and J.B. got too old to do the splits, soul music seemed nearly extinct. Then along came neo-soul, a hip-hoppier reboot of the genre that arguably peaked in 2000 with D'Angelo's Voodoo. The movement boasted plenty of talent—but unfortunately not the sustained commercial success of its forebears.—Mark Anthony Green
Lauryn Hill
After a mind-blowing stint with the Fugees and five Grammys for her solo project, Hill released an acoustic album with half the soul. Since then, her erratic stage presence has made a lot more news than her music.
Maxwell
His late-'90s debut went double platinum, but then he took most of the 2000s off. "Pretty Wings" brought him all the way back in 2009, and he's just announced plans for a summer mini-tour.
Common
Common was a key member of the Soulquarians (the neo-soul collective featuring Badu, Questlove, D'Angelo, and others), but lately he's been doing more acting than recording.
Erykah Badu
Badu has been consistent (four albums in the 2000s), but she never fully caught the mainstream wave despite being heralded as one of the best female voices of her time.

In those years, Michael was drawn to his maternal grandfather's Refuge Assembly of Yahweh, up in the mountains outside Richmond. The region had been a hub of slave trading before the Civil War, with Richmond being a place where 300,000 Africans and their descendants were sold down the James River. Then and now, church was a place where loss could be mourned, pain salved. But what attracted Michael was the way fire and brimstone infused the music. In the temple, Michael saw his elder brother Rodney speak in tongues; he witnessed healings and exorcisms. At one Friday-night revival, he noticed a woman in a pew a few rows up. She was acting strange—tugging at her clothes, foaming at the mouth, ripping at the Bible. "She was possessed. E-vil," he says, breaking the word in two. "It was a long, hot, steamy night, and that demon disrupted it." He recalls his grandfather and the other ministers praying hard as the woman crawled on all fours, screamed, and ran outside to jump on the hoods of cars. "The demon was raising holy hell, and my grandfather came outside. He had big hands, and he didn't say a word. He just—" D'Angelo raises his palm to me—"and she falls out. That's it. End of story."

Already Michael was developing into the musical connoisseur that D'Angelo is today. His Uncle CC was a truck driver who moonlighted as a DJ, and he had a huge record collection. This was the beginning of what D now calls "going to school"—delving deep into jazz, soul, rock, and gospel history, from Mahalia Jackson to Band of Gypsys, from the Meters to Miles Davis to Donald Byrd, from Sam Cooke to Otis Redding, from Donny Hathaway to Curtis Mayfield to Sly Stone to Marvin Gaye. When Michael was 8, Gaye had just made a comeback with "Sexual Healing" and won two Grammys. "Everybody was talking about him," D'Angelo recalls. "Everybody." So just after Sunday sermon on April Fool's Day 1984, when Michael learned Gaye was dead at 44—shot by his own father—he was crushed.

That night, D'Angelo had the first of many dreams about Gaye. It was in black and white and took place at Hitsville U.S.A., Motown's Detroit headquarters. D was playing piano while a bunch of famous Motown stars milled about, waiting for Gaye. "When he finally showed up, he was young, very handsome, the thin Marvin. Clean-shaven. Very debonair," he told an interviewer back in 2000. "He came straight to me and shook my hand and looked me dead in the eyes, and he said, 'Very nice to meet you.'& He grabbed my hand and wouldn't let go."

After that, whenever Gaye's music came on the radio, Michael felt a chill. The opening bars to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" made him get up and leave the room. It was as if the power in Gaye's music had been linked, somehow, to his tragic end. "I would be petrified," he says—so petrified that his mother took him to a therapist. But the dreams of Gaye—himself a preacher's son—didn't go away until Michael turned 19. That was the year he changed his name to a moniker inspired by Michelangelo. That was also the year that his demo tape found its way into the hands of Gary Harris, then an A&R executive at EMI Music.

At their first meeting, D played a little Al Green on the piano and appeared to be just another "young kid with a lot of mystery." Earlier, Harris had seen a video taken at a talent show when D was 8. "He's playing the chords from 'Thriller,' and then he starts singing: It's close to midnight. Something evil's lurkin' in the dark. He was killing it," Harris recalls. "We used to call it 'getting the spirit' in church. He's the rarest of breeds: a genuine live attraction."

The church warned D'Angelo against secular music. "I got that speech so many times," he says. " 'Don't go do the devil's music,' blah blah blah." But his grandmother encouraged him to use his gifts as he saw fit. Not long after Harris signed him, D dreamed his last Marvin dream, this one in color. "I was following him as a grown man," he tells me. "He was a bit heavier, and he had the beard. He was naked, and all I could see was his back and that cap he used to wear all the time. And he got into this whirlpool Jacuzzi with his wife and his daughter and his little son, and that's when he turns around and looks at me. And he goes, 'I know you're wondering why you keep dreaming about me.' And I woke up."

···
Angie Stone, the soul diva who sang backup vocals on Brown Sugar, says that from the moment she met D, "I knew a superstar was on the rise." But "there was an innocence there that if we weren't careful was going to get trashed," adds Stone, who became romantically involved with D during that period and remains fiercely protective of him. "It's not a little bit of God in him. It's a lot of God in him. Sometimes when you have that much power, Satan works tenfold to break you."

As D'Angelo caught fire in the mid-'90s, the star-making machinery worked overtime to mold him into a bankable headliner. Stone remembers an event in Manhattan in September 1996 that was billed as Giorgio Armani's tribute to D'Angelo. Stone—thirteen years older than D—was three months pregnant with their son. They headed to the event together in a limo, but as they neared the venue where D was going to perform, it suddenly pulled over. "He was asked to get into another car, where he would be escorted by Vivica Fox," Stone says, her voice breaking slightly. The lissome Fox had just appeared with Will Smith in the blockbuster Independence Day. "It was a Hollywood moment. They wanted a trophy girl. I had to walk in behind them to flashing cameras. It started the wheels turning of what was yet to come."

The A-list was circling now, wanting a taste of D's authentic flavor. When Madonna turned 39, she asked him to sing "Happy Birthday" at her party. One press report had her sitting on his lap and French-kissing him. In fact, two sources say that ultimately D rebuffed her advances at another gathering not long after. At that event, the sources say, Madonna walked over and told a woman sitting next to D, "I think you're in my seat." The woman got up. Madonna sat down and told him, "I'd like to know what you're thinking." To which D replied, "I'm thinking you're rude."

But the lure of fame was constant, the temptations everywhere. While his label hoped for a quick follow-up album, D retreated, citing writer's block. He would later say that the birth of his first child, Michael Jr., got him back on track, but Voodoo—partially written with Stone—would be a full five years in the making. D fathered a daughter, now 12, with another woman, and has a third child, now almost 2.

Three weeks after its January 2000 debut, Voodoo hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Some early reviews were tepid (only later would Rolling Stone list it among its 500 best albums of all time), but it sold more than a million units in five weeks (and 700,000 since). The record would eventually win two Grammys, for best R&B album and best male R&B vocal performance for "Untitled." But as D began to fall apart, the video would be the only thing many fans remembered. "The video was the line of demarcation," says Harris. "It sent him spinning out of control."

Paul Hunter, the director hired to make the video, says his work was misunderstood: "Most people think the 'Untitled' video was about sex, but my direction was completely opposite of that. It was about his grandmother's cooking."

I've stopped by Hunter's office in Culver City, California, to hear how D'Angelo came to be filmed bare-chested (but for a gold cross on a chain around his neck), wearing only a pair of precariously low-slung pajama bottoms, looking like a wolf circling a bitch in heat. Illuminated from every angle, he spins very slowly as the camera fetishizes his every ripple and drop of sweat. I've imagined a lot of things that inspired the song's rousing lyrics (Love to make you wet / In between your thighs cause / I love when it comes inside of you), but collard greens weren't among them. Hunter is quick to explain that he, like D, was raised in the Pentecostal church.

