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"content": "\u003cp>This would be a terrible thing to say about most books but, in this case\u003cem>,\u003c/em> it might actually be a compliment: I kept falling asleep reading Marina Benjamin’s \u003cem>Insomnia.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wasn’t so much bored as somehow soothed by her velvety ruminations on night wakefulness, which run on, unbroken by chapters, with lots of airy white space between paragraphs. Awash in the comfort of a kindred soul, I relaxed enough to be lulled into sleep. Did her \u003cem>Insomnia \u003c/em>cure mine?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Think how many hours are lost to night frets, which Benjamin ties to a “turbocharged … overactive brain” and I liken to a washing machine’s spin cycle. I know that my insomnia has increased since the 2016 election, and I don’t think I’m alone. [contextly_sidebar id=”xuamSR6dIRBu37LnEXZQ7KXrQULI8p24″]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Benjamin’s \u003cem>Insomnia\u003c/em> follows \u003cem>Middlepause, \u003c/em>her memoir about reaching 50, and indeed, insomnia often follows menopause, almost as reliably as winter follows fall. Her eloquent description of the inconsolability and frustration of finding oneself irremediably awake during the witching hours, “cannibalized by your own gnawing thoughts,” will certainly strike a familiar chord for many. She nails the “shotgun awakenings,” the sense of being “jet-lagged in your native time zone,” and the exasperation of being stuck chewing over all the day’s insignificant “crud,” “like waterboarding the mind with meaningless overflow, a smothering drip, drip, drip of surplus thought.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even worse are the nocturnal worries: “In my bed, I flap and thrash like a grouper caught in the net, victim to an escalating anxiety,” she writes. “It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and the brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.” She adds that, unable to find the off-button, “I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Benjamin’s book is more impressionistic than scientific: Don’t look here for an explanation of the chemistry or biology of nocturnal wakefulness. She pooh-poohs pharmaceutical sleep aids, and is also dismissive of a five-week course of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomniacs, which adds to her torment with its strictures about sleep hygiene and distressing, restrictive sleep diets. Meanwhile, her husband, whom she amusingly dubs “Zzz,” slumbers peacefully beside her, heightening her sense of isolation. [contextly_sidebar id=”0jkXEe54CyVy4ofLVXyQMKu6jv2rXI2J”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Benjamin’s mind works like a wide-roving trawler that rakes an area repeatedly before moving on to adjacent territory. 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But concerning Freud’s focus on the interplay between conscious and unconscious minds she writes amusingly, “It cheers me to note that because psychoanalysis works to excavate the brain’s nocturnal effusions and then drag them into the light, it is essentially an insomniac practice.” And her reflections on Robinson Crusoe lead to an unexpected discussion of slave labor and the dark side of capitalism and colonialism, in which she points out that what was being grown and imported were addictive stimulants: tobacco, coffee, sugar—”generators of mass insomnia.” [contextly_sidebar id=”EEPk4lmTPS3mOOMqn2wmx7otKevawBCo”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Insomnia\u003c/em> turns out to be somewhat of a celebration of sleeplessness as well as a lament. It is strongest at its most personal, and is filled with memorable images—including a Cree dream catcher that “resembled a giant dangly earring,” and Benjamin’s nocturnal canine companion’s “legs splayed like bagpipes” on the sofa beside her. 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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>This would be a terrible thing to say about most books but, in this case\u003cem>,\u003c/em> it might actually be a compliment: I kept falling asleep reading Marina Benjamin’s \u003cem>Insomnia.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wasn’t so much bored as somehow soothed by her velvety ruminations on night wakefulness, which run on, unbroken by chapters, with lots of airy white space between paragraphs. Awash in the comfort of a kindred soul, I relaxed enough to be lulled into sleep. Did her \u003cem>Insomnia \u003c/em>cure mine?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Think how many hours are lost to night frets, which Benjamin ties to a “turbocharged … overactive brain” and I liken to a washing machine’s spin cycle. I know that my insomnia has increased since the 2016 election, and I don’t think I’m alone. \u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Benjamin’s \u003cem>Insomnia\u003c/em> follows \u003cem>Middlepause, \u003c/em>her memoir about reaching 50, and indeed, insomnia often follows menopause, almost as reliably as winter follows fall. Her eloquent description of the inconsolability and frustration of finding oneself irremediably awake during the witching hours, “cannibalized by your own gnawing thoughts,” will certainly strike a familiar chord for many. She nails the “shotgun awakenings,” the sense of being “jet-lagged in your native time zone,” and the exasperation of being stuck chewing over all the day’s insignificant “crud,” “like waterboarding the mind with meaningless overflow, a smothering drip, drip, drip of surplus thought.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even worse are the nocturnal worries: “In my bed, I flap and thrash like a grouper caught in the net, victim to an escalating anxiety,” she writes. “It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and the brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.” She adds that, unable to find the off-button, “I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "'Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald': Beasts? Check. Crimes? Check. Fantastic? Not Quite.",
"headTitle": "‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald’: Beasts? Check. Crimes? Check. Fantastic? Not Quite. | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Hands up, everyone who liked the \u003cem>Harry Potter \u003c/em>series — books and/or movies — at least well enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OK, well, that’s a \u003cem>lot \u003c/em>of you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keep them up if you made it all the way through 2016’s \u003cem>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them\u003c/em> — a prequel to the canonical Potter stories, in which Eddie Redmayne played magizoologist Newt Scamander, who came to New York City in 1926 with a magical valise and an annoying, squirrelly affect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hunh. Thought that would eliminate more of you than it did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay, now \u003cem>only \u003c/em>keep them up if you came away from \u003cem>Fantastic Beasts \u003c/em>disappointed. If you liked the setting — the so-called Wizarding World, U.S. edition — but felt the story a meandering, muddled, overstuffed mess that leaned too hard into the cutesy-wutesy magical critters. If to you it captured some of the stylistic flourishes of \u003cem>Harry Potter\u003c/em>, but none of the distinctive particulars, none of the \u003cem>feel\u003c/em>, none — let’s just get this out of the way — of the magic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay. Now. If your hand isn’t up, you’re excused. This next bit isn’t for you — you either don’t care about J.K. Rowling’s world, or you’re so devoted to it that you managed to ignore the fact that \u003cem>Fantastic Beasts \u003c/em>was a cinematic Obscurus — an noisy ball of violent, nonsensical narrative chaos, albeit one that did boffo B.O.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So off with you. Everyone else? The ones still sticking around? Here’s the scoop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Crimes of Grindelwald\u003c/em> is better than the first \u003cem>Beasts \u003c/em>film, and not just because that turns out to be such a low bar to clear, but because it has a firmer grasp on what kind of movie it wants to be. It feels more familiarly Potter-y, in that it assumes the distinctive narrative shape of Harry Potter stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once again: Structurally, it’s \u003cem>familiar\u003c/em>, not, you know: \u003cem>good\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/8bYBOVWLNIs\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Can we all admit, here, that the plots of Harry Potter books and movies were always frustrating in the extreme? Rowling’s characters delighted in keeping vital information from Harry — and by extension, the reader — turning every tale into an ersatz, low-rent mystery where the goal was never to uncover whodunnit, but to eke out even the most basic understanding of whatthehellsgoingon? Inevitably, we’d discover the answers — well, “discover” is inaccurate. We’d be \u003cem>told\u003c/em>, when Rowling would finally sit Harry down to have him listen to an extended monologue, filled with secret history to which neither he nor we could have been expected to be privy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the kind of plotting \u003cem>The Crimes of Grindelwald\u003c/em> serves up, down to a hilariously out-of-nowhere pseudo-climactic scene in which characters who’ve spent the movie scheming to murder one another just stand around listening patiently to a series of monologues like they’re sleepy kindergartners at storytime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No, it doesn’t work. No, it’s not, not even a little bit, \u003cem>good\u003c/em>. But it’s familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s actually an improvement, in a very small, specific way. You’ll recall that all of that information was kept from Harry and his friends because no one tells kids anything, forcing them to glean any and all actionable intel via that most overused trope in all of kid-lit: eavesdropping. \u003cem>Magical \u003c/em>eavesdropping, to be sure, but even so: They’d learn something, jump to the wrong conclusion, and proceed to labor under that misinformation until the penultimate chapter, when someone (usually Dumbledore) would finally explain the situation in full. Rinse, repeat. \u003cem>Accio \u003c/em>annoyance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s none of that here, at least.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander is an adult, and he finds things out using magic. There’s a cool sequence when he reconstructs a crime scene using a glittery gold magical powder — pixiedusting for fingerprints, as it were. This time out, the sheer number of putatively hilarious beasts on hand is dialed mercifully back, but the ones who do turn up tend to be used strategically, to bring about some concrete result, instead of simply as a means to up the film’s Whimsy Quotient.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Redmayne’s performance, as Newt, remains just as mannered and tic-ridden as ever. But thanks to a brief flashback sequence featuring a teenage Newt played by Joshua Shea, who gamely matches Redmayne’s every furtive head-tilt and skittering glance, it seems less hammy and indulgent, and more a defined, characterizing choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, one of the main reasons that \u003cem>Grindelwald \u003c/em>works better than the film that preceded it is a function of its status as the middle film of a trilogy. The business of world-building, which the first film made such a corned-beef hash of, is over, and now there is only the task of moving the various characters across the board like the Wizard’s Chess pieces they are. As such, it has a more singular sense of purpose, as all the meandering subplots of the film’s first hour eventually lock in place and fit together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plot, such as it is: Young Dumbledore (Jude Law) sends Newt to Paris, where a newly escaped Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) is gathering his faithful — pure-blood wizards — in an attempt to rule both the Wizarding world and the human world. Meanwhile, Ezra Miller’s (checks notes) Credence Barebone is … (checks notes again, frowns, shrugs) … \u003cem>Credence Barebone\u003c/em> is also in Paris, searching for his mother, alongside sort-of-girlfriend Nagini (Claudia Kim) a Maledictus cursed to one day turn into a snake. (Yes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also there’s love-interest stuff: Newt and his Auror girlfriend Tina (Katherine Waterston) are on the outs over a misunderstanding that could be clarified with a ten-second conversation, but isn’t, because Rowling gonna Rowling. Newt’s pals Jacob (Dan Fogler) and Queenie (Alison Sudol, doing a lot with one of the film’s many underwritten roles for women) show up, as well, and the script puts them through some clearly defined changes that at least \u003cem>feel \u003c/em>like narrative progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film’s chief problem is Grindelwald, a dull-as-dishwater villain we’re repeatedly told is charming and deceitful, although Depp’s performance fights hard against any such reading. The character of Grindelwald is \u003cem>supposed \u003c/em>to use guile and rhetoric to win wizards to his side by promising them the chance to “live openly, and love freely” — a not-particularly coy attempt by the screenplay to underline the gay subtext between Grindelwald and Law’s Hot Dumbledore — but Depp just hams it up like a Pantomime baddie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Everything about the guy is second-rate. Voldemort had disquieting slits where his nose should be; Grindelwald a single, discolored iris. When Voldemort summoned \u003cem>his \u003c/em>followers, a leering skull with a snake slithering through its eye-sockets manifested in the sky:\u003cem> that \u003c/em>wizard had \u003cem>style\u003c/em>. When Grindelwald attempts the same move, the buildings of Paris simply get shadowy tarps thrown over them; it’s unclear if he’s calling an army or renovating masonry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, now. All of you who stuck around? Relax. \u003cem>Grindelwald \u003c/em>is a better, more purposeful and thus more propulsive film than the first, and it does possess its unique charms: Several characters only alluded to in the \u003cem>Harry Potter\u003c/em> tales pop up here, goosing appreciative gasps from the audience in the process. The sight of Hogwarts, accompanied by John Williams’ familiar fanfare, elicits applause.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And not for nothing? Law looks \u003cem>great \u003c/em>as a Dumbledore in bespoke tweed (\u003cem>Fantastic Vests and Where To Find Them\u003c/em>!), even if seeing him so put-together evokes a twinge of sadness at the shapeless robes and chunky jewelry that we know lie in his future, just \u003cem>waiting \u003c/em>to turn him into the Wizarding World’s equivalent of a Santa Fe gallery owner named Jade.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Hands up, everyone who liked the \u003cem>Harry Potter \u003c/em>series — books and/or movies — at least well enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OK, well, that’s a \u003cem>lot \u003c/em>of you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keep them up if you made it all the way through 2016’s \u003cem>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them\u003c/em> — a prequel to the canonical Potter stories, in which Eddie Redmayne played magizoologist Newt Scamander, who came to New York City in 1926 with a magical valise and an annoying, squirrelly affect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hunh. Thought that would eliminate more of you than it did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay, now \u003cem>only \u003c/em>keep them up if you came away from \u003cem>Fantastic Beasts \u003c/em>disappointed. If you liked the setting — the so-called Wizarding World, U.S. edition — but felt the story a meandering, muddled, overstuffed mess that leaned too hard into the cutesy-wutesy magical critters. If to you it captured some of the stylistic flourishes of \u003cem>Harry Potter\u003c/em>, but none of the distinctive particulars, none of the \u003cem>feel\u003c/em>, none — let’s just get this out of the way — of the magic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay. Now. If your hand isn’t up, you’re excused. This next bit isn’t for you — you either don’t care about J.K. Rowling’s world, or you’re so devoted to it that you managed to ignore the fact that \u003cem>Fantastic Beasts \u003c/em>was a cinematic Obscurus — an noisy ball of violent, nonsensical narrative chaos, albeit one that did boffo B.O.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So off with you. Everyone else? The ones still sticking around? Here’s the scoop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Crimes of Grindelwald\u003c/em> is better than the first \u003cem>Beasts \u003c/em>film, and not just because that turns out to be such a low bar to clear, but because it has a firmer grasp on what kind of movie it wants to be. It feels more familiarly Potter-y, in that it assumes the distinctive narrative shape of Harry Potter stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once again: Structurally, it’s \u003cem>familiar\u003c/em>, not, you know: \u003cem>good\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/8bYBOVWLNIs'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/8bYBOVWLNIs'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Can we all admit, here, that the plots of Harry Potter books and movies were always frustrating in the extreme? Rowling’s characters delighted in keeping vital information from Harry — and by extension, the reader — turning every tale into an ersatz, low-rent mystery where the goal was never to uncover whodunnit, but to eke out even the most basic understanding of whatthehellsgoingon? Inevitably, we’d discover the answers — well, “discover” is inaccurate. We’d be \u003cem>told\u003c/em>, when Rowling would finally sit Harry down to have him listen to an extended monologue, filled with secret history to which neither he nor we could have been expected to be privy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the kind of plotting \u003cem>The Crimes of Grindelwald\u003c/em> serves up, down to a hilariously out-of-nowhere pseudo-climactic scene in which characters who’ve spent the movie scheming to murder one another just stand around listening patiently to a series of monologues like they’re sleepy kindergartners at storytime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No, it doesn’t work. No, it’s not, not even a little bit, \u003cem>good\u003c/em>. But it’s familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s actually an improvement, in a very small, specific way. You’ll recall that all of that information was kept from Harry and his friends because no one tells kids anything, forcing them to glean any and all actionable intel via that most overused trope in all of kid-lit: eavesdropping. \u003cem>Magical \u003c/em>eavesdropping, to be sure, but even so: They’d learn something, jump to the wrong conclusion, and proceed to labor under that misinformation until the penultimate chapter, when someone (usually Dumbledore) would finally explain the situation in full. Rinse, repeat. \u003cem>Accio \u003c/em>annoyance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s none of that here, at least.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander is an adult, and he finds things out using magic. There’s a cool sequence when he reconstructs a crime scene using a glittery gold magical powder — pixiedusting for fingerprints, as it were. This time out, the sheer number of putatively hilarious beasts on hand is dialed mercifully back, but the ones who do turn up tend to be used strategically, to bring about some concrete result, instead of simply as a means to up the film’s Whimsy Quotient.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Redmayne’s performance, as Newt, remains just as mannered and tic-ridden as ever. But thanks to a brief flashback sequence featuring a teenage Newt played by Joshua Shea, who gamely matches Redmayne’s every furtive head-tilt and skittering glance, it seems less hammy and indulgent, and more a defined, characterizing choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, one of the main reasons that \u003cem>Grindelwald \u003c/em>works better than the film that preceded it is a function of its status as the middle film of a trilogy. The business of world-building, which the first film made such a corned-beef hash of, is over, and now there is only the task of moving the various characters across the board like the Wizard’s Chess pieces they are. As such, it has a more singular sense of purpose, as all the meandering subplots of the film’s first hour eventually lock in place and fit together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plot, such as it is: Young Dumbledore (Jude Law) sends Newt to Paris, where a newly escaped Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) is gathering his faithful — pure-blood wizards — in an attempt to rule both the Wizarding world and the human world. Meanwhile, Ezra Miller’s (checks notes) Credence Barebone is … (checks notes again, frowns, shrugs) … \u003cem>Credence Barebone\u003c/em> is also in Paris, searching for his mother, alongside sort-of-girlfriend Nagini (Claudia Kim) a Maledictus cursed to one day turn into a snake. (Yes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also there’s love-interest stuff: Newt and his Auror girlfriend Tina (Katherine Waterston) are on the outs over a misunderstanding that could be clarified with a ten-second conversation, but isn’t, because Rowling gonna Rowling. Newt’s pals Jacob (Dan Fogler) and Queenie (Alison Sudol, doing a lot with one of the film’s many underwritten roles for women) show up, as well, and the script puts them through some clearly defined changes that at least \u003cem>feel \u003c/em>like narrative progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film’s chief problem is Grindelwald, a dull-as-dishwater villain we’re repeatedly told is charming and deceitful, although Depp’s performance fights hard against any such reading. The character of Grindelwald is \u003cem>supposed \u003c/em>to use guile and rhetoric to win wizards to his side by promising them the chance to “live openly, and love freely” — a not-particularly coy attempt by the screenplay to underline the gay subtext between Grindelwald and Law’s Hot Dumbledore — but Depp just hams it up like a Pantomime baddie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Everything about the guy is second-rate. Voldemort had disquieting slits where his nose should be; Grindelwald a single, discolored iris. When Voldemort summoned \u003cem>his \u003c/em>followers, a leering skull with a snake slithering through its eye-sockets manifested in the sky:\u003cem> that \u003c/em>wizard had \u003cem>style\u003c/em>. When Grindelwald attempts the same move, the buildings of Paris simply get shadowy tarps thrown over them; it’s unclear if he’s calling an army or renovating masonry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, now. All of you who stuck around? Relax. \u003cem>Grindelwald \u003c/em>is a better, more purposeful and thus more propulsive film than the first, and it does possess its unique charms: Several characters only alluded to in the \u003cem>Harry Potter\u003c/em> tales pop up here, goosing appreciative gasps from the audience in the process. The sight of Hogwarts, accompanied by John Williams’ familiar fanfare, elicits applause.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And not for nothing? Law looks \u003cem>great \u003c/em>as a Dumbledore in bespoke tweed (\u003cem>Fantastic Vests and Where To Find Them\u003c/em>!), even if seeing him so put-together evokes a twinge of sadness at the shapeless robes and chunky jewelry that we know lie in his future, just \u003cem>waiting \u003c/em>to turn him into the Wizarding World’s equivalent of a Santa Fe gallery owner named Jade.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Anderson .Paak Comes Home: 'This Is What We Dreamed Of'",