"When I used to sing in the choir," Hunter says, "after the rehearsal, you go in to eat. I remembered seeing the preacher looking at a lady's skirt one week and then, the next Sunday, talking about how fornication is wrong." Such mixed messages about the pleasures of the flesh were intertwined with the pleasures of the palate—part of the same sensual stew. "So I was like, 'Think of your grandmother's greens, how it smelled in the kitchen. What did the yams and fried chicken taste like? That's what I want you to express.' "

The video was the brainchild of co-director Dominique Trenier, D's manager, whose goal—some still see it as a stroke of genius—was to turn his client into a sex god. D'Angelo had been working hard with his trainer and was cut down to muscle and bone. Never in his life had D been this taut and virile, and Trenier seized the opportunity to create a true crossover artist without losing his loyal base. Initially, Hunter says, to capture the heat they were hoping for, "we were going to build sort of a box for a girl to come and mess with him. We all said, 'Well, how can we push it?' "

But when the shoot began at a New York City soundstage, the fluffer turned out to be unnecessary. D's memory was all he needed to bring it home. The video may have looked like foreplay, but it was actually about family, Hunter insists—about intimacy. Later, when I tell D'Angelo this, he says, "It's so true: We talked about the Holy Ghost and the church before that take. The veil is the nudity and the sexuality. But what they're really getting is the spirit."

The shoot took six hours, and it changed D's life. Trenier got his wish: Thanks to D'Angelo's luscious physicality, albums started flying off the shelves. But the trouble began right away, at the start of the Voodoo tour in L.A. "It was a week of warm-up gigs at House of Blues just to kick off the tour, draw some attention, break in the band," says Alan Leeds, D's tour manager then and now. "And from the beginning, it's 'Take it off!' "

Questlove, the tour's bandleader, was alarmed. "We thought, okay, we're going to build the perfect art machine, and people are going to love and appreciate it," he says. "And then by mid-tour it just became, what can we do to stop the 'Take it off' stuff?"

D'Angelo felt tortured, Questlove says, by the pressure to give the audience what it wanted. Worried that he didn't look as cut as he did in the video, he'd delay shows to do stomach crunches. He'd often give in, peeling off his shirt, but he resented being reduced to that. Wasn't he an artist? Couldn't the

audience hear the power of his music and value him for that? He would explode, Questlove recalls, and throw things. Sometimes he'd have to be coaxed not to cancel shows altogether.

When I ask D about this, he downplays his suffering. Watching him pull hard on another Newport, I realize that he finds it far easier to confess his addictions than his insecurities about his corporeal self. Self-destructing with a coke spoon—while ill-advised—has a badass edge. Fretting over what Questlove has called "some Kate Moss shit" seems anything but manly. If given the chance, he tells me, he would absolutely shoot the video again. But he does admit to feeling angry during the Voodoo tour.

"One time I got mad when a female threw money at me onstage, and that made me feel fucked-up, and I threw the money back at her," he says. "I was like, 'I'm not a stripper.' " He was beginning to sense a darkness beckoning. He recalls a particular moment onstage at the North Sea Jazz festival in 2000. The band was in the middle of "Devil's Pie," his song about the spell fame casts upon the weak—Who am I to justify / All the evil in our eye / When I myself feel the high / From all that I despise—when he felt an ominous presence in the crowd. "That night I felt something that was like, whoa," he tells me. E-vil.

On the last day of the eight-month tour, Questlove says D'Angelo told him, "Yo, man, I cannot wait until this fucking tour is over. I'm going to go in the woods, drink some hooch, grow a beard, and get fat." Questlove thought he was joking. "I was like, 'You're a funny guy.' And then it started to happen. That's how much he wanted to distance himself."

While the tour was a success, both critically and commercially, it left D broken. "When I got back home, yeah, it wasn't that easy to just be," he says. "I think that's the thing that got me in a lot of trouble: me trying to just be Michael, the regular old me from back in the day, and me fighting that whole sex-symbol thing. You know: 'Hey, I ain't D'Angelo today. I'm just plain old Mike, and I just want to hang out with my boys and do what we used to do.' But, damn, those days are fucking gone."

···
Upon his return to Richmond after the Voodoo tour, D stepped into what he calls "an avalanche of shit." First he lost a few people who were close to him, including his Uncle CC, whose record collection had been the bedrock of D's musical education, and his beloved grandmother. After that, "I just kind of sunk into this thing."

It's not that D wasn't working, exactly. "I was in the studio," he says. "But I was also partying a lot. A little too much." He liked cocaine, he says, "because I could be a bit of an antisocial. It made me really open up and talk." But the problem with doing coke, he says, is "you can drink like a fish and it don't bother you. It was good in the beginning, but it got out of hand." For the first time, he says, "people started to go, 'Yo, man, you've got to get it together.' "

Executives at his then label, Virgin, were exasperated. Momentum is money in the music business, and D was squandering his. Sometime in the mid-2000s, Virgin and D'Angelo parted ways. Then D had a falling out with Questlove, who'd played a track off the album-in-progress on an Australian radio station—a cardinal sin in D's eyes. Things had begun to unravel. In January 2005 a bloated, bleary-eyed D'Angelo was arrested in Richmond and charged with possession of cocaine and marijuana and driving while intoxicated. Trenier, horrified by the mug shot that appeared in press accounts, drove from New York City to Richmond to pick D up—then drove him to California so D wouldn't have to be seen in public in an airport. Soon, D was in rehab at the Pasadena Recovery Center. But he wasn't listening.

The near fatal Hummer accident came in mid-September of that year, after D had received a three-year suspended sentence on the cocaine charge. Still, he didn't think he'd bottomed out. Only five or six months later, after J Dilla's passing, would D finally reach out to Gary Harris, the man who'd first signed him. D told Harris he wanted to talk to Clapton, with whom he'd performed a few times. Harris tracked down a number. "I was like, 'Yo, I need some help,' " D recalls telling Clapton, who founded the Crossroads treatment center in Antigua. D would be welcome there, Clapton said, but it would cost $40,000. Harris called a former boss of his: Irving Azoff, the famed personal manager, who didn't know D but knew his work. Harris says Azoff agreed to cut a check.

Getting D to Antigua was an odyssey in itself. First off, he had neither a driver's license nor a passport—a challenge when trying to board an international flight. Second, while he'd begged for this intervention, his commitment to it waxed and waned. When Harris first arrived at D's Richmond mini-mansion on a Sunday in late April 2006, the kitchen was littered with empty alcohol bottles, and D was a mess. "What should have taken a day took four days," Harris says, recounting their journey from Richmond to Charlotte to Puerto Rico, where "it took me two days to get him out of the hotel." Even once D was admitted to Crossroads, Harris says, "he was calling everybody he knew to get a ticket out." At his first two rehab centers, D had been able to evade and outsmart the counselors. At Crossroads, he was forced to deal. "It was like sobriety boot camp," he says. "They are up in your shit."

After his month in Antigua, it still took eighteen months for D to ink a new deal, this one with J Records (which would become RCA) in late 2007. But even then, in D's world, nothing happens quickly.

Everyone around him knows about D-time, a pace so slow that it could test even the most patient saint. Over the next few years, there were creative stops and starts. There were also setbacks. On March 6, 2010, D was arrested and charged with solicitation after offering a female undercover police officer $40 for a blow job in Manhattan's West Village. He reportedly had $12,000 in cash in his Range Rover. Asked to explain, he says, "It was just me making a stupid decision, a wrong turn, on the wrong night." He adds, "I'm not the role-model motherfucker. Look at all the shit that I've been in."

Questlove and D were back in touch now, but the drummer admits he kept D'Angelo at arm's length. For a while it seemed they'd only talk after someone died. Michael Jackson's passing had them on the phone in 2009. Then, in 2011, just hours after Questlove missed a call from Amy Winehouse on Skype, she, too, exited the stage. "D's the first person I called," Questlove recalls. "And I was just honest, like, 'Look, man, I'm sorry. I know you're thinking I'm avoiding you like the plague.' I just said plain and simple, 'Man, there was a period in which it seemed like you were hell-bent on following the footsteps of our idols, and the one thing you have yet to follow them in was death.' " He told D that if he'd gotten that news, it would have destroyed him. "That was probably the most emotional man-to-man talk that D and I had ever had."

Such honesty was only possible, Questlove says, because D'Angelo was finally getting his act together. He'd kicked his bad habits—well, most of them. "Any person who's dealt with substance abuse, it's an ongoing thing," D tells me. "That's the mantra—one day at a time—right? So you're going to have good days and bad days, but for the most part, I have a grip on it." He feels the forces of good are on his side now. "I don't know why it didn't happen sooner. It's just the way Yahweh ordained it."

His newfound discipline is evident in the way he has thrown himself into studying a new instrument, practicing for five and six hours a day. "The one benefit of this eleven-year sabbatical was he used 10,000 Gladwellian hours to master the guitar," says Questlove, who compares D to Frank Zappa. "He can play the shit out of it, and I don't mean no Lil Wayne shit."

Alan Leeds, the tour manager, senses a conscious decision on D's part to push beyond the beefcake. "I wonder if that isn't partially a way to take the attention away from that Chippendales shit, because when you're standing up playing guitar, there's a little less attention to what you're wearing and whether it's on or off and having to choreograph your moves," says Leeds, who's previously worked with James Brown and Prince. "It prevents you from having to calculate that shit."

Still, D is back in the gym, and it's not just vanity that's tugging at him. He knows physical presence is key to any live performance. And though he's still finer than fine, with swagger to spare, he's no longer the chiseled Adonis from the "Untitled" video. Eating little more than fish and green apples, D's been working to trim down his five-foot-seven frame, which just a few months ago had topped 300 pounds. In January, on the eve of his European tour, his managers told me he still had another twenty-five pounds to go. Which is why when I boarded the plane for Sweden, I wasn't surprised to see D's personal trainer—Mark Jenkins, the same one who got him into underwear-model shape twelve years ago—a few rows up.

···
When you haven't been onstage in more than a decade, a lot of things go through your mind. For D, it boils down to a question: Is this really happening? Backstage in Stockholm, before he steps into the light, the rumble of his fans tells him the answer is yes. Fittingly, this venue is an old Pentecostal church. Packed into pews, where red leather-bound hymnals are stacked neatly for Sunday worship, the audience of 2,000 is excited to the point of near levitation. No one was sure D would show tonight, and in fact he almost didn't. He missed two flights before his managers finally delivered him to Newark airport. "He Got on the Plane. Praise Jesus," Tina Farris, his assistant tour manager, would blog later. "The knot in my stomach is slowly unraveling."

When he finally takes the stage ("In a minute!" he teases the audience from the wings. "In a minute!"), he sports a black leather trench coat that hits his black pants mid-thigh and a big-brimmed black hat. He calls this look Chocolate Rock. His hair is arranged in two-strand twists, and silver crosses hang on chains that bump against his chest. Also around his neck is the strap of his black custom Minarik Diablo guitar, named for its devilish horns.

He steps into the spotlight, the guitar slung low, his face aglow. If you could somehow access the voltage in the air, you could turn on all the lights in Scandinavia. First, the strains of an old song, "Playa Playa," cut through the din. Then a Roberta Flack cover—"Feel Like Makin' Love"—and then, seamlessly, a bluesy new tune, "Ain't That Easy," whose lyrics acknowledge, I've been away so long. The crowd catches the double meaning and roars as D peels off his jacket, revealing a black undershirt and sculpted arms. He glides through a mix of the old ("Chicken Grease," "Sh*t, Damn, Motherf*cker," a cover of Parliament's "I've Been Watching You") and the new (the infectious "Sugah Daddy," and "The Charade," a battle cry that D says "is telling the powers that be, 'This is why we are justified in our stance' "). Is he rusty? A little. But his presence grows with each song.

At one point, he grabs the hem of his wife-beater with both hands and tugs it up—one, two!—in time with the song. The brief reveal of his midsection is a flashback to the trying days of 2000, but it's 2012 now, and the shirt stays on. When the band rips into its encore, "Brown Sugar," it feels like D has rounded third base and is about to slide to safety. "Good God!" D yelps, kicking the mike stand away, then catching it with his foot before it flies into the audience. "Give my testimony!" he shouts, blowing kisses from the stage.

The show is a triumph, and soon Twitter and Facebook are on fire. He's really back—no longer a specter. D's band—he can't decide on the name, but he's considering the Spades—radiates happiness and exhaustion as they load onto the tour buses, nicknamed the Amistad I and II after the slave ship. The next night he fills a 1,600-capacity club in Copenhagen, and afterward the buses leave on D-time—a full twelve hours behind schedule. By the time they arrive at the hotel in Paris on Sunday, January 29, sound check for that night's show is just three hours away. Still, despite having traveled 760 miles across Denmark, Germany, Belgium, and France, D and his trainer head directly to the tiny hotel gym. Coincidentally I'm there, too. I ask if D wants privacy. He does. As I head for the door, he steps wordlessly onto the treadmill, a weary man with many miles still to go.

But that night, at the tour's first 5,000-seat arena, Le Zénith, D'Angelo is revived. Toward the end of the show, after a medley featuring snippets of the melodious, bumping "Jonz in My Bonz" and the gospel-fueled "Higher," he hits a single percussive note on the piano that reverberates and fades away. Then he hits it again, and all of us in this cavernous hall begin to scream. It's the beginning of "Untitled," which he didn't perform in Stockholm or Copenhagen—which he hasn't played in public, not once, in a dozen years. After a few bars, D stops abruptly and stands up. The crowd cheers as he leans on one end of the piano, his chin in his hands, catching his breath. What happens next is the most soulful, palpable connection I've ever felt between an artist and an audience. As D sits back down and starts to play again, the audience spontaneously begins to sing. How does it feel?—four words coming from thousands of throats, urging him on. He responds gratefully, "Sing it again, sing it again." And they do, loudly, prettily, right on tempo: How does it feel? "Oh, baby, long time," he sings, "that this has been on my mind." People are crying, swaying, raising up their hands. I'm one of them. It's impossible not to be overcome as this sexy anthem, this source of so much pain, is transformed before us into a crucible of love. "Thank you so much," he says, his fingers fluttering on the keys as he brings it home. Then he stands up, kisses both his hands, and opens his arms to the crowd. The blue lights go dark.

I'm reminded of something Angie Stone says about D. "D'Angelo is always going to be D'Angelo," she tells me. "You can't take too much away from the gift itself. I'm sure there's still some fear there, because it's been a long time out of the spotlight. And when all the spotlight he'd got lately has been negative, there's a rebirth of some kind that needs to take place." God willing, we've all just witnessed it.

···
Upon D'Angelo's return to New York City in mid-February, his friends and colleagues began to worry a little. D-time speeds up for no man. Russell Elevado, D's longtime engineer, told MTV Hive that D wanted to finish his album "as soon as possible, but once he gets into the studio he gets into his own zone.... Altogether there's over fifty songs that he's cut since we started. I think he wants to put twelve songs on the album."