"headTitle": "Anderson .Paak Comes Home: ‘This Is What We Dreamed Of’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The smoky, silky rasp of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/464866525/anderson-paak\">Anderson .Paak\u003c/a>‘s voice boasts a soulfulness beyond his years. Though he’s only 32, the California native has done more living than many musicians do in their whole lives, and he has the war stories to prove it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He grew up playing drums in church, watched his family torn apart by domestic abuse and prison stints, worked in an assisted living home, engineered for a punk band, followed a woman to L.A., and formed his band, The Free Nationals, while attending music school — all before the world knew his name. But even through his rocky moments, making music and going back to his hometown have remained two constant factors in his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”LGnfQYtSPx1snjlWaOVgTWypS2NjCiu5″]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know if it was faith or anything, but, naturally, I always had to be doing something creative or musical,” .Paak says. “I couldn’t help it. Even when I was saying I quit, I was always doing something — writing a little bit, or recording, helping somebody out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After years of grinding in the L.A. music scene, .Paak made a splash in 2015 on Dr. Dre’s \u003cem>Compton\u003c/em> and quickly followed that up with his own 2016 album, \u003cem>Malibu \u003c/em>— mixing ’70s funk, speakeasy soul and R&B elements with intricate, immersive (and sometimes hilariously raunchy) songwriting. Now, two years and a couple world tours later, .Paak is back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Oxnard\u003c/em>, out Nov. 16, is an ode to the artist’s formative years growing up in Oxnard, Calif. and something of a homecoming, as the first album released under Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment. With features from \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/397293070/j-cole\">J. Cole\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/166009689/kendrick-lamar\">Kendrick Lamar\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/126920109/snoop-dogg\">Snoop Dogg\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/597644166/kadhja-bonet\">Kadhja Bonet\u003c/a> ,and his mentor’s fingerprints all over the beats as executive producer, .Paak probes topics from unceremonious breakups to his own position in the music industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”FXUntZjqQ9F4vy03llUcuQvBHTBrBcMp”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>.Paak joined NPR’s David Greene in-studio — over cups of “champeezy” — to discuss finding his confidence as a performer, getting through unstable times and \u003cem>Oxnard’\u003c/em>s overarching themes\u003cem>. \u003c/em>Hear the radio version of their conversation at the audio link, and read on for more that didn’t make the broadcast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/ferZnZ0_rSM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Greene: Whatever it is about you that strikes people — that other musicians are like, “You’ve \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>got \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>to be out there, you’ve \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>got \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>to play music” — where do we hear it on this new album?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Anderson .Paak: \u003c/strong>You hear it in the production. There’s so much great drumming; there’s so much great musicianship in there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why is that the distinctive Anderson .Paak sound?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t know if it’s distinctive, but there’s a way that I say things, relationship-wise, that I think is just unique to myself and really honest — making it simple but still not on the sleeve.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In [the song “Smile/Petty”] in particular, I’m actually talking about a situation that happened to my guitar player, where he got kicked out of his house and she put all his stuff in the street. He was trying to FaceTime her before he was on the plane, and he was like, “I \u003cem>just got\u003c/em> that stuff.” He was trying to talk to her as we were pulling off, then he just loses reception. It was great material for me to write about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Probably not good for his belongings. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah, but it made for a great song. Being able to put what’s going on in my life and everyone’s life into a way that everyone can relate to, that’s what I really love. And that song in particular is definitely about that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Dre produced this album, right?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah, he mixed the whole album. He was the main producer. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he was making all the beats and everything, but me and him were running the train. … Some artists, everything’s laid out for them. They get to the studio, song’s ready. “Here’s your song, just do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What’s your relationship like? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just two Aquariuses going at it: two control freaks, perfectionists that just can’t stop working on a project. I love it. It’s amazing, man. We met a few years ago, — they were working on his album \u003cem>Compton\u003c/em>, and some writers over there really liked my song “Suede”… and they were like, man, we want to get you on this Dre project. I went over there, not thinking I was gonna meet Dre or anything, and I walk in and he’s like the first person I meet, him and [rapper and Death Row Records co-founder] D.O.C.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Was that intimidating?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A little bit. He’s super tall. Like, everyone was tall in the ’90s — I don’t get it. But yeah it was great, and he threw me all over the album. The dope part was that [when] he put out his album, I wasn’t signed to him yet or anything like that, and I had \u003cem>Malibu \u003c/em>almost done. After he put out his album, I put out \u003cem>Malibu — \u003c/em>and signed to Dre after that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do you feel like you’ve made it? I just think about the rocky journey, and moments where you gave up music, and your parents and the uncertainty. Is this album a moment for you, where you feel that you’ve come through and you don’t have to worry?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I mean, dude, I could eat sushi every day if I wanted to. It’s dope not having to worry about my phone bill and stuff. But it’s always something next level. I’m always around people that are on that next level, and I want to aspire to do that. But this definitely feels like a welcome home — like, “Dang man, I’m proud of what we did.” All these different people we met. I’ve gotten to see the world, I’ve gotten to share all these experiences with people in my hometown and introduce my hometown to the world. It just feels great. This is what we dreamed of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Web editor \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/565465074/sidney-madden\">\u003cem>Sidney Madden\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this story. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Anderson+.Paak+Comes+Home%3A+%27This+Is+What+We+Dreamed+Of%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The singer-songwriter-rapper-drummer is one of music's most venerable Renaissance men. .Paak discusses his early struggles, building confidence and his latest album, \u003cem>Oxnard\u003c/em>, with David Greene.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The smoky, silky rasp of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/464866525/anderson-paak\">Anderson .Paak\u003c/a>‘s voice boasts a soulfulness beyond his years. Though he’s only 32, the California native has done more living than many musicians do in their whole lives, and he has the war stories to prove it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He grew up playing drums in church, watched his family torn apart by domestic abuse and prison stints, worked in an assisted living home, engineered for a punk band, followed a woman to L.A., and formed his band, The Free Nationals, while attending music school — all before the world knew his name. But even through his rocky moments, making music and going back to his hometown have remained two constant factors in his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know if it was faith or anything, but, naturally, I always had to be doing something creative or musical,” .Paak says. “I couldn’t help it. Even when I was saying I quit, I was always doing something — writing a little bit, or recording, helping somebody out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After years of grinding in the L.A. music scene, .Paak made a splash in 2015 on Dr. Dre’s \u003cem>Compton\u003c/em> and quickly followed that up with his own 2016 album, \u003cem>Malibu \u003c/em>— mixing ’70s funk, speakeasy soul and R&B elements with intricate, immersive (and sometimes hilariously raunchy) songwriting. Now, two years and a couple world tours later, .Paak is back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Oxnard\u003c/em>, out Nov. 16, is an ode to the artist’s formative years growing up in Oxnard, Calif. and something of a homecoming, as the first album released under Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment. With features from \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/397293070/j-cole\">J. Cole\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/166009689/kendrick-lamar\">Kendrick Lamar\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/126920109/snoop-dogg\">Snoop Dogg\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/597644166/kadhja-bonet\">Kadhja Bonet\u003c/a> ,and his mentor’s fingerprints all over the beats as executive producer, .Paak probes topics from unceremonious breakups to his own position in the music industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>.Paak joined NPR’s David Greene in-studio — over cups of “champeezy” — to discuss finding his confidence as a performer, getting through unstable times and \u003cem>Oxnard’\u003c/em>s overarching themes\u003cem>. \u003c/em>Hear the radio version of their conversation at the audio link, and read on for more that didn’t make the broadcast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/ferZnZ0_rSM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Greene: Whatever it is about you that strikes people — that other musicians are like, “You’ve \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>got \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>to be out there, you’ve \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>got \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>to play music” — where do we hear it on this new album?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Anderson .Paak: \u003c/strong>You hear it in the production. There’s so much great drumming; there’s so much great musicianship in there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why is that the distinctive Anderson .Paak sound?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t know if it’s distinctive, but there’s a way that I say things, relationship-wise, that I think is just unique to myself and really honest — making it simple but still not on the sleeve.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In [the song “Smile/Petty”] in particular, I’m actually talking about a situation that happened to my guitar player, where he got kicked out of his house and she put all his stuff in the street. He was trying to FaceTime her before he was on the plane, and he was like, “I \u003cem>just got\u003c/em> that stuff.” He was trying to talk to her as we were pulling off, then he just loses reception. It was great material for me to write about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Probably not good for his belongings. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah, but it made for a great song. Being able to put what’s going on in my life and everyone’s life into a way that everyone can relate to, that’s what I really love. And that song in particular is definitely about that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Dre produced this album, right?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah, he mixed the whole album. He was the main producer. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he was making all the beats and everything, but me and him were running the train. … Some artists, everything’s laid out for them. They get to the studio, song’s ready. “Here’s your song, just do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What’s your relationship like? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just two Aquariuses going at it: two control freaks, perfectionists that just can’t stop working on a project. I love it. It’s amazing, man. We met a few years ago, — they were working on his album \u003cem>Compton\u003c/em>, and some writers over there really liked my song “Suede”… and they were like, man, we want to get you on this Dre project. I went over there, not thinking I was gonna meet Dre or anything, and I walk in and he’s like the first person I meet, him and [rapper and Death Row Records co-founder] D.O.C.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Was that intimidating?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A little bit. He’s super tall. Like, everyone was tall in the ’90s — I don’t get it. But yeah it was great, and he threw me all over the album. The dope part was that [when] he put out his album, I wasn’t signed to him yet or anything like that, and I had \u003cem>Malibu \u003c/em>almost done. After he put out his album, I put out \u003cem>Malibu — \u003c/em>and signed to Dre after that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do you feel like you’ve made it? I just think about the rocky journey, and moments where you gave up music, and your parents and the uncertainty. Is this album a moment for you, where you feel that you’ve come through and you don’t have to worry?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I mean, dude, I could eat sushi every day if I wanted to. It’s dope not having to worry about my phone bill and stuff. But it’s always something next level. I’m always around people that are on that next level, and I want to aspire to do that. But this definitely feels like a welcome home — like, “Dang man, I’m proud of what we did.” All these different people we met. I’ve gotten to see the world, I’ve gotten to share all these experiences with people in my hometown and introduce my hometown to the world. It just feels great. This is what we dreamed of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Music fans have been waiting almost half a century to see a storied documentary that many thought might never see the light of day: \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15662553/aretha-franklin\">Aretha Franklin\u003c/a>‘s \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>. Originally directed by Sydney Pollack and completed by Alan Elliott, the film has been talked about since it was filmed in a Watts, California church in 1972 during the recording sessions for a live album of the same name. Now, 46 years after it was shot, the \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> movie was finally shown in public for the first time Monday, with initial screenings in New York City and more on the way nationwide. (It will be have limited runs in Los Angeles and New York before the end of the year in order to qualify for the 2019 Academy Awards; it’s then expected to go into wider circulation early next year.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”YDmuodBeetkpX9nsMCWREQF3PzXrFAPd”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a document of an iconic musician’s skills, the film is essential. But \u003cem>Amazing Grace \u003c/em>is far more than that: Watching it is a transcendent, spine-tingling, uplifting, utterly joyous experience. As cherished as the album version has been since its release, the film is nothing short of a revelation, soaring from one chill-inducing moment to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recorded over two January nights at Watts’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, \u003cem>Amazing Grace \u003c/em>marked Franklin’s thrilling return to her gospel roots after she’d earned 11 consecutive No. 1 pop and R&B singles, won five Grammys and released more than 20 albums. (In a marketing plan that must have made demographic sense at the time but now seems almost unfathomably tone-deaf, Warner Bros. originally planned to pair the \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> movie with \u003cem>Superfly\u003c/em> as a theatrical double-bill.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short order, the album version became a classic: It went double-platinum and remains one of the biggest-selling recordings in gospel music history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marvin Gaye, whose “Wholy Holy” Franklin covers on \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>, told her biographer, David Ritz, that the album is “Aretha’s singular masterpiece … her greatest work.” And it’s with “Wholy Holy” that Franklin begins her performance, seated at the piano, with plushly arranged vocals from the choir backing her. It sets the reverent mood for the sessions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That sense of shared spiritual experience, a communion of believers and their God, is what defines \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> — a project recorded not in a studio, but in a living church. Moreover, Franklin is surrounded by a community that she understands innately, says Aaron Cohen, who saw the film’s raw footage about a decade ago at Elliott’s invitation. Cohen is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, as well as the author of a 2011 \u003ca href=\"https://bloomsbury.com/us/aretha-franklins-amazing-grace-9781441148889\">book\u003c/a> about the album \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cohen says it’s essential to understand the community in which Franklin chose to record: the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, which, just six and a half years earlier, had \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4795093\">exploded\u003c/a> in riots. The unrest — which stemmed from deep-seated anger in the community over high unemployment, poor medical care, inferior housing, bad schools and tensions with police — left 34 people dead, hundreds injured and the neighborhood devastated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13844893\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13844893 size-large\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-1020x720.jpg\" alt=\"Singer Aretha Franklin in a still from the documentary Amazing Grace.