Questlove tells me the same thing. "To get five songs out of him, we had to throw away at least twelve that I would give my left arm for," he says. "I don't mind that, because I literally feel he is the last pure African-American artist left." Still, as weeks pass, Questlove admits, "My first fear was him not doing this at all. Now my new fear is, okay, the tour is over. Now what?"

For nearly a month, D mostly holes up in his apartment on the Upper West Side. Jenkins comes by regularly to sweat D in his private gym. He fasts for a few days, and the weight is coming off, but it seems D is headed back into his pre-tour cave. Only music persuades him to go out. Late in February, after he and D go to see Björk together, Questlove addresses a tweet to the Icelandic artist, saying, "amazing job last night. even d'angelo was mind blown & he leaves the house for NOBODY."

So when will he release his new album? D can't say for sure. His managers and his label are pushing hard for September, before the Grammy deadline. But nobody's banking on it. Sounding like a man who's all too familiar with D-time, Tom Corson, RCA's president and COO, says simply, "This year would be nice." In mid-April, D and his band are back in the studio, this time in Los Angeles, supposedly adding the final touches. But everything hinges on D letting the music go.

"I'm driven by the masters that came before me that I admire—the Yodas," D tells me, using the term he and Questlove have coined for their heroes. He tells me of a music teacher who told him that when classical composers like Beethoven made music, "people didn't understand it, and it got bad reviews," D says, recalling how his teacher said Beethoven responded: "He's like, 'I don't make music for you. I make music for the ages.' "

That's all well and good, Chris Rock says—as long as D actually releases his music. "You've got to earn it, man," he tells me, adding that the only reason fans aren't disappointed by Jeff Buckley, the celebrated singer-songwriter who recorded just one album, is that he drowned. "Body of work, babe. It's all body of work at the end of the day. I mean, the only way D's going to be a great artist with the output he has now is if he dies."

I can't help but think about J Dilla, whose death was the pivot, D says, on which his comeback began to turn. Dilla was the ultimate underground artist—prolific beyond compare, a legend in the hip-hop world. When he died, he'd made so much music with so many people—from De La Soul to Busta Rhymes to A Tribe Called Quest—that his legacy was secure. For all of D'Angelo's otherworldly talent, for all the passions he distills and reflects when he's in front of an audience, for all his perceived connections to Beethoven and Michelangelo and Marvin, and yes, to Jesus himself, the same cannot yet be said for him. Can Dilla, the overachiever, spur the underachiever to reach his true potential?

Back in the Times Square recording studio, I tell D I want to read to him something from a fan who posted recently on Prince.org, a site frequented by devotees of all things funky. The fan is worried by reports that D is trimming down, he writes, because of the havoc the "Untitled" video wrought: "While it's cool that dude is getting in better shape, I hope he's not trying to get back to the way other people picture him or want him to be. Dude just needs to get his head straight."

I look up from the page. "Is your head straight?" I ask.

"Straight," D'Angelo says, his eyes locked on mine. "Yes, my head is straight." Just because you're black, he adds, doesn't mean you have to look or sound a certain way, "or, you know, act ignorant or what have you, whatever the fucking gatekeepers have us doing because they think that that's the formula to make money. And a lot of motherfuckers, they just fall right into line." D has a term for artists like this: "minstrelsy." If he's learned nothing, he's learned this: He's no minstrel.

I ask him about Internet reports that the new album is called James River, after the Virginia waterway whose swampy banks provided hidden refuge for escaped slaves. No, that's no longer the title, D says, but he doesn't say what is. I let slip that I've heard about another new song he's written called "Back." I just want to go back, baby / Back to the way it was, it goes. And then: I know you're wondering where I've been / Wondering 'bout the shape I'm in / I hope it ain't my abdomen.

I tell him I'm impressed that he's addressing his body directly, using wry lyrics to confront and reclaim this difficult chapter of his life. He murmurs a thank you, but he looks a little unsettled. "Wow," he says, when I ask if the song will appear on the album. "I don't know if that's going to make it."

Later, when I reach Janis Gaye, Marvin's second wife—and a longtime D'Angelo fan—I tell her about the dreams D had of Marvin, and she isn't surprised. Her own children dreamed of Marvin on the night he was killed, and D is just a few years older. "Marvin is a protector, and I'm sure there was something in Marvin's spirit that saw something in D'Angelo's spirit," Janis says. I tell her about Rock's stern admonition that D needs to step it up, and she agrees. She even has a suggestion: "He should go to Marvin's Room, the studio that Marvin built," she says of the famed studio on Sunset Boulevard where Gaye recorded many of his hits. "Go in and take his fifty songs. Not to sound kooky or out there, but Marvin will help him to choose."

Amy Wallace is a GQ correspondent.

Sept. 11 Memorial Museum’s Fraught Task

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 02:19:27 +0000

SOURCE
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/arts/d...wanted=all

Sept. 11 Memorial Museum’s Fraught Task

New York City’s fire chief protested that such a display would “honor” the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. A New York Post editorial called the idea “appalling.” Groups representing rescuers, survivors and victims’ families asked how anyone could even think of showing the faces of the men who killed their relatives, colleagues and friends.

The anger took some museum officials by surprise.

“You don’t create a museum about the Holocaust and not say that it was the Nazis who did it,” said Joseph Daniels, chief executive of the memorial and museum foundation.

Such are the exquisite sensitivities that surround every detail in the creation of the National September 11 Memorial Museum , which is being built on land that many revere as hallowed ground. During eight years of planning, every step has been muddied with contention. There have been bitter fights over the museum’s financing, which have delayed its opening until at least next year, as well as continuing arguments over its location, seven stories below ground; which relics should be exhibited; and where unidentified human remains should rest.

Even the souvenir key chains to be sold in the gift shop have become a focus of rancor.

But nothing has been more fraught than figuring out how to tell the story.

The sunken granite pools that opened last Sept. 11 and that occupy the footprints of the fallen towers were designed as places to mourn and remember the dead. Yet nowhere on the plaza is there even a mention of the terrorist attacks that caused the destruction. The job of documenting and interpreting the history has been left to the museum, and it is an undertaking pockmarked with contradictions.

Alice Greenwald, the director of the new museum, and her team must simultaneously honor the dead and the survivors; preserve an archaeological site and its artifacts; and try to offer a comprehensible explanation of a once inconceivable occurrence. They must speak to vastly different audiences that include witnesses at the scene and around the globe, as well as children born long after the wreckage had been cleared. And many of those listening have long-simmering, deeply felt opinions about how the museum should take shape.

“Whose truth is going to be in that museum?” asked Sally Regenhard , whose son, Christian, a firefighter, died in the north tower.

Even the name — “Memorial Museum” — is something of a contradiction in terms. In the context of a memorial, for example, the 17-foot, two-ton crossbeam where Mass was held every day during the cleanup is a sacred relic, an icon that vibrates with emotional and ideological resonance. In a museum, this same hunk of iron is simply evidence. So it is with the photographs of the 19 hijackers: They are simultaneously documentation and abominations.

“Museums are about understanding, about making meaning of the past,” said James Gardner, who oversees the nation’s legislative archives, presidential libraries and museums. “A memorial fulfills a different need; it’s about remembering and evoking feelings in the viewer, and that function is antithetical to what museums do.”

Reconciling the clashing obligations to recount the history with pinpoint accuracy, to memorialize heroism and to promote healing inevitably required compromise.

No one anticipated how much.

Sifting Through Pain

As the former associate director and a 19-year veteran of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Ms. Greenwald knows a lot about ghastly things. Yet even that museum did not have to wrestle with the challenge of being built where the horrors had occurred and while the families of victims were still grieving.

Since being appointed director of the September 11 Museum in 2006, Ms. Greenwald has inherited much of the distrust some of the families feel toward officials involved in developing the site, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who at one point said that if he were a mourner, he would “suck it up and get going.”

In particular, many families are upset about a plan to place approximately 14,000 unidentified or unclaimed remains of those who died — typically bone fragments or dried bits of tissue — in the museum below ground. The repository will be controlled by the city’s medical examiner and sealed off from everyone but family members. Visitors will just see an outer wall inscribed with a quotation from Virgil: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”

Seventeen family members have filed suit against the city as part of an effort to reopen the decision. They view it as degrading to set the remains in a museum below ground. Rosaleen Tallon , whose brother, Sean, a firefighter, died in the north tower, said the insensitivity was mirrored in the museum’s decision to stock its gift shop with $40 souvenir key chains engraved with the Virgil phrase.

“They’re marketing the headstones of our loved ones on key chains,” she said. “How disgusting is that?”

But to Ms. Greenwald, the decision to keep the remains underground represented an equally earnest effort to fulfill a longstanding promise to other families who had sought, above all, to ensure that the remains stayed at bedrock.

“It’s been a very difficult, fascinating and challenging process” to juggle competing visions of what the museum should be, she said.

Throughout, Ms. Greenwald reached out to the varied constituencies by inviting some of the most influential and outspoken players to assist the museum’s board. It was led by Mayor Bloomberg and included the first deputy mayor, Patricia E. Harris. Among the 11 family members on the roster was Debra Burlingame , who lost her brother, an American Airlines pilot, in the attack on the Pentagon. She had successfully led a campaign against a proposed international freedom center at ground zero that would have told the story of Sept. 11 in the context of a worldwide struggle for liberty. Also on the committee was Howard W. Lutnick , the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, the company that lost 658 employees, including Mr. Lutnick’s brother, in the attack.

Ms. Greenwald drew in an even wider circle by holding a series of discussions about topics like exhibiting disturbing material and handling human remains. It was an exhausting process, with dozens of conversations that solicited the opinions of at least 25 survivors and family members of victims; 55 nearby residents and business, community and government representatives; 7 preservationists; 12 uniformed rescue and recovery workers; 9 interfaith and multicultural representatives; 78 museum and educational specialists; 8 social service and counseling professionals; and 60 foundation staff members.

As the conversations continued, a subtle map of divisions surfaced that ran along class, geographic and political lines: New Yorkers found outsiders meddlesome; families of uniformed rescue workers were resentful of Wall Streeters’ moneyed influence; critics disdained those willing to compromise.

Ms. Regenhard, for example, called some of the participants “fat cats, V.I.P.’s and stuffed suits,” and said they represented “pure and simple tokenism” rather than genuine family input.

The New York City fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano, on the other hand, judged the conversations a success. “That doesn’t mean that everybody got what they wanted, but they did get heard,” he said.

Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, Ms. Greenwald, a small woman with red hair, has been widely praised for her curatorial judgment as well as for her diplomatic skills.

“She has handled this thing with sensitivity,” said Charles Wolf, whose wife, Katherine, was killed in the attack and who attended the discussions. “She is the one who gave us all confidence in the whole process.”

Helping Ms. Greenwald was a kitchen cabinet of nine advisers, including Kate D. Levin, the city’s cultural commissioner; Jane Rosenthal, a founder of the Tribeca Film Festival ; and a handful of scholars like James E. Young , Edward T. Linenthal, and the Civil War historian David Blight . They met two or three times a year and served as both sounding board and touchstone.

Mr. Blight, who at one point considered writing a book about the museum’s creation, said the overriding question for him was what message visitors would take away: “Are they going to leave with any sense of why this happened and its consequences? Or will they be moved solely by the sheer power of the catastrophe? If it’s only the latter, then the museum is a failure.”

Difficult Decisions

Everyone agrees that it is the museum’s job is to tell the truth. The question, though, is how much truth.

The museum has more than 4,000 artifacts , from a wedding band to a 15-ton composite of several tower floors that collapsed into a stack, like pancakes, and then fused together. There are photographs of men and women jumping out of windows, burned and mutilated bodies, scattered and blood-soaked limbs, images so awful they tested the bounds of taste and appropriateness.

There are thousands of harrowing first-person recollections, and photographs and videos from survivors and witnesses, many of them raw. Many victims’ final phone calls were preserved. Flight 93’s cockpit recorder captured the hijackers’ last words and a flight attendant’s begging for her life.

Which of it should be on display?

“We have to transmit the truth without being absolutely crushed by it,” Mr. Daniels, the chief executive, said. “We don’t want to retraumatize people.”

Within months of settling into her office at 1 Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan, Ms. Greenwald invited Grady P. Bray, a disaster psychologist who consulted with the Fire Department after Sept. 11, to speak with the staff and advisers. He explained that hearing a recording could be more disturbing than seeing an image because it requires more imagination.

“The mind is left to create the illusion of what was taking place,” Mr. Bray said. “We personalize things that we don’t see so well.”

With those concerns in mind, curators reviewed hundreds of recordings . The family of Betty Ong , the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the north tower, for example, gave the museum a tape of her calmly informing ground control of the terror transpiring around her.

“It’s the most remarkable demonstration of professionalism under duress that I think anyone will ever hear, and they wanted us to include it because they felt it said so much about who she was,” Ms. Greenwald said.

The family of Mary Fetchet , a member of the foundation’s advisory board, donated the recording of her 24-year-old son Brad’s last phone call from the south tower, telling her not to worry.

A third recording was of a 911 operator tenderly trying to comfort a woman during her terrifying final moments.

As she listened, Ms. Greenwald kept thinking of a comment made by the museum consultant Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett . “I’ll never forget it because it just ripped me apart when she said it, that we need to look at this kind of material as another form of human remains,” Ms. Greenwald said. “We need to use it judiciously.”

In the end, they decided to make Brad Fetchet’s and Betty Ong’s voices available, and to archive the other. “This was not meant to be a public moment,” Ms. Greenwald said of the 911 call. “We have to be careful not to be exploitative, to be sensitive to what’s appropriate in the setting of a public museum.”

Over time the team also pulled back further from exhibiting graphic carnage. Curators followed a guideline used by the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum , which commemorates the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh that killed 168 people. “We don’t show body parts, but we show blood,” Kari F. Watkins, that museum’s executive director, said in an interview.

Ms. Greenwald explained that there were other ways to convey horror, as when it is reflected in the faces of witnesses. “The historical reality is that there were body parts littering Lower Manhattan,” she said. “We do not feel the need to display that.”

Particularly upsetting items drew additional review by the program committee, as well as by advisers and staff. Opinions about whether to include images of trapped victims leaping from the flaming towers were mixed. Mr. Cassano, the fire chief, was opposed.

“I didn’t think it was respectful to show people jumping out of windows,” he said, adding that the Fire Department’s memorial book excluded such pictures. “I thought it was too graphic.”

After repeated discussions, Ms. Greenwald and Mr. Daniels decided to use photographs, but not video, and only if the person jumping could not be identified.

Still, the material can be devastating.

“Even all of us who work here, when I see bits of the exhibition,” Mr. Daniels said, pausing for a breath, “it’s very powerful.”

When Mr. Bray talked to staff members, he discovered that some were already showing symptoms of severe stress from listening to audiotapes and oral histories and reviewing photographs hour after hour, day after day.

“There was literally this ‘Aha’ moment,” Mr. Bray recalled. “Workers were oblivious to the fact that new problems at home and in their relationships were influenced significantly by the work they were doing.”

The lesson that Ms. Greenwald took away was to offer visitors choices rather than sending them on “a forced march.”

So the architectural design includes “early exits” along the museum route, enabling distressed visitors to duck out without having to pass through the entire exhibition. Disturbing material will be sectioned off with partitions or put in alcoves. Those who want more information can stop at one of several kiosks to gain access to the museum’s archives.