\" width=\"640\" height=\"452\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-1020x720.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-160x113.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-800x564.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-768x542.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-960x677.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-240x169.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-375x265.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-520x367.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220.jpg 1032w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Singer Aretha Franklin in a still from the documentary Amazing Grace. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Al's Records And Tapes)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The film shows not just Aretha performing,” he says, “but also this congregation and what it was like to be in a church in Watts in the early ’70s, in the post-civil rights era, in a time when the community was redirecting its energy and deciding where to go next. I believe you can feel that,” he continues, “through the music, through what she’s singing in ‘How I Got Over'” — a song that Clara Ward’s sister \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130827-a-song-that-made-america-believe\">claimed\u003c/a> was inspired by a specific incident of racial bullying that the family experienced, but whose lyrics were a touchstone for many black Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In David Ritz’s standalone biography of Franklin, 2014’s \u003cem>Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin\u003c/em>, the singer’s late brother Cecil strikes a similar tone. “I see [\u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>] as the sacred moment in the life of black people,” he told Ritz. “Think back. We had lost Martin; we had lost Malcolm; we had lost Bobby Kennedy. We were still fighting an immoral war. We had Tricky Dick in the White House. Turmoil, anger, corruption, confusion. We needed reassurance and recommitment. We needed redirection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As dramatic as the footage is, the \u003cem>Amazing Grace \u003c/em>documentary was plagued by troubles from the outset. The film of the recording sessions was made at the behest of Warner Bros. (the parent company of Franklin’s label, Atlantic Records), which hired actor and director Sydney Pollack to create it. Pollack, who had recently earned his first Oscar nomination (for \u003cem>They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?\u003c/em>), was still green enough as a director to forget an essential need in the pre-digital era: clapper boards to mark the starting points of the visual and audio elements of the film, meaning that what one saw and what one heard were out of sync. The screw-up was so bad that the 20 hours of footage were deemed useless, and the film was jettisoned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pollack reportedly \u003ca href=\"https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sydney-pollacks-amazing-grace-tortured-820294\">dreamed\u003c/a> of returning to the material, but that never came to fruition. There were other attempts, though. “It was a very tedious and long process. Initially they tried, and they only got through about 20 feet of film and they gave up,” Franklin’s niece and the executor of her estate, Sabrina Owens, tells NPR. “And so it ended up on somebody’s cutting floor somewhere for years — for decades, actually.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, a former Atlantic A&R staffer-turned-producer named Alan Elliott took up the cause of seeing the \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> film through, and by around 2010 had painstakingly matched the movie with the sound. But Franklin wouldn’t allow the documentary to be released. In 2011, she sued Elliott on the grounds of using her likeness without her permission. In 2015, she sued \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/04/437648259/aretha-franklin-blocks-premiere-of-concert-film-amazing-grace\">again\u003c/a> to prevent the film from being screened at the Telluride Film Festival.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elliott was tenacious, however. In the weeks after Franklin’s death in August, he persuaded her family to let the film be released at long last. Owens says it started with a call she received from Elliott. “He asked if he could come and preview the film for friends and family,” she recalls. “I said yes. They previewed it for us at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History [in Detroit] before about 40 or 50 family members, and we all delighted in what we saw.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of that pleasure is in seeing Franklin work alongside her colleagues; these are musicians who innately feel each other, who are able to anticipate each other’s every move. Franklin had a crack team of collaborators, including her band of stellar players (Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums, guitarist Cornell Dupree and bassist Chuck Rainey). The backing choir was directed by Rev. James Cleveland, who had formerly served as the minister of music at Aretha’s father’s church, New Bethel Baptist in Detroit, and was one of Franklin’s mentors and a gospel-music giant in his own right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, as \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> abundantly demonstrates, his Southern California Community Choir was an extraordinary ensemble — a group which Franklin called “one of the best anywhere” in the 1999 autobiography, \u003cem>From These Roots\u003c/em>, which she co-wrote with author David Ritz. Cleveland also serves as the genial emcee for the recording sessions. (At the start of the first night, he reminds the people in attendance that this is a church service taking place in the Lord’s house — but adds at the beginning of the second session, “Don’t be bashful when the camera comes your way … so while it comin’ your way, get in on it, all right?!”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no narrative to the film, and — aside from nothing more of a glimpse of a rehearsal — no behind-the-scenes segments to make viewers feel as if they’re learning more about Franklin’s process or gaining insights into her day-to-day life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, what viewers bear witness to is the \u003cem>work\u003c/em> of creating ecstasy: the rivers of sweat on Franklin and Cleveland, the eye makeup streaking down her face. The you-are-there framing keeps a close watch on Aretha as she swoops and sweeps with the greatest of ease, skipping between dizzying runs and effortless slides that remind you of what a masterful jazz singer she was. We see mental wheels spinning as Cleveland and Alexander Hamilton, the assistant choir director, keep driving the choir into ever-greater surges of emotion while keeping them immaculately tight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moreover, the film captures the breathtaking force of feeling from both artists and congregants. Near the end of the song “Amazing Grace,” for which Cleveland has been accompanying Franklin on the piano, he slides off the piano bench, giving his space to Hamilton, and surrenders to shoulder-heaving sobs, rocking himself back and forth in a congregational seat. He’s not the only one — by this point, audience and performers alike are wiping tears from their faces — and when Franklin herself sinks down into a seat at the song’s conclusion, she well may be weeping, too. But her face is so sparkling with perspiration, it’s impossible to tell for sure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sabrina Owens says that such moments reveal an intimate facet of the resplendent Queen of Soul. “I think that seeing her in this setting helps them to understand Aretha as a person,” she says. “She came from the church. She is a daughter of the church. Her faith was so strong and she just loved gospel music. And I think seeing her in this element, it has to make you feel \u003cem>something\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Franklin was surrounded by family at these performances. There are some beautiful moments between Franklin and her father, the famed preacher Rev. C.L. Franklin, who comes to the second night’s session to sit in the front row alongside gospel legend Clara Ward, one of Aretha Franklin’s closest guides and her father’s longtime girlfriend. Ward seems caught between delight and other feelings — wistfulness? melancholy? — as Franklin, nearly 20 years younger, wails “Never Grow Old” from the piano a few feet away. Meanwhile, Clara Ward’s mother, Gertrude, the founder of the Ward Singers, appears to faint a short distance away, as Pollack gestures wildly to his cameramen to capture the scene. (There were at least a couple of other celebrities in attendance that night: The cameras alight upon Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones at the back of the congregation.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During that second night of recording, Franklin watches her father with shining eyes as he mounts the pulpit to wax ecstatic about her talents. After delivering remarks in his stentorian, mahogany tones, he gleefully tells the congregation, “She is a \u003cem>stone\u003c/em> singer,” while she melts into a smile. But in a gesture and response intimately familiar to generations of parents and children, we also see a flicker of annoyance in the nearly 30-year-old’s fleetingly pursed lips as her father, apparently unbidden, daubs some perspiration off her face while she sings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those kinds of understated and elemental moments, Sabrina Owens says, is what makes the film so special. “It was just Aretha standing there singing,” she says. “In her element, in a church setting, just doing what she does.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Aretha+Franklin+Touches+The+Infinite+In+The+Long-Delayed+Film+%27Amazing+Grace%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Music fans have been waiting almost half a century to see a storied documentary that many thought might never see the light of day: \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15662553/aretha-franklin\">Aretha Franklin\u003c/a>‘s \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>. Originally directed by Sydney Pollack and completed by Alan Elliott, the film has been talked about since it was filmed in a Watts, California church in 1972 during the recording sessions for a live album of the same name. Now, 46 years after it was shot, the \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> movie was finally shown in public for the first time Monday, with initial screenings in New York City and more on the way nationwide. (It will be have limited runs in Los Angeles and New York before the end of the year in order to qualify for the 2019 Academy Awards; it’s then expected to go into wider circulation early next year.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a document of an iconic musician’s skills, the film is essential. But \u003cem>Amazing Grace \u003c/em>is far more than that: Watching it is a transcendent, spine-tingling, uplifting, utterly joyous experience. As cherished as the album version has been since its release, the film is nothing short of a revelation, soaring from one chill-inducing moment to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recorded over two January nights at Watts’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, \u003cem>Amazing Grace \u003c/em>marked Franklin’s thrilling return to her gospel roots after she’d earned 11 consecutive No. 1 pop and R&B singles, won five Grammys and released more than 20 albums. (In a marketing plan that must have made demographic sense at the time but now seems almost unfathomably tone-deaf, Warner Bros. originally planned to pair the \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> movie with \u003cem>Superfly\u003c/em> as a theatrical double-bill.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short order, the album version became a classic: It went double-platinum and remains one of the biggest-selling recordings in gospel music history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marvin Gaye, whose “Wholy Holy” Franklin covers on \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>, told her biographer, David Ritz, that the album is “Aretha’s singular masterpiece … her greatest work.” And it’s with “Wholy Holy” that Franklin begins her performance, seated at the piano, with plushly arranged vocals from the choir backing her. It sets the reverent mood for the sessions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That sense of shared spiritual experience, a communion of believers and their God, is what defines \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> — a project recorded not in a studio, but in a living church. Moreover, Franklin is surrounded by a community that she understands innately, says Aaron Cohen, who saw the film’s raw footage about a decade ago at Elliott’s invitation. Cohen is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, as well as the author of a 2011 \u003ca href=\"https://bloomsbury.com/us/aretha-franklins-amazing-grace-9781441148889\">book\u003c/a> about the album \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cohen says it’s essential to understand the community in which Franklin chose to record: the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, which, just six and a half years earlier, had \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4795093\">exploded\u003c/a> in riots. The unrest — which stemmed from deep-seated anger in the community over high unemployment, poor medical care, inferior housing, bad schools and tensions with police — left 34 people dead, hundreds injured and the neighborhood devastated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13844893\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13844893 size-large\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-1020x720.jpg\" alt=\"Singer Aretha Franklin in a still from the documentary Amazing Grace.\" width=\"640\" height=\"452\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-1020x720.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-160x113.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-800x564.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-768x542.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-960x677.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-240x169.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-375x265.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220-520x367.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/amazing_grace_still_custom-29f6045ad5d7dd881d6e19729a762c7711791220.jpg 1032w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Singer Aretha Franklin in a still from the documentary Amazing Grace. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Al's Records And Tapes)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The film shows not just Aretha performing,” he says, “but also this congregation and what it was like to be in a church in Watts in the early ’70s, in the post-civil rights era, in a time when the community was redirecting its energy and deciding where to go next. I believe you can feel that,” he continues, “through the music, through what she’s singing in ‘How I Got Over'” — a song that Clara Ward’s sister \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130827-a-song-that-made-america-believe\">claimed\u003c/a> was inspired by a specific incident of racial bullying that the family experienced, but whose lyrics were a touchstone for many black Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In David Ritz’s standalone biography of Franklin, 2014’s \u003cem>Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin\u003c/em>, the singer’s late brother Cecil strikes a similar tone. “I see [\u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em>] as the sacred moment in the life of black people,” he told Ritz. “Think back. We had lost Martin; we had lost Malcolm; we had lost Bobby Kennedy. We were still fighting an immoral war. We had Tricky Dick in the White House. Turmoil, anger, corruption, confusion. We needed reassurance and recommitment. We needed redirection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As dramatic as the footage is, the \u003cem>Amazing Grace \u003c/em>documentary was plagued by troubles from the outset. The film of the recording sessions was made at the behest of Warner Bros. (the parent company of Franklin’s label, Atlantic Records), which hired actor and director Sydney Pollack to create it. Pollack, who had recently earned his first Oscar nomination (for \u003cem>They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?\u003c/em>), was still green enough as a director to forget an essential need in the pre-digital era: clapper boards to mark the starting points of the visual and audio elements of the film, meaning that what one saw and what one heard were out of sync. The screw-up was so bad that the 20 hours of footage were deemed useless, and the film was jettisoned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pollack reportedly \u003ca href=\"https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sydney-pollacks-amazing-grace-tortured-820294\">dreamed\u003c/a> of returning to the material, but that never came to fruition. There were other attempts, though. “It was a very tedious and long process. Initially they tried, and they only got through about 20 feet of film and they gave up,” Franklin’s niece and the executor of her estate, Sabrina Owens, tells NPR. “And so it ended up on somebody’s cutting floor somewhere for years — for decades, actually.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, a former Atlantic A&R staffer-turned-producer named Alan Elliott took up the cause of seeing the \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> film through, and by around 2010 had painstakingly matched the movie with the sound. But Franklin wouldn’t allow the documentary to be released. In 2011, she sued Elliott on the grounds of using her likeness without her permission. In 2015, she sued \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/04/437648259/aretha-franklin-blocks-premiere-of-concert-film-amazing-grace\">again\u003c/a> to prevent the film from being screened at the Telluride Film Festival.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elliott was tenacious, however. In the weeks after Franklin’s death in August, he persuaded her family to let the film be released at long last. Owens says it started with a call she received from Elliott. “He asked if he could come and preview the film for friends and family,” she recalls. “I said yes. They previewed it for us at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History [in Detroit] before about 40 or 50 family members, and we all delighted in what we saw.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of that pleasure is in seeing Franklin work alongside her colleagues; these are musicians who innately feel each other, who are able to anticipate each other’s every move. Franklin had a crack team of collaborators, including her band of stellar players (Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums, guitarist Cornell Dupree and bassist Chuck Rainey). The backing choir was directed by Rev. James Cleveland, who had formerly served as the minister of music at Aretha’s father’s church, New Bethel Baptist in Detroit, and was one of Franklin’s mentors and a gospel-music giant in his own right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, as \u003cem>Amazing Grace\u003c/em> abundantly demonstrates, his Southern California Community Choir was an extraordinary ensemble — a group which Franklin called “one of the best anywhere” in the 1999 autobiography, \u003cem>From These Roots\u003c/em>, which she co-wrote with author David Ritz. Cleveland also serves as the genial emcee for the recording sessions. (At the start of the first night, he reminds the people in attendance that this is a church service taking place in the Lord’s house — but adds at the beginning of the second session, “Don’t be bashful when the camera comes your way … so while it comin’ your way, get in on it, all right?!”