The emotional journey that each visitor will travel has been painstakingly orchestrated by Ms. Greenwald’s team, from the moment someone enters the museum’s glass pavilion on the plaza and descends to the schist bedrock seven stories down. Gradually, the story is rolled out. It begins on Sept. 11, 2001, with an 8 foot by 10-foot-7-inch photograph, taken at 8:30 a.m., of New York’s sublime skyline, with the World Trade Center towers stretching to the Crayola-blue heavens.

“It’s the world before,” Ms. Greenwald said. “Innocence.”

About 4,000 of the museum’s 110,000 square feet of public space are devoted to honoring the victims, with artifacts and photos of each of the 2,977 people who died on Sept. 11 and the 6 who died in 1993, when terrorists planted a bomb in the Trade Center garage.

The tumultuous events of Sept. 11 in the air and on the ground in New York ; Washington; and Shanksville, Pa., unfold through oral histories, timelines and photographs.

“We decided to start with what people saw that day,” Ms. Greenwald said, explaining that familiar images — like those flashed hundreds of times on television and in print — would be easier to process.

To give visitors time to recover, Ms. Greenwald said the designers built in some breathing room. A more cerebral subject — the history of Al Qaeda — follows the intensely emotional recounting of the day.

There are also exhibits about the construction of the towers, the wrenching posters of the missing, the outpouring of tribute art.

The account of the recovery and response starts with Sept. 12, 2001, and includes the start of the war in Afghanistan. It ends on May 30, 2002, when the final object was cleared from ground zero, Ms. Greenwald said. Other events and issues, like the Patriot Act and the 9/11 Commission , are treated thematically, as a series of questions dealing with, say, the tension between civil liberties and national security, or investigations into what happened. The job of selecting which moments to highlight, potentially a political brawl, has been given to a computer that will project an ever-changing variety of news articles on a wall, as chosen by a statistical algorithm.

At the end, visitors will confront what is essentially an archaeological excavation, a section of the soaring 60-foot-high slurry wall that was built to hold back the Hudson River when the World Trade Center site was designed. “You become a witness yourself,” Ms. Greenwald said.

Nearby, the monumental artifacts have already been installed: bent beams from the spot where the nose of a 767 jet, Flight 11, first rammed the north tower at 8:46 a.m. and reconfigured the reigning global order; the smashed fire truck of Ladder Company 3; the crossbeam where recovery workers gathered for daily Mass; and the last item to be removed from ground zero, the 60-ton, 36-foot steel column from the south tower that had served as a makeshift shrine.

Choices remain. Absent from the space so far are any “composites,” the chunks of compressed floors. Many officials and family members say they are the objects that perhaps best capture the destructive force unleashed that day.

“This is something that people 50 years from now should see,” Mr. Cassano, the fire chief, said.

Some families are concerned, though, that despite assurances and tests, composites could contain body matter.

“Museum officials thought this was a very interesting exhibit,” said Diane Horning, who lost her 26-year-old son, Matthew. “To us, it was human remains.”

The Faces of Terror

Like a line in a sacred text, a single sentence in the museum’s guidelines generated volumes of conflicting commentary: Exhibits should explore “a factual presentation of what is known of the terrorists, including their methods and means of preparation.”

That sentence was one of the recommendations offered by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation before it handed off responsibility for the memorial and museum to the foundation in 2006. The two pages of guidelines — composed by the corporation’s 27-member museum advisory committee, after consulting with seven advisers and reviewing 1,070 public comments — were adopted by what is now known as the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation as a formal planning document.

The Talmudic-like analysis began immediately. How, for instance, should the museum handle the flood of information about the terrorists’ private lives and plotting that the government’s mammoth investigation was uncovering?

The museum was in a unique position to draw perhaps the most detailed and nuanced portrait of the men, but that was precisely the problem. Officials were wary of being seen as trying to do too much to humanize murderers.

By 2008, Jan Ramirez, the museum’s chief curator, said, “We retreated from that kind of in-depth presentation.”

Only evidence that proved the hijackers’ guilt would be displayed. “There is not a shred of psychoanalysis about what their issues might have been,” Ms. Ramirez explained. “You would never want to create a type of interest in their lives that would potentially promote some other zealot.”

Explaining the terrorists’ motivations aroused similar concerns. To some families of victims, asking what caused Sept. 11 “is literally a profane question,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and a participant in the conversation series. “It is like blaming the victim.”

Other families, Ms. Greenwald said, “literally took me by the lapel and said, ‘Don’t whitewash this, you’ve got to tell the story.’ ”

Yet making sense of the attacks is hard to do without delving into the grievances of the attackers. In the end, Mr. Daniels said, they reasoned: “Al Qaeda was responsible. Therefore we looked at the rise of Al Qaeda , and that was in the ’80s.”

Thus the museum will begin the tale in 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where radical Islamic fighters, who gained power with the support of the United States, later gave Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda safe haven.

“Ultimately this is not a museum that is created or designed by committee,” Mr. Daniels said. “We’ll listen to everybody, but in the end we have to make the decision.”

After a pause, he added, “There’s almost a comfort level that we’re going to get criticized, no matter what.”

The tug of war between memorializing and documenting is encapsulated in the angry debates over the question of displaying the hijackers’ photographs.

To Mr. Daniels the museum’s primary obligation is to preserve “the history of what happened,” and so he took it for granted that the photos would be there.

But portraying perpetrators and enemies is rarely simple, as Mr. Blight pointed out. Most of the narratives displayed at Civil War battlefields started to mention slavery as a cause of the conflict only about 10 to 15 years ago.

Mr. Daniels learned that lesson on Sept. 10, 2009, when, during a presentation, he mentioned the photos and the possibility that some of the hijackers’ words would be posted in the museum. When he opened The New York Post the next day, he discovered that its editorial board had denounced the idea.

Mr. Cassano said he too was opposed. “The story has to be told,” he said, but added that he did not think the hijackers “should be given the honor of having their pictures in the museum that showed everybody else who was killed.”

The issue was then put on the consultative conveyor belt. Ms. Greenwald devoted a planning conversation to it. She, Mr. Daniels and a handful of staff members visited the Oklahoma City Memorial Museum, which had confronted similar concerns. Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma initially opposed showing a picture of Mr. McVeigh, who was convicted in 1997 and executed in 2001, the director, Ms. Watkins, said. But to her it was important to show “how unbelievably normal Timothy McVeigh looked, like the guy living next door.” In the end, his picture was displayed.

Historians had additional reasons for wanting to use the hijackers’ photographs. “There are all these conspiracy theories, that it was Jews who did this or the C.I.A.,” said Bernard Haykel , a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, but “we know exactly who they were.”

The conspiracy fantasies persist. “I’m still receiving crank phone calls suggesting our son is still alive,” said David Beamer, whose son, Todd , was one of a handful of men who tried to overpower the hijackers on Flight 93 before it crashed in Shanksville. “I do believe that it’s important and appropriate that names, faces and voices are part of the reality of that day.”

When the program committee voted on whether to play the cockpit recording of the hijackers’ voices, Mr. Daniels reported, everyone there said yes.

The decision on the photographs was more labored. They decided to shrink the images, from 6 by 4 inches to 2 by 1 ½ inches, the faces a little bigger than a thumbnail. And they will have evidence stickers from the F.B.I. attached.

During a visit to Washington, Ms. Ramirez discovered that the F.B.I. had been struggling with similar questions about its own in-house Sept. 11 exhibition. One option organizers considered was to display the hijackers’ photographs on a ledge so that visitors could avoid a head-on confrontation. Though the agency ended up posting them on the wall, museum officials borrowed the idea to place the photos on a slanted board, in a narrow partitioned alcove. People “would have to turn physically and look down to see them,” Ms. Greenwald said.

In that space will be documentation of their activities, including quotations from their final statements, acknowledging their participation. “We’re allowing them to indict themselves as mass murderers, not giving them a platform for propaganda,” she said.

Ms. Greenwald said her staff calculated that the history of Al Qaeda and the hijackers made up only a tiny fraction of the exhibition space.

Ms. Burlingame captured the whirl of sentiments. Despite doubts, she ultimately agreed that the hijackers’ photographs should be shown because “we need to tell the story of 9/11 truthfully and fully.” But, she added, “One of my own brothers called me to say, ‘I don’t want to see their faces.’ ”

Evolving History

Many of the decisions Ms. Greenwald and her colleagues are making today may be unmade in the future. Sensibilities are sure to be different 10 or 20 years from now. Future curators will choose differently as time passes, anguish eases, and America’s position in the world shifts.

As Ms. Greenwald said, “This is a museum without an ending.”

For the present, though, the National September 11 Memorial Museum is emphasizing a story of hope over despair, and the resiliency and selflessness of the rescue effort, not its mishaps.

That is by design. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s original guidelines specifically directed the museum to chronicle the “outpouring of heroism, sacrifice and human ingenuity during, and in the aftermath of, the attacks.”

How, then, to handle less-than-heroic moments ?

For example, the communications breakdowns between rescuers that contributed to the day’s cascading catastrophes and a death toll that included 343 firefighters . Or the looting that followed, which outraged downtown residents.

The Sept. 11 museum will include the communications failures, Ms. Ramirez said, but they will not dominate the story of how police and firefighters responded. The same goes for the thefts. Oral histories complaining about them are part of the museum archives, Ms. Ramirez said, but not in the permanent exhibition. The more they listened, she said, the more they realized that those incidents were “irrelevant to the story we’re telling.”

A similar approach guided the museum’s treatment of angry reactions the attacks generated. Ms. Ramirez said it was not appropriate for a museum to support anger or militarism as a response. So photos of protesters advocating violence, for example, will probably be included only in video projections that capture a range of reactions, enabling viewers to see that this “sentiment then yields to another sentiment and another sentiment,” she said.

The staff acknowledges that at points it has ceded authority and taken a step back from creating the definitive master narrative, functioning instead as an aggregator.

“It’s not always an authoritative museum,” Ms. Greenwald said. “It’s about collective memory.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 5, 2012

An article on Sunday about sensitivities and disputes surrounding the creation of the National September 11 Memorial Museum in Manhattan misstated the name of a disaster psychologist who spoke with museum staff members and advisers. He is Grady P. Bray, not Brady P. Gray.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 02:06:59 +0000

"Like a line in a sacred text, a single sentence in the museum’s guidelines generated volumes of conflicting commentary"

SOURCE
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...ce/258829/

'A Perfect and Beautiful Machine': What Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence
By Daniel C. Dennett

Jun 22 2012, 8:10 AM ET 153

Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, in their different ways, both homed in on the same idea: the existence of competence without comprehension.

@FakeTV

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

Charles Darwin managed to compress his entire theory into a single summary paragraph that a layperson can readily follow.

Francis Crick and James Watson closed their epoch-making paper on the structure of DNA with a single deliciously diffident sentence. ("It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.")

And Alan Turing created a new world of science and technology, setting the stage for solving one of the most baffling puzzles remaining to science, the mind-body problem, with an even shorter declarative sentence in the middle of his 1936 paper on computable numbers:

It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.

Turing didn't just intuit that this remarkable feat was possible; he showed exactly how to make such a machine. With that demonstration the computer age was born. It is important to remember that there were entities called computers before Turing came up with his idea, but they were people, clerical workers with enough mathematical skill, patience, and pride in their work to generate reliable results of hours and hours of computation, day in and day out. Many of them were women.

Early "computers" at work. (NASA)

Thousands of them were employed in engineering and commerce, and in the armed forces and elsewhere, calculating tables for use in navigation, gunnery and other such technical endeavors. A good way of understanding Turing's revolutionary idea about computation is to put it in juxtaposition with Darwin's about evolution. The pre-darwinian world was held together not by science but by tradition: All things in the universe, from the most exalted ("man") to the most humble (the ant, the pebble, the raindrop) were creations of a still more exalted thing, God, an omnipotent and omniscient intelligent creator -- who bore a striking resemblance to the second-most exalted thing. Call this the trickle-down theory of creation. Darwin replaced it with the bubble-up theory of creation. One of Darwin's nineteenth-century critics, Robert Beverly MacKenzie, put it vividly:

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

It was, indeed, a strange inversion of reasoning. To this day many people cannot get their heads around the unsettling idea that a purposeless, mindless process can crank away through the eons, generating ever more subtle, efficient, and complex organisms without having the slightest whiff of understanding of what it is doing.

In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is.

Turing's idea was a similar -- in fact remarkably similar -- strange inversion of reasoning. The Pre-Turing world was one in which computers were people, who had to understand mathematics in order to do their jobs. Turing realized that this was just not necessary: you could take the tasks they performed and squeeze out the last tiny smidgens of understanding, leaving nothing but brute, mechanical actions. In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is.

What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. This inverted the deeply plausible assumption that comprehension is in fact the source of all advanced competence. Why, after all, do we insist on sending our children to school, and why do we frown on the old-fashioned methods of rote learning? We expect our children's growing competence to flow from their growing comprehension. The motto of modern education might be: "Comprehend in order to be competent." For us members of H. sapiens, this is almost always the right way to look at, and strive for, competence. I suspect that this much-loved principle of education is one of the primary motivators of skepticism about both evolution and its cousin in Turing's world, artificial intelligence. The very idea that mindless mechanicity can generate human-level -- or divine level! -- competence strikes many as philistine, repugnant, an insult to our minds, and the mind of God.

Consider how Turing went about his proof. He took human computers as his model. There they sat at their desks, doing one simple and highly reliable step after another, checking their work, writing down the intermediate results instead of relying on their memories, consulting their recipes as often as they needed, turning what at first might appear a daunting task into a routine they could almost do in their sleep. Turing systematically broke down the simple steps into even simpler steps, removing all vestiges of discernment or comprehension. Did a human computer have difficulty telling the number 99999999999 from the number 9999999999? Then break down the perceptual problem of recognizing the number into simpler problems, distributing easier, stupider acts of discrimination over multiple steps. He thus prepared an inventory of basic building blocks from which to construct the universal algorithm that could execute any other algorithm. He showed how that algorithm would enable a (human) computer to compute any function, and noted that:

The behavior of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing and his "state of mind" at that moment. We may suppose that there is a bound B to the number of symbols or squares which the computer can observe at one moment. If he wishes to observe more, he must use successive observations. ... The operation actually performed is determined ... by the state of mind of the computer and the observed symbols. In particular, they determine the state of mind of the computer after the operation is carried out.

He then noted, calmly:

We may now construct a machine to do the work of this computer.

Right there we see the reduction of all possible computation to a mindless process. We can start with the simple building blocks Turing had isolated, and construct layer upon layer of more sophisticated computation, restoring, gradually, the intelligence Turing had so deftly laundered out of the practices of human computers.

But what about the genius of Turing, and of later, lesser programmers, whose own intelligent comprehension was manifestly the source of the designs that can knit Turing's mindless building blocks into useful competences? Doesn't this dependence just re-introduce the trickle-down perspective on intelligence, with Turing in the God role? No less a thinker than Roger Penrose has expressed skepticism about the possibility that artificial intelligence could be the fruit of nothing but mindless algorithmic processes.