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no narrative to the film, and — aside from nothing more of a glimpse of a rehearsal — no behind-the-scenes segments to make viewers feel as if they’re learning more about Franklin’s process or gaining insights into her day-to-day life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, what viewers bear witness to is the \u003cem>work\u003c/em> of creating ecstasy: the rivers of sweat on Franklin and Cleveland, the eye makeup streaking down her face. The you-are-there framing keeps a close watch on Aretha as she swoops and sweeps with the greatest of ease, skipping between dizzying runs and effortless slides that remind you of what a masterful jazz singer she was. We see mental wheels spinning as Cleveland and Alexander Hamilton, the assistant choir director, keep driving the choir into ever-greater surges of emotion while keeping them immaculately tight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moreover, the film captures the breathtaking force of feeling from both artists and congregants. Near the end of the song “Amazing Grace,” for which Cleveland has been accompanying Franklin on the piano, he slides off the piano bench, giving his space to Hamilton, and surrenders to shoulder-heaving sobs, rocking himself back and forth in a congregational seat. He’s not the only one — by this point, audience and performers alike are wiping tears from their faces — and when Franklin herself sinks down into a seat at the song’s conclusion, she well may be weeping, too. But her face is so sparkling with perspiration, it’s impossible to tell for sure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sabrina Owens says that such moments reveal an intimate facet of the resplendent Queen of Soul. “I think that seeing her in this setting helps them to understand Aretha as a person,” she says. “She came from the church. She is a daughter of the church. Her faith was so strong and she just loved gospel music. And I think seeing her in this element, it has to make you feel \u003cem>something\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Franklin was surrounded by family at these performances. There are some beautiful moments between Franklin and her father, the famed preacher Rev. C.L. Franklin, who comes to the second night’s session to sit in the front row alongside gospel legend Clara Ward, one of Aretha Franklin’s closest guides and her father’s longtime girlfriend. Ward seems caught between delight and other feelings — wistfulness? melancholy? — as Franklin, nearly 20 years younger, wails “Never Grow Old” from the piano a few feet away. Meanwhile, Clara Ward’s mother, Gertrude, the founder of the Ward Singers, appears to faint a short distance away, as Pollack gestures wildly to his cameramen to capture the scene. (There were at least a couple of other celebrities in attendance that night: The cameras alight upon Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones at the back of the congregation.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During that second night of recording, Franklin watches her father with shining eyes as he mounts the pulpit to wax ecstatic about her talents. After delivering remarks in his stentorian, mahogany tones, he gleefully tells the congregation, “She is a \u003cem>stone\u003c/em> singer,” while she melts into a smile. But in a gesture and response intimately familiar to generations of parents and children, we also see a flicker of annoyance in the nearly 30-year-old’s fleetingly pursed lips as her father, apparently unbidden, daubs some perspiration off her face while she sings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those kinds of understated and elemental moments, Sabrina Owens says, is what makes the film so special. “It was just Aretha standing there singing,” she says. “In her element, in a church setting, just doing what she does.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Aretha+Franklin+Touches+The+Infinite+In+The+Long-Delayed+Film+%27Amazing+Grace%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>When he’s not busy on a movie set, Jeff Goldblum owns Wednesday nights in Los Angeles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/664380882/666038529\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The actor, known for roles in Hollywood blockbusters and a singular, chin-stroking comic persona, plays piano in a jazz band with a standing weekly gig, which he calls The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. The performances are casual and unstructured, with the man of the hour playing keys one moment, holding court and posing for photos with attendees the next, just generally being … well, Jeff Goldblum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”cC8tpilx6wNodlavn9rqJiyEMm49iTkO”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR’s David Greene joined Goldblum to talk about \u003cem>The Capitol Studios Sessions\u003c/em>, an album that captures the live show by recreating it — bringing a stage, a buffet, a live audience and guest stars including comedian Sarah Silverman into the storied recording space.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview Highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On discovering jazz as a teenager\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of these chords started to do something to me that I hadn’t experienced before, and that was just delicious to me — when I discovered that blues scale, my God. So I learned a little bit about that, and got to start to play things. And then — listen to this, what a strange boy I was — one day when I was 15, I locked the door from the inside in our study, where I didn’t think anybody would find me, hear me or bother me. Got the yellow pages, looked up cocktail lounges, and starting with A and going down to Z, I cold-called. I thought I was some kind of scammy salesman or something like that. And I said, “Hi, I understand you need a piano player.” Most of them would say, “No, you’ve been misinformed” — hang up on you. [But] some would say, “Well, jeez … we have a piano. Nobody’s been playing it. You play?” And so I did, and I got a couple of jobs. It was magical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how his two creative practices affect one another\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a cross-training aspect of this, so that my music, I’m just doing it for fun, without nerves really. It has bled over into my acting experience. … I didn’t [used to] feel like a fraud exactly, but I felt like I had to shock myself into functionality. I felt I had to rearrange my molecules and achieve some kind of condition of freedom or aliveness, in order to be worthy of participation in some show or another. The seeds of me knowing myself were there, but it was unformed and underdeveloped, and I had good reason to be scared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the social element of his jazz shows\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has become kind of an improvised show, where I commune with people and meet them, and interesting people show up. It’s kind of a living room experience that we turn it into. No one’s turning on the lights or introducing me; I kind of start talking and taking pictures with them and finding out who they are and playing games with them, which I like to do. Everything is sort of playful. … People seem to get a kick out of it. And then I go on my Instagram account the next day, see if they’ve posted anything … see how I looked the night before, see how they looked. See if they’re people I can remember. “Oh, yeah. They were nice.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Jeff+Goldblum+The+Jazz+Artist%3F+Life%2C+Uh%2C+Finds+A+Way&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of these chords started to do something to me that I hadn’t experienced before, and that was just delicious to me — when I discovered that blues scale, my God. So I learned a little bit about that, and got to start to play things. And then — listen to this, what a strange boy I was — one day when I was 15, I locked the door from the inside in our study, where I didn’t think anybody would find me, hear me or bother me. Got the yellow pages, looked up cocktail lounges, and starting with A and going down to Z, I cold-called. I thought I was some kind of scammy salesman or something like that. And I said, “Hi, I understand you need a piano player.” Most of them would say, “No, you’ve been misinformed” — hang up on you. [But] some would say, “Well, jeez … we have a piano. Nobody’s been playing it. You play?” And so I did, and I got a couple of jobs. It was magical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how his two creative practices affect one another\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a cross-training aspect of this, so that my music, I’m just doing it for fun, without nerves really. It has bled over into my acting experience. … I didn’t [used to] feel like a fraud exactly, but I felt like I had to shock myself into functionality. I felt I had to rearrange my molecules and achieve some kind of condition of freedom or aliveness, in order to be worthy of participation in some show or another. The seeds of me knowing myself were there, but it was unformed and underdeveloped, and I had good reason to be scared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the social element of his jazz shows\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has become kind of an improvised show, where I commune with people and meet them, and interesting people show up. It’s kind of a living room experience that we turn it into. No one’s turning on the lights or introducing me; I kind of start talking and taking pictures with them and finding out who they are and playing games with them, which I like to do. Everything is sort of playful. … People seem to get a kick out of it. And then I go on my Instagram account the next day, see if they’ve posted anything … see how I looked the night before, see how they looked. See if they’re people I can remember. “Oh, yeah. They were nice.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Jeff+Goldblum+The+Jazz+Artist%3F+Life%2C+Uh%2C+Finds+A+Way&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>It’s not enough to make list after list. The Turning the Tables project seeks to suggest alternatives to the traditional popular music canon, and to do more than that, too: to stimulate conversation about how hierarchies emerge and endure. This year, Turning the Tables considers how women and non-binary artists are shaping music in our moment, from the pop mainstream to the sinecures of jazz and contemporary classical music. Our list of the 200 Greatest Songs By Women+ offers a soundtrack to a new century. This series of essays takes on another task.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The 25 arguments writers make in these pieces challenge the usual definitions of influence. Some rethink the building legacies of popular artists; others celebrate those who create within subcultures, their innovations rippling outward over time. As always, women forge new pathways in sound; today, they also make waves under the surface of culture by confronting, in their music, the increased fluidity of “woman” itself. What is a woman? It’s a timeless question on the surface, but one deeply engaged with whatever historical moment in which it is asked. Our 25 Most Influential Women+ Musicians of the 21st Century illuminate its complexities. —Ann Powers\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>On the day after Halloween 2014, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/504998599/big-freedia\">Big Freedia\u003c/a>‘s set at the Voodoo Experience festival in New Orleans’ City Park kicked off with a costume extravaganza evoking the French royal court from before Louisiana was purchased. Bedecked in rococo lace, feathers, ribbons and curled wigs, a cadre of dancers flanked their leader in a fierce \u003cem>tableau vivant\u003c/em> tribute to Versailles style (or, perhaps, Madonna circa the 1990 VMAs).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hometown gig was the wrap for a six-week tour that capped off another successful year for Freedia, including more marquee festival gigs, the well-received release of \u003cem>Just Be Free — \u003c/em>Freedia’s first album of new material since the rapper’s 2003 debut \u003cem>Queen Diva\u003c/em> — and a GLAAD Media Award for the Fuse TV reality show “Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce.” The elaborate opening to the Voodoo performance was a big step up in production value from the years’ worth of shows that had more than succeeded on pure athleticism — and a visually literal coronation, on home turf, for the fast-rising star. But in the middle of the triumphant homecoming, the queen was quick to cede the throne to a pair of unannounced guests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”wmItkBRLagwu5CLbBifk5tJUSSVtTMcO”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Showboys were a New York rap duo whose 1986 Profile Records cut “Drag Rap (Trigger Man)” had become a sort of common ancestor for New Orleans bounce music. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, when bounce was taking shape live in nightclubs, “Drag Rap” hit big in New Orleans. When local artists started making original tracks, elements of the song — its booming 808 bass beat, an ominous synthesizer quotation of the \u003cem>Dragnet \u003c/em>theme and especially a tense, repetitive \u003cem>doodoodoodoo \u003c/em>run of short high notes that became known as the “Triggerman bells” — became signatures of the new sound. “Through repetition,” wrote Dr. Matt Miller in his 2012 book \u003cem>Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans\u003c/em>, “the sample has become an icon of the bounce style, to the extent that even in isolation it connotes New Orleans for rap aficionados.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Showboys’ own story should surprise nobody familiar with the vagaries of the music industry; they never got to profit much off their song’s popularity down South in either money or renown. The audience watching Freedia at the 2014 Voodoo, which is mostly a popular rock and EDM festival and not particularly aimed at locals, wasn’t really one to get its mind blown open by the surprise showing. All of that is meant to say: Freedia used one of her moments in an increasingly bright spotlight to put the shine, instead, on the unsung history that came before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a statement about visibility, which is key to Freedia’s mission and influence as an artist — the right to be seen. Big Freedia has always repped New Orleans, the creatively exceptional city that has always resolutely (and, uh, literally) marched to the beat of its own drummer, and the music and culture-makers that make it swing, even deep under the radar. She’s become famous doing it – way more so than any other practitioner of bounce, which for decades was a hyper-regional, street-level sound. In doing so, importantly, she’s amplified New Orleans history (and in an increasingly global pop world, really, the whole \u003cem>idea\u003c/em> of retaining fealty to deep-rooted local identity) to new audiences. And she’s done it by insisting on being her \u003cem>sui generis \u003c/em>self, a gay black man with a feminine stage name and fluid pronouns. You too, Freedia seems to say, should be proud of where you came from and be nothing less than who you are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”196Vw4E6m4hAnG52b9gYA7Af8aVJr8AZ”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though Freedia started out as a backup dancer for her friend Katey Red, a transgender bounce rapper who dropped her first album in 1999, she hit with real force just after Hurricane Katrina. In the wake of the floods, there was tremendous support for music from New Orleans nationally, and both emotional and pragmatic reasons to travel with it for artists: People in exile wanted to hear the sound of home, and with fewer stages in the city, the artists (who were sometimes unstable in their living situations in New Orleans themselves) needed to travel to work. Freedia built a name exponentially, performing a punishing regular schedule in New Orleans and Houston and soon, beyond. She also expanded her reach outside of the traditional Southern hip-hop scene after hooking up with Rusty Lazer, a DJ and drummer for a freaky-jazz cabaret group. On the road with him, Freedia crashed on couches and got introduced to a queer-friendly punk scene that loved to dance. (Fans of Peaches liking Big Freedia — who would have guessed?) Diplo got involved, and so did RuPaul, but the core essence of the sound stayed true: rattling beats and big, joyous, call-and-response shouts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Big Freedia, Diplo, DJ Snake - Drop (Official video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/bHNiNP3hDkU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the same force Freedia uses to command crowds to shake, twerk, wobble and exercise, if you ask the rapper what pronouns are preferred, she’ll tell you to pick. (I am using “she/her” here because those are the ones with which Freedia was introduced to me, somewhere around early 2008.) This fluidity sometimes seems less about Freedia’s own identity – she usually refers to herself as a gay man, when pressed – than a comment on what such labels mean, and whose problem they are. (If you require one, then it’s yours.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That flexibility, too, has precedent in New Orleans, the city that builds its calendar around a lengthy holiday celebrating, in part, the whole idea of being more truly yourself by casting off boring strictures of dress and identity. Big Freedia fits into a grand lineage of black New Orleans performers who made gender identity fall in line behind who they were as artists and as people; for instance, Bobby Marchan, a gay man from Youngstown, Ohio, who arrived in the city with a female impersonators’ troupe called the Powder Box Revue in the late 1940s and made a splash at the New Orleans nitery the Dew Drop Inn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”M9zWrgJV0CpDCiyJcTP6szC8wYud4tbO”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A restaurant, barbershop, and, crucially during the years of Jim Crow, a hotel where marquee black entertainers including Ray Charles and Duke Ellington stayed, the Dew Drop was more than just a stage. As the late Charles Neville put it in authors Jason Berry and Tad Jones’s sweeping postwar New Orleans music history \u003cem>Up From the Cradle of Jazz\u003c/em>, it was a clubhouse where you could find local music royalty at any hour of the day or night – and more than that, it was a place to nourish the spirit in a world that, for black artists, was fraught with danger for black artists plying their trade on the road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Okay, here’s what we wanted to do,” Neville told the writers. “Play music and pit ourselves against all of that. With little places like the Dew Drop, these oases where we could regroup and recover made the music that happened there kind of special. There were things projected into the music there that was not there on the road. There was that sense of security about being there, and that sense of belonging with the strangers who were there, but who were not, in fact, strangers, because they were members of this same order.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The star of the Dew Drop, where Bobby Marchan became a regular patron and performer, was Irving Ale, who performed and presided over the entertainment as mistress of ceremonies Patsy Vidalia. Other out gay artists, like the wild pianists Esquerita and James Booker, were fixtures too, but Marchan is especially notable because of where his long career wound up. After a stint as a soul singer with a few solid hits, Bobby Marchan – who presented on and off as masculine or feminine as it pleased him over the years and liked to use the catchphrase “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, I’m Bobby Marchan!” – settled into a second (third?) act. From the dawn of rap in New Orleans until his death, he was the godfather of New Orleans hip-hop, managing, advising and promoting artists including Mystikal and the Hot Boys. Cash Money Records footed the bill for his 1999 funeral.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All that considered, Freedia didn’t grow up as an artist in a community that necessarily accepted gay or gender-nonconforming artists across the board. There were still doors that were closed to Freedia – or only cracked open a little bit – in the local hip-hop scene for months and years after they would have swung wide open for straight-presenting men or women. But success bred success (an early indicator being, perhaps, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/17682423/lil-wayne\">Lil Wayne\u003c/a> quoting Freedia’s signature early banger “Gin In My System” on a mixtape track) and soon, if counter-intuitively, national write-ups and awards begat total public local embrace. In turn, importantly, that led to greater visibility for younger gay artists on the grassroots New Orleans scene, including the late shooting star Nicky da B – who, like Freedia, was slowly and judiciously bringing dance influences from the wider world into the studio to meet what New Orleanians call That (Dat) Beat. After and because of Freedia, it’s less a city that lets everyone have their own room; it’s a city where everyone is in every room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would be reductive to say that bounce was a hothouse regional ’90s style that Freedia shot new life into, or helped to “cross over,” although both ideas have some truth to them. Could any other artist have done it? Years before \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/250250872/drake\">Drake \u003c/a>worked with Freedia and her longtime producer BlaqNMild on the hit “Nice for What,” or \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/19230778/beyonce\">Beyoncé \u003c/a>hired her to lend that unmistakable bellow to “Formation,” top-selling artists were borrowing the sound – Bey on “Get Me Bodied,” for example, or T.I. collaborating with Lil Wayne on “Ball,” with its musical tip of the hat to the Triggerman bells and a video shot in the streets of Hollygrove, a stylistic throwback to the ’90s glory days of Cash Money videos. The imprimatur of the big guns takes Freedia, and her steadfast New Orleans identity, even more global, linking her to the biggest names in popular music (Freedia, in a “Formation”-referencing wide-brimmed black hat, introduced the Queen B herself onstage at the Superdome at the end of 2016; Lil Wayne invited her into his pantheon of guests and acknowledged influences at multiple Lil Weezyana Fests.) And she gives back, too: Any international star gets deep, regional, block-level terroir from Freedia, a singular factor. How could you see someone who loves and trusts herself so much and \u003cem>not\u003c/em> follow them to the dance floor?