I am a strong believer in the power of natural selection. But I do not see how natural selection, in itself, can evolve algorithms which could have the kind of conscious judgements of the validity of other algorithms that we seem to have.

He goes on to admit:

To my way of thinking there is still something mysterious about evolution, with its apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose. Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection.

Indeed, a single cascade of natural selection events, occurring over even billions of years, would seem unlikely to be able to create a string of zeroes and ones that, once read by a digital computer, would be an "algorithm" for "conscious judgments." But as Turing fully realized, there was nothing to prevent the process of evolution from copying itself on many scales, of mounting discernment and judgment. The recursive step that got the ball rolling -- designing a computer that could mimic any other computer -- could itself be reiterated, permitting specific computers to enhance their own powers by redesigning themselves, leaving their original designer far behind. Already in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," his classic paper in Mind, 1950, he recognized that there was no contradiction in the concept of a (non-human) computer that could learn.

The idea of a learning machine may appear paradoxical to some readers. How can the rules of operation of the machine change? They should describe completely how the machine will react whatever its history might be, whatever changes it might undergo. The rules are thus quite time-invariant. This is quite true. The explanation of the paradox is that the rules which get changed in the learning process are of a rather less pretentious kind, claiming only an ephemeral validity. The reader may draw a parallel with the Constitution of the United States.

He saw clearly that all the versatility and self-modifiability of human thought -- learning and re-evaluation and, language and problem-solving, for instance -- could in principle be constructed out of these building blocks. Call this the bubble-up theory of mind, and contrast it with the various trickle-down theories of mind, by thinkers from René Descartes to John Searle (and including, notoriously, Kurt Gödel, whose proof was the inspiration for Turing's work) that start with human consciousness at its most reflective, and then are unable to unite such magical powers with the mere mechanisms of human bodies and brains.

Turing, like Darwin, broke down the mystery of intelligence (or Intelligent Design) into what we might call atomic steps of dumb happenstance, which, when accumulated by the millions, added up to a sort of pseudo-intelligence.

Turing, like Darwin, broke down the mystery of intelligence (or Intelligent Design) into what we might call atomic steps of dumb happenstance, which, when accumulated by the millions, added up to a sort of pseudo-intelligence. The Central Processing Unit of a computer doesn't really know what arithmetic is, or understand what addition is, but it "understands" the "command" to add two numbers and put their sum in a register -- in the minimal sense that it reliably adds when called upon to add and puts the sum in the right place. Let's say it sorta understands addition. A few levels higher, the operating system doesn't really understand that it is checking for errors of transmission and fixing them but it sorta understands this, and reliably does this work when called upon. A few further levels higher, when the building blocks are stacked up by the billions and trillions, the chess-playing program doesn't really understand that its queen is in jeopardy, but it sorta understands this, and IBM's Watson on Jeopardy sorta understands the questions it answers.
Why indulge in this "sorta" talk? Because when we analyze -- or synthesize -- this stack of ever more competent levels, we need to keep track of two facts about each level: what it is and what it does. What it is can be described in terms of the structural organization of the parts from which it is made -- so long as we can assume that the parts function as they are supposed to function. What it does is some (cognitive) function that it (sorta) performs -- well enough so that at the next level up, we can make the assumption that we have in our inventory a smarter building block that performs just that function -- sorta, good enough to use.

This is the key to breaking the back of the mind-bogglingly complex question of how a mind could ever be composed of material mechanisms. What we might call the sorta operator is, in cognitive science, the parallel of Darwin's gradualism in evolutionary processes. Before there were bacteria there were sorta bacteria, and before there were mammals there were sorta mammals and before there were dogs there were sorta dogs, and so forth. We need Darwin's gradualism to explain the huge difference between an ape and an apple, and we need Turing's gradualism to explain the huge difference between a humanoid robot and hand calculator.

The ape and the apple are made of the same basic ingredients, differently structured and exploited in a many-level cascade of different functional competences. There is no principled dividing line between a sorta ape and an ape. The humanoid robot and the hand calculator are both made of the same basic, unthinking, unfeeling Turing-bricks, but as we compose them into larger, more competent structures, which then become the elements of still more competent structures at higher levels, we eventually arrive at parts so (sorta) intelligent that they can be assembled into competences that deserve to be called comprehending. We use the intentional stance to keep track of the beliefs and desires (or "beliefs" and "desires" or sorta beliefs and sorta desires) of the (sorta-)rational agents at every level from the simplest bacterium through all the discriminating, signaling, comparing, remembering circuits that compose the brains of animals from starfish to astronomers.

There is no principled line above which true comprehension is to be found -- even in our own case. The small child sorta understands her own sentence "Daddy is a doctor," and I sorta understand "E=mc2." Some philosophers resist this anti-essentialism: either you believe that snow is white or you don't; either you are conscious or you aren't; nothing counts as an approximation of any mental phenomenon -- it's all or nothing. And to such thinkers, the powers of minds are insoluble mysteries because they are "perfect," and perfectly unlike anything to be found in mere material mechanisms.

We still haven't arrived at "real" understanding in robots, but we are getting closer. That, at least, is the conviction of those of us inspired by Turing's insight. The trickle-down theorists are sure in their bones that no amount of further building will ever get us to the real thing. They think that a Cartesian res cogitans, a thinking thing, cannot be constructed out of Turing's building blocks. And creationists are similarly sure in their bones that no amount of Darwinian shuffling and copying and selecting could ever arrive at (real) living things. They are wrong, but one can appreciate the discomfort that motivates their conviction.

Turing's strange inversion of reason, like Darwin's, goes against the grain of millennia of earlier thought. If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by "mere machines," there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

Editor's Note: The essay has been adapted from the forthcoming book, Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, edited by S. Barry Cooper and Jan van Leeuwen (Elsevier, 2012) . Some paragraphs are adapted from an earlier essay by the author, "Darwin's 'Strange Inversion of Reasoning' ."

Join the 2012-2013 IDEA Organizing Team!

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:30:01 +0000

http://www.democraticeducation.org/

If you’re ready for a different story to be told about education -- a story about education that is by, for, and with young people, educators, families, and communities -- then we’d love for you to apply to be an IDEA Organizer.

Community organizing is a time-tested model that we believe can be well utilized, along with digital organizing, to generate a powerful catalytic effect in the lives of folks most directly experiencing challenges and wanting change. For the past two years, we’ve been privileged to work with organizers who are teachers, students, parents, digital changemakers, and community leaders.

This year, we’ve designed a new structure for the organizing teams. Seven teams will focus on specific groups in education (such as young people and schools), and three additional teams will focus on digital organizing, planning IDEC 2013, and advancing work in specific regions where IDEA has a presence.

Read more on our website and download the call for organizers

We asked 2011-2012 IDEA Organizers what worked well this year, and here are a few of their responses:

“Having the opportunity to connect with folks from different places and struggle through what it means to develop relationships with really different perspectives. To be part of trying to build something new and holding relationships in new ways.”

“I appreciated having a group with a common value set working across differences.”

“I feel activism can be isolating and it was great to connect with the group. It can difficult going, and it was renewing to have a network of ready-made folks that have your back.”

“I really enjoyed our time together at IDEA Camp. It was good to get to know other folks doing work on the ground. I enjoyed the diversity of the group, to have it include teachers, principals, digital folks, community organizers -- a strong team.”

Please share our call for organizers widely, and consider applying yourself!
Read more on our website and download the call for organizers

IDEAorganizers2012.pdf (Size: 367.94 KB / Downloads: 0)

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.”

What You Need To Know Before Registering

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

We have intentionally disabled automatic registration. Contact us if you would like to join our forums and make your own posts.

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.

"Viva Riva!" (2010) [trailer]

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 05:22:59 +0000