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”uFEdcByMLtnO6mVBr3TH3h7ido2axI1y”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An oasis is by definition rare; it wouldn’t be so refreshing if the land surrounding it weren’t so barren. It’d be nice to think that the world out there is safer than when Charles Neville identified the Dew Drop as one, a place where you could finally relax enough to make your art, be yourself, shake it off. Either way, in solid New Orleans tradition, every Big Freedia show is a mobile oasis — pushing back the desert beat by beat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Big+Freedia+Is+The+21st+Century%27s+Ambassador+Of+Freedom&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>It’s not enough to make list after list. The Turning the Tables project seeks to suggest alternatives to the traditional popular music canon, and to do more than that, too: to stimulate conversation about how hierarchies emerge and endure. This year, Turning the Tables considers how women and non-binary artists are shaping music in our moment, from the pop mainstream to the sinecures of jazz and contemporary classical music. Our list of the 200 Greatest Songs By Women+ offers a soundtrack to a new century. This series of essays takes on another task.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The 25 arguments writers make in these pieces challenge the usual definitions of influence. Some rethink the building legacies of popular artists; others celebrate those who create within subcultures, their innovations rippling outward over time. As always, women forge new pathways in sound; today, they also make waves under the surface of culture by confronting, in their music, the increased fluidity of “woman” itself. What is a woman? It’s a timeless question on the surface, but one deeply engaged with whatever historical moment in which it is asked. Our 25 Most Influential Women+ Musicians of the 21st Century illuminate its complexities. —Ann Powers\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>On the day after Halloween 2014, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/504998599/big-freedia\">Big Freedia\u003c/a>‘s set at the Voodoo Experience festival in New Orleans’ City Park kicked off with a costume extravaganza evoking the French royal court from before Louisiana was purchased. Bedecked in rococo lace, feathers, ribbons and curled wigs, a cadre of dancers flanked their leader in a fierce \u003cem>tableau vivant\u003c/em> tribute to Versailles style (or, perhaps, Madonna circa the 1990 VMAs).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hometown gig was the wrap for a six-week tour that capped off another successful year for Freedia, including more marquee festival gigs, the well-received release of \u003cem>Just Be Free — \u003c/em>Freedia’s first album of new material since the rapper’s 2003 debut \u003cem>Queen Diva\u003c/em> — and a GLAAD Media Award for the Fuse TV reality show “Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce.” The elaborate opening to the Voodoo performance was a big step up in production value from the years’ worth of shows that had more than succeeded on pure athleticism — and a visually literal coronation, on home turf, for the fast-rising star. But in the middle of the triumphant homecoming, the queen was quick to cede the throne to a pair of unannounced guests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Showboys were a New York rap duo whose 1986 Profile Records cut “Drag Rap (Trigger Man)” had become a sort of common ancestor for New Orleans bounce music. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, when bounce was taking shape live in nightclubs, “Drag Rap” hit big in New Orleans. When local artists started making original tracks, elements of the song — its booming 808 bass beat, an ominous synthesizer quotation of the \u003cem>Dragnet \u003c/em>theme and especially a tense, repetitive \u003cem>doodoodoodoo \u003c/em>run of short high notes that became known as the “Triggerman bells” — became signatures of the new sound. “Through repetition,” wrote Dr. Matt Miller in his 2012 book \u003cem>Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans\u003c/em>, “the sample has become an icon of the bounce style, to the extent that even in isolation it connotes New Orleans for rap aficionados.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Showboys’ own story should surprise nobody familiar with the vagaries of the music industry; they never got to profit much off their song’s popularity down South in either money or renown. The audience watching Freedia at the 2014 Voodoo, which is mostly a popular rock and EDM festival and not particularly aimed at locals, wasn’t really one to get its mind blown open by the surprise showing. All of that is meant to say: Freedia used one of her moments in an increasingly bright spotlight to put the shine, instead, on the unsung history that came before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a statement about visibility, which is key to Freedia’s mission and influence as an artist — the right to be seen. Big Freedia has always repped New Orleans, the creatively exceptional city that has always resolutely (and, uh, literally) marched to the beat of its own drummer, and the music and culture-makers that make it swing, even deep under the radar. She’s become famous doing it – way more so than any other practitioner of bounce, which for decades was a hyper-regional, street-level sound. In doing so, importantly, she’s amplified New Orleans history (and in an increasingly global pop world, really, the whole \u003cem>idea\u003c/em> of retaining fealty to deep-rooted local identity) to new audiences. And she’s done it by insisting on being her \u003cem>sui generis \u003c/em>self, a gay black man with a feminine stage name and fluid pronouns. You too, Freedia seems to say, should be proud of where you came from and be nothing less than who you are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though Freedia started out as a backup dancer for her friend Katey Red, a transgender bounce rapper who dropped her first album in 1999, she hit with real force just after Hurricane Katrina. In the wake of the floods, there was tremendous support for music from New Orleans nationally, and both emotional and pragmatic reasons to travel with it for artists: People in exile wanted to hear the sound of home, and with fewer stages in the city, the artists (who were sometimes unstable in their living situations in New Orleans themselves) needed to travel to work. Freedia built a name exponentially, performing a punishing regular schedule in New Orleans and Houston and soon, beyond. She also expanded her reach outside of the traditional Southern hip-hop scene after hooking up with Rusty Lazer, a DJ and drummer for a freaky-jazz cabaret group. On the road with him, Freedia crashed on couches and got introduced to a queer-friendly punk scene that loved to dance. (Fans of Peaches liking Big Freedia — who would have guessed?) Diplo got involved, and so did RuPaul, but the core essence of the sound stayed true: rattling beats and big, joyous, call-and-response shouts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Big Freedia, Diplo, DJ Snake - Drop (Official video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/bHNiNP3hDkU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the same force Freedia uses to command crowds to shake, twerk, wobble and exercise, if you ask the rapper what pronouns are preferred, she’ll tell you to pick. (I am using “she/her” here because those are the ones with which Freedia was introduced to me, somewhere around early 2008.) This fluidity sometimes seems less about Freedia’s own identity – she usually refers to herself as a gay man, when pressed – than a comment on what such labels mean, and whose problem they are. (If you require one, then it’s yours.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That flexibility, too, has precedent in New Orleans, the city that builds its calendar around a lengthy holiday celebrating, in part, the whole idea of being more truly yourself by casting off boring strictures of dress and identity. Big Freedia fits into a grand lineage of black New Orleans performers who made gender identity fall in line behind who they were as artists and as people; for instance, Bobby Marchan, a gay man from Youngstown, Ohio, who arrived in the city with a female impersonators’ troupe called the Powder Box Revue in the late 1940s and made a splash at the New Orleans nitery the Dew Drop Inn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A restaurant, barbershop, and, crucially during the years of Jim Crow, a hotel where marquee black entertainers including Ray Charles and Duke Ellington stayed, the Dew Drop was more than just a stage. As the late Charles Neville put it in authors Jason Berry and Tad Jones’s sweeping postwar New Orleans music history \u003cem>Up From the Cradle of Jazz\u003c/em>, it was a clubhouse where you could find local music royalty at any hour of the day or night – and more than that, it was a place to nourish the spirit in a world that, for black artists, was fraught with danger for black artists plying their trade on the road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Okay, here’s what we wanted to do,” Neville told the writers. “Play music and pit ourselves against all of that. With little places like the Dew Drop, these oases where we could regroup and recover made the music that happened there kind of special. There were things projected into the music there that was not there on the road. There was that sense of security about being there, and that sense of belonging with the strangers who were there, but who were not, in fact, strangers, because they were members of this same order.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The star of the Dew Drop, where Bobby Marchan became a regular patron and performer, was Irving Ale, who performed and presided over the entertainment as mistress of ceremonies Patsy Vidalia. Other out gay artists, like the wild pianists Esquerita and James Booker, were fixtures too, but Marchan is especially notable because of where his long career wound up. After a stint as a soul singer with a few solid hits, Bobby Marchan – who presented on and off as masculine or feminine as it pleased him over the years and liked to use the catchphrase “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, I’m Bobby Marchan!” – settled into a second (third?) act. From the dawn of rap in New Orleans until his death, he was the godfather of New Orleans hip-hop, managing, advising and promoting artists including Mystikal and the Hot Boys. Cash Money Records footed the bill for his 1999 funeral.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All that considered, Freedia didn’t grow up as an artist in a community that necessarily accepted gay or gender-nonconforming artists across the board. There were still doors that were closed to Freedia – or only cracked open a little bit – in the local hip-hop scene for months and years after they would have swung wide open for straight-presenting men or women. But success bred success (an early indicator being, perhaps, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/17682423/lil-wayne\">Lil Wayne\u003c/a> quoting Freedia’s signature early banger “Gin In My System” on a mixtape track) and soon, if counter-intuitively, national write-ups and awards begat total public local embrace. In turn, importantly, that led to greater visibility for younger gay artists on the grassroots New Orleans scene, including the late shooting star Nicky da B – who, like Freedia, was slowly and judiciously bringing dance influences from the wider world into the studio to meet what New Orleanians call That (Dat) Beat. After and because of Freedia, it’s less a city that lets everyone have their own room; it’s a city where everyone is in every room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would be reductive to say that bounce was a hothouse regional ’90s style that Freedia shot new life into, or helped to “cross over,” although both ideas have some truth to them. Could any other artist have done it? Years before \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/250250872/drake\">Drake \u003c/a>worked with Freedia and her longtime producer BlaqNMild on the hit “Nice for What,” or \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/19230778/beyonce\">Beyoncé \u003c/a>hired her to lend that unmistakable bellow to “Formation,” top-selling artists were borrowing the sound – Bey on “Get Me Bodied,” for example, or T.I. collaborating with Lil Wayne on “Ball,” with its musical tip of the hat to the Triggerman bells and a video shot in the streets of Hollygrove, a stylistic throwback to the ’90s glory days of Cash Money videos. The imprimatur of the big guns takes Freedia, and her steadfast New Orleans identity, even more global, linking her to the biggest names in popular music (Freedia, in a “Formation”-referencing wide-brimmed black hat, introduced the Queen B herself onstage at the Superdome at the end of 2016; Lil Wayne invited her into his pantheon of guests and acknowledged influences at multiple Lil Weezyana Fests.) And she gives back, too: Any international star gets deep, regional, block-level terroir from Freedia, a singular factor. How could you see someone who loves and trusts herself so much and \u003cem>not\u003c/em> follow them to the dance floor?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An oasis is by definition rare; it wouldn’t be so refreshing if the land surrounding it weren’t so barren. It’d be nice to think that the world out there is safer than when Charles Neville identified the Dew Drop as one, a place where you could finally relax enough to make your art, be yourself, shake it off. Either way, in solid New Orleans tradition, every Big Freedia show is a mobile oasis — pushing back the desert beat by beat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Big+Freedia+Is+The+21st+Century%27s+Ambassador+Of+Freedom&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">I prefer to read books without knowing anything about them. In the case of \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little\u003c/em>\u003c/i>, I didn’t need to know anything besides the fact that Edward Carey wrote it; I’ve loved and reviewed every volume in his \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Iremonger\u003c/em>\u003c/i> trilogy, a series in which people are in constant danger of turning into things, used and traded and thrown away, but sometimes prone to revolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">In \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little\u003c/em>\u003c/i>—a project fifteen years in the making, that began before the first \u003cem>Iremonger\u003c/em> volume was published and ended after the trilogy concluded—Carey again approaches themes of personhood and power, objects and their subjects, but rooted this time in real history: the years leading up to the French Revolution and its aftermath.[contextly_sidebar id=”uT7y32GtnSN6pQZHFheJdWjI6j6hmCle”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anne Marie Grosholtz—known as Little for her small stature—is born to a mother with a strong nose and a father with a strong chin, inheriting both their distinguishing features before losing her father to war, her mother to suicide. Orphaned at the age of six, she’s apprenticed to a solitary man named Curtius, a maker of anatomical models who’s accustomed to being shunned for his gruesome skill. Marie, however, is not put off, and Curtius introduces her to the craft by casting Marie’s face in wax—a departure from his usual modelling of internal organs. Once people begin to see themselves in Curtius’ work, they clamor for it, forcing Curtius and Marie flee to Paris, where they meet a cruel widow and her shy son, and together begin a tense and profitable household business of modeling notable people and dressing them in the widow’s handiwork. But as the revolution approaches, fashions change, and so do the relationships between people and the representations of nobility and notability: People steal wax heads to deface in the absence of their originals—until, eventually, they can lay hands on those originals.[contextly_sidebar id=”C0e8DnuI9UqSKhB3R4TMs4chG1wKIurC”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">It took me until the end of the book to realize this wasn’t a fantasy novel, but a work of historical fiction telling the origin story of Madame Tussaud. It took me that long because the book’s affect, its style, its concerns, its sadness and loneliness and empathy, were so thoroughly those of Carey’s fantasy series that I was left thinking helplessly about how inadequate are our conversations about genre. \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little \u003c/em>\u003c/i>is written as a memoir, told in phases of Marie’s life from childhood through adulthood, illustrated throughout by Carey in ways that allow the fantastical to both ease and trouble reality; when her mother hangs herself, Marie draws a broken-necked bird in her place. The slipperiness between people and things that I so admired in \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Heap House\u003c/em>\u003c/i> is everywhere here, but inviting us to observe how thoroughly history teems with it—what is a subject, and what an object? In language and in life, these words shift and tumble against and polish each other. A king has subjects, whom he subjects to oppression, until they object so fiercely that they make an object of him. And where does wax come in? What is pressed into it along with a body’s lines?[contextly_sidebar id=”Ze6F8TQpKbfrAU85Wd682tnFXU8X7lRf”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">I marvel at the achievement of this book, even as I regret it. I didn’t want this to be about Madame Tussaud; I didn’t want the character of Marie, whom I loved as a fantasy, to resolve into a woman who really existed, who has written her own memoirs in her own voice that isn’t Little’s. I loved this book best when it showed me, with its stylized dialogue, its garroting commas, its punctuating illustrations, history as an art form, history as an argument. I loved it less when the Revolution began in earnest, and Marie’s narrative began to be swallowed into the gravity well of history as facts, history as a litany of horrors somehow less moving than the Widow Picot’s obsessive cruelty, Curtius’ oblivious neglect, the monstrosity and tenderness of Versailles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/04/madame-tussaud-edward-carey-little\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Writing for the \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, and speaking of having worked at Madame Tussaud’s once upon a time, Carey observes that “At its heart, Tussaud’s isn’t about history: it’s a museum of the human body.” \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little\u003c/em>\u003c/i> isn’t about history either; it’s about humans, and bodies, and art, and loneliness, and it’s deeply, painfully sad. I could talk about it forever. I’ll stop here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"http://amalelmohtar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amal El-Mohtar\u003c/a> \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">is the Hugo Award-winning author of\u003c/em>\u003c/i> The Honey Month \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">and the editor of \u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"http://www.goblinfruit.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Goblin Fruit\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">, an online poetry magazine.\u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR.org\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">I prefer to read books without knowing anything about them. In the case of \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little\u003c/em>\u003c/i>, I didn’t need to know anything besides the fact that Edward Carey wrote it; I’ve loved and reviewed every volume in his \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Iremonger\u003c/em>\u003c/i> trilogy, a series in which people are in constant danger of turning into things, used and traded and thrown away, but sometimes prone to revolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">In \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little\u003c/em>\u003c/i>—a project fifteen years in the making, that began before the first \u003cem>Iremonger\u003c/em> volume was published and ended after the trilogy concluded—Carey again approaches themes of personhood and power, objects and their subjects, but rooted this time in real history: the years leading up to the French Revolution and its aftermath.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anne Marie Grosholtz—known as Little for her small stature—is born to a mother with a strong nose and a father with a strong chin, inheriting both their distinguishing features before losing her father to war, her mother to suicide. Orphaned at the age of six, she’s apprenticed to a solitary man named Curtius, a maker of anatomical models who’s accustomed to being shunned for his gruesome skill. Marie, however, is not put off, and Curtius introduces her to the craft by casting Marie’s face in wax—a departure from his usual modelling of internal organs. Once people begin to see themselves in Curtius’ work, they clamor for it, forcing Curtius and Marie flee to Paris, where they meet a cruel widow and her shy son, and together begin a tense and profitable household business of modeling notable people and dressing them in the widow’s handiwork. But as the revolution approaches, fashions change, and so do the relationships between people and the representations of nobility and notability: People steal wax heads to deface in the absence of their originals—until, eventually, they can lay hands on those originals.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">It took me until the end of the book to realize this wasn’t a fantasy novel, but a work of historical fiction telling the origin story of Madame Tussaud. It took me that long because the book’s affect, its style, its concerns, its sadness and loneliness and empathy, were so thoroughly those of Carey’s fantasy series that I was left thinking helplessly about how inadequate are our conversations about genre. \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little \u003c/em>\u003c/i>is written as a memoir, told in phases of Marie’s life from childhood through adulthood, illustrated throughout by Carey in ways that allow the fantastical to both ease and trouble reality; when her mother hangs herself, Marie draws a broken-necked bird in her place. The slipperiness between people and things that I so admired in \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Heap House\u003c/em>\u003c/i> is everywhere here, but inviting us to observe how thoroughly history teems with it—what is a subject, and what an object? In language and in life, these words shift and tumble against and polish each other. A king has subjects, whom he subjects to oppression, until they object so fiercely that they make an object of him. And where does wax come in? What is pressed into it along with a body’s lines?\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">I marvel at the achievement of this book, even as I regret it. I didn’t want this to be about Madame Tussaud; I didn’t want the character of Marie, whom I loved as a fantasy, to resolve into a woman who really existed, who has written her own memoirs in her own voice that isn’t Little’s. I loved this book best when it showed me, with its stylized dialogue, its garroting commas, its punctuating illustrations, history as an art form, history as an argument. I loved it less when the Revolution began in earnest, and Marie’s narrative began to be swallowed into the gravity well of history as facts, history as a litany of horrors somehow less moving than the Widow Picot’s obsessive cruelty, Curtius’ oblivious neglect, the monstrosity and tenderness of Versailles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/04/madame-tussaud-edward-carey-little\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Writing for the \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, and speaking of having worked at Madame Tussaud’s once upon a time, Carey observes that “At its heart, Tussaud’s isn’t about history: it’s a museum of the human body.” \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Little\u003c/em>\u003c/i> isn’t about history either; it’s about humans, and bodies, and art, and loneliness, and it’s deeply, painfully sad. I could talk about it forever. I’ll stop here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"http://amalelmohtar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amal El-Mohtar\u003c/a> \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">is the Hugo Award-winning author of\u003c/em>\u003c/i> The Honey Month \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">and the editor of \u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"http://www.goblinfruit.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Goblin Fruit\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">, an online poetry magazine.\u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR.org\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/658251028/659203378\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Amandla Stenberg prepared for her lead role in the film adaptation of \u003cem>The Hate U Give, \u003c/em>she devoured Angie Thomas’ 2017 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/522191657/the-hate-u-give\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">young adult novel\u003c/a>. “Reading the book became this strange, spiritual thing because it started to feel like I was reading my own diary,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like protagonist Starr Carter, Stenberg grew up in a black neighborhood, but attended an overwhelmingly white school. “I had a very parallel experience,” she says. Stenberg was 10 when she began attending a school across town; she was one of just four black girls in her grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I became really familiar with the experience of being isolated in my ethnicity,” Stenberg says. She found it hard to “show all the way up” or be fully herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I wanted to fit into this space in which the culture was really white and privileged and kind of alternative,” she says. “So I learned how to adapt to that environment in order to feel included.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the movie, Starr also learns to code switch to fit in. “That means flipping a switch in my brain” around her prep school classmates, she says. But she’s proud of where she’s from — Starr “loves her blackness,” Stenberg explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One night, Starr and her childhood friend Khalil are pulled over by a white police officer who shoots Khalil when he mistakes his hairbrush for a weapon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomas \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/02/26/517305270/the-hate-u-give-explores-racism-and-police-violence\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told NPR\u003c/a> she was inspired to write \u003cem>The Hate U Give\u003c/em> after the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant—a young, African-American man who was killed by a white transit officer in Oakland on New Year’s Day in 2009.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grant was unarmed when he was shot, and Thomas was struck by the media coverage that focused on Grant’s criminal record rather than the circumstances of his death. “More people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life,” Thomas said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starr is the only witness to Khalil’s killing. While she wants the police officer to face justice, she’s afraid to speak out. Without giving too much away, she has good reasons for wanting to hold back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Starr’s father doesn’t accept her silence—he raised his children to fight to be heard. He’s taught them the Black Panther’s Ten-Point Program—including “an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people”—and to work for justice “by any means necessary.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So why you gonna be quiet?” he asks Starr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/517305270/517305271\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were special screenings of the film around the country before its official release. Students at Washington, D.C., area public schools had the opportunity to see the film at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tiana Minor, 16, who attends Fauquier High School in Virginia, says society tries to “overlook” or “sugarcoat” issues of racial injustice. She thinks the film will help people open their eyes to what she knows are “real-life problems.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Minor’s classmate, Devon Lewis, 16, says he understands Starr’s reluctance to speak out. “She wants to talk, but she can’t because she just doesn’t have the voice yet,” he says. Lewis adds that he liked the way the father in the story named his daughter “Starr” for “light.” That’s a detail Stenberg likes, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Something that’s so beautiful about black culture is that we give our children power in their names,” Stenberg says. “My name actually means ‘power’ in Zulu and Xhosa. It was something that my mom was very intentional with. I think we recognize that it’s a tough world out there, and so we give our children names that they can use as superpowers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This notion of what you “give your children” is referenced in the title of the book and movie:\u003cem> The Hate U Give\u003c/em>. It comes from Tupac Shakur’s THUG LIFE: The Hate U Give Little Infants F***** Everybody. As Amandla Stenberg says—the love you give is even more powerful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27The+Hate+U+Give%27+Star+Says+The+Novel+Was+Like+%27Reading+My+Own+Diary%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the movie, Starr also learns to code switch to fit in. “That means flipping a switch in my brain” around her prep school classmates, she says. But she’s proud of where she’s from — Starr “loves her blackness,” Stenberg explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One night, Starr and her childhood friend Khalil are pulled over by a white police officer who shoots Khalil when he mistakes his hairbrush for a weapon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomas \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/02/26/517305270/the-hate-u-give-explores-racism-and-police-violence\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told NPR\u003c/a> she was inspired to write \u003cem>The Hate U Give\u003c/em> after the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant—a young, African-American man who was killed by a white transit officer in Oakland on New Year’s Day in 2009.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grant was unarmed when he was shot, and Thomas was struck by the media coverage that focused on Grant’s criminal record rather than the circumstances of his death. “More people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life,” Thomas said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starr is the only witness to Khalil’s killing. While she wants the police officer to face justice, she’s afraid to speak out. Without giving too much away, she has good reasons for wanting to hold back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Starr’s father doesn’t accept her silence—he raised his children to fight to be heard. He’s taught them the Black Panther’s Ten-Point Program—including “an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people”—and to work for justice “by any means necessary.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So why you gonna be quiet?” he asks Starr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/517305270/517305271\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were special screenings of the film around the country before its official release. Students at Washington, D.C., area public schools had the opportunity to see the film at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tiana Minor, 16, who attends Fauquier High School in Virginia, says society tries to “overlook” or “sugarcoat” issues of racial injustice. She thinks the film will help people open their eyes to what she knows are “real-life problems.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Minor’s classmate, Devon Lewis, 16, says he understands Starr’s reluctance to speak out. “She wants to talk, but she can’t because she just doesn’t have the voice yet,” he says. Lewis adds that he liked the way the father in the story named his daughter “Starr” for “light.” That’s a detail Stenberg likes, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Something that’s so beautiful about black culture is that we give our children power in their names,” Stenberg says. “My name actually means ‘power’ in Zulu and Xhosa. It was something that my mom was very intentional with. I think we recognize that it’s a tough world out there, and so we give our children names that they can use as superpowers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This notion of what you “give your children” is referenced in the title of the book and movie:\u003cem> The Hate U Give\u003c/em>. It comes from Tupac Shakur’s THUG LIFE: The Hate U Give Little Infants F***** Everybody. As Amandla Stenberg says—the love you give is even more powerful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27The+Hate+U+Give%27+Star+Says+The+Novel+Was+Like+%27Reading+My+Own+Diary%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Trauma is not neat and pretty to deal with; it is not easily diagnosed, it does not vanish on its own, and its lingering effects can touch those around us. In the latest sequel to the long and winding \u003cem>Halloween \u003c/em>series, trauma plays an important role in the narrative arc of famed final girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). You might remember her from the original 1978 John Carpenter film, which saw her screaming, running, discovering her friends brutally murdered, then fending off a serial killer to protect the kids she was babysitting. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2018 sequel picks up several decades later, and while it largely conforms to the retro thrills of the “serial killer on the loose” subgenre, it makes something interesting out of Laurie’s earlier experience. In this film, trauma and survivor’s guilt are not swept under the rug, as often happens in sequels. Instead, Laurie’s experience shapes her behavior and her relationship with both her loved ones and the wider world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Horror movies have lightly toyed with a character’s trauma for dramatic effect before. In Neil Marshall’s \u003cem>The Descent\u003c/em>, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) tries to cope with the loss of her family in an accident by reuniting with friends and taking a girl’s trip. Things go terribly wrong on the group’s cave-diving adventure, and the memory of her daughter as well as her survivor’s guilt haunt her as she fights off cannibalistic monsters. Wes Craven’s \u003cem>Scream \u003c/em>features Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) struggling to cope with her mother’s murder. When a similar killer starts attacking her classmates, it brings her worst fears back to her doorstep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in this present-day \u003cem>Halloween\u003c/em>, directed by David Gordon Green, trauma is no mere plot device; it’s the film’s explicit subject. Laurie has become a virtual hermit, closing herself off from a world that saw her more like a freak show than a survivor. She’s quick to shut out journalists looking to make a sensational story out of her experience. In this timeline, which skips all of the other sequels, Laurie arms herself in case serial killer Michael Myers returns. She teaches her daughter how to survive, how to shoot, and when to seek shelter in the family panic room. She’s trying to inoculate her daughter from fully inheriting her trauma, as when young women are taught to walk to their cars with their keys between their fingers. This \u003cem>Halloween \u003c/em>sets out to explore the emotional cost of seeing a monster in every shadow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/ek1ePFp-nBI\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laurie’s insistence that her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) learn to protect herself and check around every corner causes a rift in their relationship: Karen resents her mother for the survivalist training and for exposing her to secondhand paranoia. She settles for a passive husband and refuses to train her own daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) the way her mother raised her. She naively considers her mother’s trauma to be hers alone and actively tries to separate Laurie from spending time with her granddaughter. In the movie, trying to break the cycle of fear leaves them vulnerable to the man who caused the fear in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We see why Karen has so forcefully pushed Laurie out in one especially tense dinner scene: A visibly shaken Laurie shows up late to meet the family at a restaurant, upsetting the shallow pleasantries. Granddaughter Allyson tries to calm her, while daughter Karen becomes confrontational, angry that her mother has shown up at all. Curtis’ performance here is moving — she’s clearly uncomfortable within seconds of sitting down at the table. She keeps looking past the others nervously, while Karen’s body language telegraphs her frustration at the challenges of caring for someone struggling with mental health issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trauma manifests in ways we can’t control, often at times when it isn’t appropriate to cry or scream. Laurie’s instability in these moments is palpable, and helps explain why she took such drastic measures against a (likely supernaturally driven) killer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laurie’s story could have gone any number of ways. She could have buried her trauma, reliving it only in nightmares. She could have moved to another part of the world. If it’s disappointing to see Laurie Strode turned, here, into a gun-toting survivalist in a standard revenge plot, the actress’ own words may shed some light on that decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Austin’s Fantastic Fest screening last month, \u003ca href=\"https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/jamie-lee-curtis-flips-a-fan-the-bird-and-talks-trauma-at-halloweens-fantastic-fest\">Curtis told the crowd\u003c/a>, “Laurie Strode went back to school on November 1st with a bandage on her arm. She left school on the 31st, this dreaming, intellectual, going-off-to-college girl. And she came back on the first of November a freak, where everybody talked about her. Nobody helped her. And that’s what I think was the reasoning behind going back to the original trauma. And I’m really glad they did.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would have been nice if more women could have had some say in the narrative trajectory Laurie has taken, instead of film’s all-male screenwriting trio of Green, Danny McBride and John Fradley. However, this \u003cem>Halloween\u003c/em> highlights a question that horror films so often ignore: How does a genre that unleashes so much violence on its characters grapple with post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and grief? Horror filmmakers will always terrorize their characters in the moment, of course — but here’s hoping we’ll start to see more films willing to explore the lingering costs of \u003cem>living \u003c/em>with fear every day. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While this latest \u003cem>Halloween \u003c/em>may not accomplish everything it sets out to do, it amply demonstrates how difficult it can be to move on from the ghosts of traumas past.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laurie’s insistence that her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) learn to protect herself and check around every corner causes a rift in their relationship: Karen resents her mother for the survivalist training and for exposing her to secondhand paranoia. She settles for a passive husband and refuses to train her own daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) the way her mother raised her. She naively considers her mother’s trauma to be hers alone and actively tries to separate Laurie from spending time with her granddaughter. In the movie, trying to break the cycle of fear leaves them vulnerable to the man who caused the fear in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We see why Karen has so forcefully pushed Laurie out in one especially tense dinner scene: A visibly shaken Laurie shows up late to meet the family at a restaurant, upsetting the shallow pleasantries. Granddaughter Allyson tries to calm her, while daughter Karen becomes confrontational, angry that her mother has shown up at all. Curtis’ performance here is moving — she’s clearly uncomfortable within seconds of sitting down at the table. She keeps looking past the others nervously, while Karen’s body language telegraphs her frustration at the challenges of caring for someone struggling with mental health issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trauma manifests in ways we can’t control, often at times when it isn’t appropriate to cry or scream. Laurie’s instability in these moments is palpable, and helps explain why she took such drastic measures against a (likely supernaturally driven) killer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laurie’s story could have gone any number of ways. She could have buried her trauma, reliving it only in nightmares. She could have moved to another part of the world. If it’s disappointing to see Laurie Strode turned, here, into a gun-toting survivalist in a standard revenge plot, the actress’ own words may shed some light on that decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Austin’s Fantastic Fest screening last month, \u003ca href=\"https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/jamie-lee-curtis-flips-a-fan-the-bird-and-talks-trauma-at-halloweens-fantastic-fest\">Curtis told the crowd\u003c/a>, “Laurie Strode went back to school on November 1st with a bandage on her arm. She left school on the 31st, this dreaming, intellectual, going-off-to-college girl. And she came back on the first of November a freak, where everybody talked about her. Nobody helped her. And that’s what I think was the reasoning behind going back to the original trauma. And I’m really glad they did.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would have been nice if more women could have had some say in the narrative trajectory Laurie has taken, instead of film’s all-male screenwriting trio of Green, Danny McBride and John Fradley. However, this \u003cem>Halloween\u003c/em> highlights a question that horror films so often ignore: How does a genre that unleashes so much violence on its characters grapple with post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and grief? Horror filmmakers will always terrorize their characters in the moment, of course — but here’s hoping we’ll start to see more films willing to explore the lingering costs of \u003cem>living \u003c/em>with fear every day. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While this latest \u003cem>Halloween \u003c/em>may not accomplish everything it sets out to do, it amply demonstrates how difficult it can be to move on from the ghosts of traumas past.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "'First Man' Considers Glory, Grief And A Famous Walk On The Moon",
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"content": "\u003cp>“You’re bouncing off the atmosphere.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Early in director Damien Chazelle’s \u003cem>First Man\u003c/em>, this is one of the cautions given to Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) during his pilot training, years before he walked on the moon. That idea of the barrier between Earth and space, the violence of making the journey through it and the almost mystical experience of being on the other side of it forms the spine of the film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We encounter Armstrong at three points: 1961, leading up to the start of his training as an astronaut; 1965, just before his first space flight; and 1968, as he prepares to be the first person to walk on the moon. His family life progresses alongside his much more famous professional one: the loss of his two-year-old daughter from brain cancer, the grief that nearly consumes him after, the sacrifices that his service demands from his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), and his relationship with his two boys, to whom he hesitates to explain the dangers of space travel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/PSoRx87OO6k\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It makes all the sense in the world that this screenplay is written by Josh Singer, who has screenwriting credits on \u003cem>Spotlight\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Post\u003c/em> and, long ago, \u003cem>The West Wing\u003c/em>. Singer seems drawn to stories that often make up a certain American integrity narrative—the noble presidency, a justice-seeking press, and here, the moon landing. But while those pieces favor high drama in their declaration of principle, this one is a little quieter. It shows streaks of rah-rah nostalgia for a terribly troubled age with not a lot of discussion of what made it so troubled (save for a reading of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey On The Moon”). But Gosling’s version of Armstrong is intriguingly turned inward, deeply feeling but outwardly passive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This comes up first in his relationship with his daughter, with whom he is warm and affectionate, far from the distant ’50s and ’60s dad often drawn in popular culture as a symbol of regressive and emotionless ideas about masculinity. This despite the fact that his work requires—as we learn in the opening sequence—an almost impossible level of detached poise as his cockpit shakes and bangs and gives every indication that it is about to blow apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chazelle shoots the cockpit scenes with claustrophobic disorientation, so that the clanging and banging and vibrating is all that exists in the small spaces astronauts inhabit. You see a similar setup several times in the film. The technique creates a sharper sense of the violence—and therefore the risk—of space flight. It’s impossible to watch these scenes and not wonder whether these men are doing something that they are not meant to do. The wonder of all this, as it were, is not an abstract concept of the grandeur of space, or at least it is not only that. It is that we are more than obviously not designed to pass through this barrier, except in that we are designed to find ways to do unlikely things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Astronauts, and the many many many \u003cem>many\u003c/em> people who support them, suppress every natural instinct that tells you that when you are vomiting and shaking and everything in your ears is roaring and there’s no air to breathe, you stop going wherever you are going, and you go back where you came from. That understanding informs the film’s idea of Armstrong as a man who, both changed by grief and committed to flight and to duty, can take enormous risks to explore space, but must be forced by his wife to face his young sons and explain those risks. There are risks and there are risks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Foy’s character is unavoidably secondary to what we might call the HGM (Historically Great Man) to whom she is married. But she carries a significant piece of the emotional weight of the story. Her husband doesn’t always understand that Janet sits and listens to the radio when he’s on a flight, just in case he dies. He doesn’t initially grasp the burden on her of being responsible for managing their sons’ anxieties. There’s an excellent sequence in which the administrators at NASA decide that in a dangerous situation, the best thing to do is just turn off the radio so families can’t listen—which, obviously, is an absurd miscalculation if the idea is to reduce worry. Foy drives the scene with her balanced presentation of Janet’s understanding of command and her expectations as a person who also serves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Structurally, the film leads up to Armstrong’s walk on the moon. But it leads to that moment tonally as well. The peace and silence of that sequence underscore that on the other side of this historically difficult barrier to cross was an end to the shaking and banging and defiance of every sign of … well, doom. This is hope, really; not just the hope of space travel, but every hope. Your capsule shakes, the air roars, you even risk your life, all because maybe there is something on the other side that nobody has ever seen before. And maybe over there, you stop shaking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>First Man \u003c/em>does romanticize space travel and some of the iconography of the Historically Great Man (and, as critic Yolanda Machado \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/SassyMamainLA/status/1049470438609276929\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has noted\u003c/a>, its vision of NASA in the 1960s seems awfully white, even for NASA in the 1960s). But the imagery of a struggle against an unforgiving onslaught of heat and hazards, and against the forces that constantly try to return you to your place, is effective. Whether it’s grief or gravity you fight, those battles are won only with great steadfastness and support—and the hope that they will end in peace.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“You’re bouncing off the atmosphere.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Early in director Damien Chazelle’s \u003cem>First Man\u003c/em>, this is one of the cautions given to Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) during his pilot training, years before he walked on the moon. That idea of the barrier between Earth and space, the violence of making the journey through it and the almost mystical experience of being on the other side of it forms the spine of the film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We encounter Armstrong at three points: 1961, leading up to the start of his training as an astronaut; 1965, just before his first space flight; and 1968, as he prepares to be the first person to walk on the moon. His family life progresses alongside his much more famous professional one: the loss of his two-year-old daughter from brain cancer, the grief that nearly consumes him after, the sacrifices that his service demands from his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), and his relationship with his two boys, to whom he hesitates to explain the dangers of space travel.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/PSoRx87OO6k'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/PSoRx87OO6k'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>It makes all the sense in the world that this screenplay is written by Josh Singer, who has screenwriting credits on \u003cem>Spotlight\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Post\u003c/em> and, long ago, \u003cem>The West Wing\u003c/em>. Singer seems drawn to stories that often make up a certain American integrity narrative—the noble presidency, a justice-seeking press, and here, the moon landing. But while those pieces favor high drama in their declaration of principle, this one is a little quieter. It shows streaks of rah-rah nostalgia for a terribly troubled age with not a lot of discussion of what made it so troubled (save for a reading of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey On The Moon”). But Gosling’s version of Armstrong is intriguingly turned inward, deeply feeling but outwardly passive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This comes up first in his relationship with his daughter, with whom he is warm and affectionate, far from the distant ’50s and ’60s dad often drawn in popular culture as a symbol of regressive and emotionless ideas about masculinity. This despite the fact that his work requires—as we learn in the opening sequence—an almost impossible level of detached poise as his cockpit shakes and bangs and gives every indication that it is about to blow apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chazelle shoots the cockpit scenes with claustrophobic disorientation, so that the clanging and banging and vibrating is all that exists in the small spaces astronauts inhabit. You see a similar setup several times in the film. The technique creates a sharper sense of the violence—and therefore the risk—of space flight. It’s impossible to watch these scenes and not wonder whether these men are doing something that they are not meant to do. The wonder of all this, as it were, is not an abstract concept of the grandeur of space, or at least it is not only that. It is that we are more than obviously not designed to pass through this barrier, except in that we are designed to find ways to do unlikely things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Astronauts, and the many many many \u003cem>many\u003c/em> people who support them, suppress every natural instinct that tells you that when you are vomiting and shaking and everything in your ears is roaring and there’s no air to breathe, you stop going wherever you are going, and you go back where you came from. That understanding informs the film’s idea of Armstrong as a man who, both changed by grief and committed to flight and to duty, can take enormous risks to explore space, but must be forced by his wife to face his young sons and explain those risks. There are risks and there are risks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Foy’s character is unavoidably secondary to what we might call the HGM (Historically Great Man) to whom she is married. But she carries a significant piece of the emotional weight of the story. Her husband doesn’t always understand that Janet sits and listens to the radio when he’s on a flight, just in case he dies. He doesn’t initially grasp the burden on her of being responsible for managing their sons’ anxieties. There’s an excellent sequence in which the administrators at NASA decide that in a dangerous situation, the best thing to do is just turn off the radio so families can’t listen—which, obviously, is an absurd miscalculation if the idea is to reduce worry. Foy drives the scene with her balanced presentation of Janet’s understanding of command and her expectations as a person who also serves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Structurally, the film leads up to Armstrong’s walk on the moon. But it leads to that moment tonally as well. The peace and silence of that sequence underscore that on the other side of this historically difficult barrier to cross was an end to the shaking and banging and defiance of every sign of … well, doom. This is hope, really; not just the hope of space travel, but every hope. Your capsule shakes, the air roars, you even risk your life, all because maybe there is something on the other side that nobody has ever seen before. And maybe over there, you stop shaking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>First Man \u003c/em>does romanticize space travel and some of the iconography of the Historically Great Man (and, as critic Yolanda Machado \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/SassyMamainLA/status/1049470438609276929\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has noted\u003c/a>, its vision of NASA in the 1960s seems awfully white, even for NASA in the 1960s). But the imagery of a struggle against an unforgiving onslaught of heat and hazards, and against the forces that constantly try to return you to your place, is effective. Whether it’s grief or gravity you fight, those battles are won only with great steadfastness and support—and the hope that they will end in peace.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "bigger-than-disco-you-make-me-feel-mighty-real-is-a-celebration-of-self",
"title": "Bigger Than Disco, 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)' Is A Celebration Of Self",
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"headTitle": "Bigger Than Disco, ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ Is A Celebration Of Self | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/series/622671774/american-anthem\">\u003cem>NPR.org/Anthem\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/651794925/655529024\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>Dick Clark couldn’t get his \u003cem>American Bandstand\u003c/em> crowd to stop cheering. It was early December, 1978, around the peak of disco’s popularity — and Clark’s studio audience had just heard Sylvester and his backup singers, Two Tons O’ Fun, perform their first hit, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhcm5yWWdAE\">Dance (Disco Heat)\u003c/a>“.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Clark got the crowd to pipe down and conducted an \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKKsI2seeTM\">awkward interview\u003c/a>, the gender-bending singer — wearing makeup, a loose kimono and leather pants — performed his follow-up single. The song, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyAHULpMXKQ\">You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)\u003c/a>,” hit the top of Billboard’s dance chart that year. Forty years later, its greater legacy is as an \u003ca href=\"https://www.billboard.com/photos/7408710/gay-anthems-lgbt-pride-top-songs\">LGBTQ anthem\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Dick Clark Interviews Sylvester - American Bandstand 1978\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/VKKsI2seeTM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a song of freedom,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.usfca.edu/faculty/joshua-gamson\">Joshua Gamson\u003c/a>, Sylvester’s biographer. In his book \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DXIU6JQ\">\u003cem>The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, Gamson makes the case that the artist became a kind of folk hero for many young LGBTQ people, because his life was theirs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”DX8CVmChGyCDKVAere6SHhEx4c61Rsz4″]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ve come out of the closet. It’s been difficult,” he says. “Many people [at the time] have moved out of their homes of origin, their families of origin, with great pain, and moved to a more liberated place, like San Francisco. And then … this person comes out into public life that sounds like what you were feeling when you made yourself free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For him to be celebrated for all of his strangeness and all of the ways he inhabited who he wanted to be — who he felt himself to be — felt like \u003cem>you\u003c/em> being celebrated for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it wasn’t just how Sylvester looked and sounded. The song’s lyrics openly celebrated that liberation:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>\u003cem>When we’re out there dancing on the floor, darlin’\u003cbr>\nAnd I feel like I need some more\u003cbr>\nAnd I feel your body close to mine\u003cbr>\nAnd I know, my love, it’s about that time\u003cbr>\nMake me feel mighty real\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>“You’ve got the words of a person who is just matter-of-fact about their sexual desires, about the freedom to do with their bodies and their desires whatever they want to do,” Gamson says. “And you can dance to it!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/VyAHULpMXKQ\">http://youtu.be/VyAHULpMXKQ\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sylvester James grew up singing in a Pentecostal church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. His mother was a devout member of the church and couldn’t accept the early signs of her son’s sexuality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I was little, I used to dress up, right? And my mother said, ‘You can’t dress up,’ ” Sylvester told Joan Rivers \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNS7VM5oTRU\">when he appeared on The Tonight Show in 1986\u003c/a>. ” ‘You gotta wear these pants and these shoes. And you have to, like, drink beer and play football.’ And I said, ‘No I don’t!’ And she said, ‘You’re very strange.’ And I said, ‘That’s OK!’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”3WTfhvRC1lCwVO0uNQncpTN6ko1JXC2Y”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The [Pentecostal] church was oppressive,” says singer Jeanie Tracy, who shared Sylvester’s religious background and became his friend and collaborator. “They just didn’t tolerate gayness. They didn’t tolerate a lot of things. They didn’t allow you to wear makeup. You couldn’t wear toeless shoes or sleeveless dresses. It was just real … controlled.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too much so for Sylvester. At 13, he left the church. Two years later, he left home. He lived with friends and his grandmother, who accepted him as he was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his early 20s, Sylvester moved to San Francisco to join an avant-garde theatre troupe called \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cockettes\">The Cockettes\u003c/a>, whose fans included Truman Capote and Gloria Vanderbilt. But he left the group soon after — to front his own act. Jeanie Tracy remembers being introduced to him by friends in the music industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They said, ‘Oh, Jeanie, this is Sylvester,'” she says. “And I said, ‘Sylvester? I thought you were a woman.’ And then I said, ‘Oops! I’m sorry!’ He goes, ‘Oh, no, girl, that’s okay!'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When guitarist and songwriter James Wirrick saw the singer for the first time, Sylvester was backed by a tight three-piece band and flanked by two drag queens — “in full drag, with full neck-beards,” he laughs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”WeX9Pk3YLSO5mIo6h3pmTN2LiUZUIu6M”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wirrick became Sylvester’s bandmate and collaborator a few months later. By then, the drag queens had been replaced by backup singers Izora Rhodes and Martha Wash, aka Two Tons O’ Fun. (They went on to record another anthem — \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5aZJBLAu1E\">“It’s Raining Men”\u003c/a> — as The Weather Girls.) Wirrick and Sylvester wrote “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” together. Getting the rest of the band on board was a challenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At first the band didn’t wanna play it as a dance tune,” Wirrick says. “They were kinda snotty about it. ‘We don’t really wanna do that,’ y’know? And Sylvester and I kept saying, ‘No, you have to do that because that’s what’s on the radio.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than on the radio, the song was huge in discos — and its falsetto vocals, four-on-the-floor beat and bouncing synthesizer influenced generations of electronic dance music producers to follow. Eleven years after the original came out, vocalist Jimmy Sommerville of the British band Bronski Beat \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZtdcMIR5do\">paid tribute with a cover\u003c/a>. The following decade, Chicago House vocalist \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psi7c64mdWk\">Byron Stingily’s version\u003c/a> once again took the song to the top of the U.S. dance chart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-large wp-image-13842259\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1020x1332.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"836\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1020x1332.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-160x209.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-800x1045.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-768x1003.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-919x1200.jpg 919w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1920x2507.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1180x1541.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-960x1253.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-240x313.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-375x490.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-520x679.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22.jpg 1568w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The song also went on to become the centerpiece of a 2014 \u003ca href=\"https://www.broadway.com/shows/mighty-real-fabulous-sylvester-musical/\">off-Broadway musical\u003c/a> that tells Sylvester’s life story. It’s appeared in ads, films, and TV shows. So far this year, James Wirrick says he’s gotten eight requests for permission to use the song he co-wrote: a video game, three television commercials, three movies and an episode of \u003cem>The Simpsons\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sylvester never had a mainstream hit after “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. A year after it came out, Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl made “Disco sucks!” a rallying cry with his \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night\">“Disco Demolition” promotion between the games of a White Sox doubleheader\u003c/a>; the ensuing melee forced the Sox to forfeit the second game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joshua Gamson says the event was a reaction by straight white fans of classic rock against a music that they saw as too black and too queer — and that that backlash is partly why he missed the anthem’s power when it first came out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In a way, if I had felt that earlier, I’d have come out earlier,” he says. “Embracing who you are, celebrating who you are, being as fabulous as you could possibly be, I think that’s the message that he’s preaching in the song. And I could’ve used a dose of that as a teenager.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Sylvester remained popular among dance music fans, and he leveraged that popularity to raise AIDS awareness. He played benefit shows and distributed safe-sex information to his audiences. When he appeared on \u003cem>The Tonight Show\u003c/em>, he thanked Joan Rivers and guest Charles Nelson Reilly for their early support of what was becoming a movement. “I was there trying to do whatever we could at the time to get it together. And now it’s like a national thing to do,” Sylvester said. “I want to thank you myself.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”T2fVkkiaGtKy3pbsh8wpi99OACVQwyoF”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than 10 years after “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” came out, Sylvester’s husband died of complications from AIDS. The singer was never tested for HIV — he told friends there was no point, because he knew he had the virus. Within a few months, his own health was deteriorating. But, Jeanie Tracy says, his senses of style and humor stayed intact, even as he was planning his own funeral. “He looked at me and he says, ‘I wanna be buried in a pearl-colored casket,’ ” she recalls. ” ‘Don’t bury me in a white casket, ’cause I don’t wanna look like I’m lyin’ in a white refrigerator!'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few months before he died, Sylvester appeared in the 1988 gay pride parade in San Francisco. He was emaciated and weak and rode in a wheelchair. But he didn’t want to hide, Gamson says — he wanted the crowds along Castro Street to see him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was part of the same almost philosophy of realness — like, this, this is being real,” Gamson says. “This is mighty real, to be marching in the Gay Freedom parade looking, like, 40 years older than you are. And people, knowing that they’ve seen this icon of their freedom, they see him [as] a symbol of the devastation that AIDS took on the community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sylvester made sure to champion that community even after he died. In his will, he left his share of future royalties for “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” to two San Francisco nonprofits: the \u003ca href=\"https://prcsf.org/aids-emergency-fund/\">AIDS Emergency Fund\u003c/a> and the meals program \u003ca href=\"https://www.openhand.org/\">Project Open Hand\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Bigger+Than+Disco%2C+%27You+Make+Me+Feel+%28Mighty+Real%29%27+Is+A+Celebration+Of+Self&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Sylvester's 1978 dance hit transcends its moment and even the gay rights and AIDS awareness movements it came to represent. It's an anthem to liberation — of desire, and of the body.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/series/622671774/american-anthem\">\u003cem>NPR.org/Anthem\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/651794925/655529024\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>Dick Clark couldn’t get his \u003cem>American Bandstand\u003c/em> crowd to stop cheering. It was early December, 1978, around the peak of disco’s popularity — and Clark’s studio audience had just heard Sylvester and his backup singers, Two Tons O’ Fun, perform their first hit, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhcm5yWWdAE\">Dance (Disco Heat)\u003c/a>“.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Clark got the crowd to pipe down and conducted an \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKKsI2seeTM\">awkward interview\u003c/a>, the gender-bending singer — wearing makeup, a loose kimono and leather pants — performed his follow-up single. The song, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyAHULpMXKQ\">You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)\u003c/a>,” hit the top of Billboard’s dance chart that year. Forty years later, its greater legacy is as an \u003ca href=\"https://www.billboard.com/photos/7408710/gay-anthems-lgbt-pride-top-songs\">LGBTQ anthem\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Dick Clark Interviews Sylvester - American Bandstand 1978\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/VKKsI2seeTM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a song of freedom,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.usfca.edu/faculty/joshua-gamson\">Joshua Gamson\u003c/a>, Sylvester’s biographer. In his book \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DXIU6JQ\">\u003cem>The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, Gamson makes the case that the artist became a kind of folk hero for many young LGBTQ people, because his life was theirs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ve come out of the closet. It’s been difficult,” he says. “Many people [at the time] have moved out of their homes of origin, their families of origin, with great pain, and moved to a more liberated place, like San Francisco. And then … this person comes out into public life that sounds like what you were feeling when you made yourself free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For him to be celebrated for all of his strangeness and all of the ways he inhabited who he wanted to be — who he felt himself to be — felt like \u003cem>you\u003c/em> being celebrated for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it wasn’t just how Sylvester looked and sounded. The song’s lyrics openly celebrated that liberation:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>\u003cem>When we’re out there dancing on the floor, darlin’\u003cbr>\nAnd I feel like I need some more\u003cbr>\nAnd I feel your body close to mine\u003cbr>\nAnd I know, my love, it’s about that time\u003cbr>\nMake me feel mighty real\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>“You’ve got the words of a person who is just matter-of-fact about their sexual desires, about the freedom to do with their bodies and their desires whatever they want to do,” Gamson says. “And you can dance to it!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/VyAHULpMXKQ\">http://youtu.be/VyAHULpMXKQ\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sylvester James grew up singing in a Pentecostal church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. His mother was a devout member of the church and couldn’t accept the early signs of her son’s sexuality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I was little, I used to dress up, right? And my mother said, ‘You can’t dress up,’ ” Sylvester told Joan Rivers \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNS7VM5oTRU\">when he appeared on The Tonight Show in 1986\u003c/a>. ” ‘You gotta wear these pants and these shoes. And you have to, like, drink beer and play football.’ And I said, ‘No I don’t!’ And she said, ‘You’re very strange.’ And I said, ‘That’s OK!’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The [Pentecostal] church was oppressive,” says singer Jeanie Tracy, who shared Sylvester’s religious background and became his friend and collaborator. “They just didn’t tolerate gayness. They didn’t tolerate a lot of things. They didn’t allow you to wear makeup. You couldn’t wear toeless shoes or sleeveless dresses. It was just real … controlled.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too much so for Sylvester. At 13, he left the church. Two years later, he left home. He lived with friends and his grandmother, who accepted him as he was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his early 20s, Sylvester moved to San Francisco to join an avant-garde theatre troupe called \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cockettes\">The Cockettes\u003c/a>, whose fans included Truman Capote and Gloria Vanderbilt. But he left the group soon after — to front his own act. Jeanie Tracy remembers being introduced to him by friends in the music industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They said, ‘Oh, Jeanie, this is Sylvester,'” she says. “And I said, ‘Sylvester? I thought you were a woman.’ And then I said, ‘Oops! I’m sorry!’ He goes, ‘Oh, no, girl, that’s okay!'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When guitarist and songwriter James Wirrick saw the singer for the first time, Sylvester was backed by a tight three-piece band and flanked by two drag queens — “in full drag, with full neck-beards,” he laughs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wirrick became Sylvester’s bandmate and collaborator a few months later. By then, the drag queens had been replaced by backup singers Izora Rhodes and Martha Wash, aka Two Tons O’ Fun. (They went on to record another anthem — \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5aZJBLAu1E\">“It’s Raining Men”\u003c/a> — as The Weather Girls.) Wirrick and Sylvester wrote “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” together. Getting the rest of the band on board was a challenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At first the band didn’t wanna play it as a dance tune,” Wirrick says. “They were kinda snotty about it. ‘We don’t really wanna do that,’ y’know? And Sylvester and I kept saying, ‘No, you have to do that because that’s what’s on the radio.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than on the radio, the song was huge in discos — and its falsetto vocals, four-on-the-floor beat and bouncing synthesizer influenced generations of electronic dance music producers to follow. Eleven years after the original came out, vocalist Jimmy Sommerville of the British band Bronski Beat \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZtdcMIR5do\">paid tribute with a cover\u003c/a>. The following decade, Chicago House vocalist \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psi7c64mdWk\">Byron Stingily’s version\u003c/a> once again took the song to the top of the U.S. dance chart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-large wp-image-13842259\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1020x1332.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"836\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1020x1332.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-160x209.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-800x1045.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-768x1003.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-919x1200.jpg 919w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1920x2507.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-1180x1541.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-960x1253.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-240x313.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-375x490.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22-520x679.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/gettyimages-150003218_custom-6e8d90df126b06dfba6018624392c0d705ad4d22.jpg 1568w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The song also went on to become the centerpiece of a 2014 \u003ca href=\"https://www.broadway.com/shows/mighty-real-fabulous-sylvester-musical/\">off-Broadway musical\u003c/a> that tells Sylvester’s life story. It’s appeared in ads, films, and TV shows. So far this year, James Wirrick says he’s gotten eight requests for permission to use the song he co-wrote: a video game, three television commercials, three movies and an episode of \u003cem>The Simpsons\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sylvester never had a mainstream hit after “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. A year after it came out, Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl made “Disco sucks!” a rallying cry with his \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night\">“Disco Demolition” promotion between the games of a White Sox doubleheader\u003c/a>; the ensuing melee forced the Sox to forfeit the second game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joshua Gamson says the event was a reaction by straight white fans of classic rock against a music that they saw as too black and too queer — and that that backlash is partly why he missed the anthem’s power when it first came out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In a way, if I had felt that earlier, I’d have come out earlier,” he says. “Embracing who you are, celebrating who you are, being as fabulous as you could possibly be, I think that’s the message that he’s preaching in the song. And I could’ve used a dose of that as a teenager.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Sylvester remained popular among dance music fans, and he leveraged that popularity to raise AIDS awareness. He played benefit shows and distributed safe-sex information to his audiences. When he appeared on \u003cem>The Tonight Show\u003c/em>, he thanked Joan Rivers and guest Charles Nelson Reilly for their early support of what was becoming a movement. “I was there trying to do whatever we could at the time to get it together. And now it’s like a national thing to do,” Sylvester said. “I want to thank you myself.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than 10 years after “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” came out, Sylvester’s husband died of complications from AIDS. The singer was never tested for HIV — he told friends there was no point, because he knew he had the virus. Within a few months, his own health was deteriorating. But, Jeanie Tracy says, his senses of style and humor stayed intact, even as he was planning his own funeral. “He looked at me and he says, ‘I wanna be buried in a pearl-colored casket,’ ” she recalls. ” ‘Don’t bury me in a white casket, ’cause I don’t wanna look like I’m lyin’ in a white refrigerator!'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few months before he died, Sylvester appeared in the 1988 gay pride parade in San Francisco. He was emaciated and weak and rode in a wheelchair. But he didn’t want to hide, Gamson says — he wanted the crowds along Castro Street to see him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was part of the same almost philosophy of realness — like, this, this is being real,” Gamson says. “This is mighty real, to be marching in the Gay Freedom parade looking, like, 40 years older than you are. And people, knowing that they’ve seen this icon of their freedom, they see him [as] a symbol of the devastation that AIDS took on the community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sylvester made sure to champion that community even after he died. In his will, he left his share of future royalties for “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” to two San Francisco nonprofits: the \u003ca href=\"https://prcsf.org/aids-emergency-fund/\">AIDS Emergency Fund\u003c/a> and the meals program \u003ca href=\"https://www.openhand.org/\">Project Open Hand\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Bigger+Than+Disco%2C+%27You+Make+Me+Feel+%28Mighty+Real%29%27+Is+A+Celebration+Of+Self&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "3 Ways Of Looking At A Police Shooting In The Powerful 'Monsters And Men'",
"headTitle": "3 Ways Of Looking At A Police Shooting In The Powerful ‘Monsters And Men’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The central event of \u003cem>Monsters and Men\u003c/em> is clearly based on the 2014 slaying of Eric Garner by NYPD officers on Staten Island, although writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green has altered both the location and the cause of death. Yet the killing of loose-cigarette peddler Big D (Samel Edwards) takes place literally in the background. This evocative drama is most concerned about the aftermath, viewed from three different angles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Green is clearly fascinated by vantage points, as he demonstrates with a prologue that introduces an African-American man, Dennis (John David Washington), as a face in his car’s rear-view mirror. It’s a face whose expression turns from blithe to anxious with the warning bleat of a police cruiser’s siren.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Monsters and Men\u003c/em> was filmed exquisitely by Pat Scola, who follows the characters through Brooklyn and Manhattan with a handheld camera, conveying intimacy and distance simultaneously. The camerawork captures the feeling of being at home in the crowd, but with the nagging awareness that trouble could lurk around the next corner, and is as likely to come from cops as criminals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/4AnpybNQ-hU\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is not simply the story of a black and Latino community oppressed by white police officers. Dennis, it turns out, is a cop. It’s a job he’s proud to have, even after Big D’s death sparks protests and reprisals. In one of the movie’s most emotionally complex scenes, Dennis defends the NYPD from the anger of a friend who’s come to his house for dinner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before circling back to Dennis, though, Green introduces Manny (Anthony Ramos), a buddy of Big D and a guy with a few hustles of his own. Manny is there when the neighborhood fixture is shot, and records the action on his mobile phone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Manny has reasons to be cautious: He shares a young daughter and a promising future with his pregnant girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones, who like Ramos was in the original cast of \u003cem>Hamilton\u003c/em>). Disseminating the video of Big D’s killing is likely to threaten all that, since the footage appears to contradict the police’s official story of what happened. But how can Manny suppress this evidence when the cops are falsely claiming they shot Big D in self-defense?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The third chapter shifts to Zyrick (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a high-schooler whose baseball skills may clear a path out of the neighborhood. The kid’s father (Rob Morgan), who just happens to also be a cop, encourages Zyrick to concentrate on his potential sports career and ignore the local controversy. But baseball seems less consequential than protest, especially when the latter is being organized by an alluring young woman played by Chante Adams. (This development echoes one in \u003cem>BlacKKKlansman\u003c/em>, which starred John David Washington as a similarly conflicted, albeit more impulsive, cop.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the cinematic visual style, \u003cem>Monsters and Men\u003c/em> is stagey in places. It also includes a few clunky motifs, notably a recurring bit with paper airplanes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing that’s most likely to divide audiences, though, is the movie’s lack of a tidy resolution. The three stories are left hanging, as is the Internal Affairs investigation of Big D’s death. Onscreen, at least, justice is not done, and the truth is not revealed. Even what the audience sees of Manny’s video is inconclusive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s the point. \u003cem>Monsters and Men\u003c/em> offers neither unalloyed despair nor implausible hope. It’s about the way people of color live now, moving through the streets with passion, purpose and one eye on the rear-view mirror.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
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},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
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"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Perspectives",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
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"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/category/perspectives/feed/",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93dzIua3FlZC5vcmcvcGVyc3BlY3RpdmVzL2NhdGVnb3J5L3BlcnNwZWN0aXZlcy9mZWVkLw"
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},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/M4f5",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/Planet-Money-p164680/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml"
}
},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Political Breakdown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 5
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
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