#[<- did you know they were created in 1958?! crazy. i think most people know of them from the more recent movies nstuff tho --rottel]

[haveyouheardthisband]

[tcm]

Sammy Davis Jr.: Civil Rights Activist and Natural Born Entertainer By Susan King

Sammy Davis Jr. was an exceptional talent. He could sing (you’ll get chills up your spine listening to his recording of “I Gotta Be Me”), dance, act and lest we forget, he was a member of the Rat Pack. He and Harry Belafonte made history in 1956 when they became the first African Americans to earn Emmy nominations.

But most people forget Davis was also very involved in the fight for civil rights in the 1950s and ‘60s. In January 1961, he joined Rat Packers Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, as well as Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson and Tony Bennett, for the Carnegie Hall benefit concert Tribute to Martin Luther King. He also performed at the Freedom Rally in Los Angeles that year and at the March on Montgomery in 1965.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. even wrote Davis a thank you note: “Not very long ago, it was customary for Negro artists to hold themselves aloof from the struggle for equality… Today, greats like Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Mahalia Jackson and yourself, of course, are not content to merely identify with the struggle. They actively participate in it, as artists and as citizens, adding the weight of their enormous prestige and thus helping to move the struggle forward.”

In 1968, Davis received the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the NAACP for his 1965 autobiography Yes, I Can. Nevertheless, considering his work for the late Dr. King, Davis shocked the world in 1972 when he supported Richard Nixon, who had a poor track record when it came to civil rights and would refer to African Americans in derogatory terms behind closed doors. But there was Davis, attending the opening night of the Republican convention in Miami Beach and then performing a concert for Republican youth. And it was during the concert that he hugged Nixon.

The backlash in the African American community was loud and strong. Wil Haywood stated in his biography In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., “Sammy failed to understand Blacks’ distrust of Nixon’s ultraconservative views. The hug at the Republican National Convention, in the glare of the nation’s spotlight, seemed too to minstrelsy.“

Davis later said: “By their definition I had let them down. In their minds there were certain things I could do, certain rules I could break. I married a white woman and I hardly got any heat. But by going with a Republican president I had broken faith with my people.”

In a 1976 Ebony interview, Davis reflected that working with Nixon was not a betrayal to African Americans but a way to help Black citizens. “When my wife, Altovise, and I were invited to the White House after the November elections, I repeated [my recommendations],” he noted. “We started to rap, and he asks, ‘What can I do?’ Come on Sam, tell me what I can do.’ So, I laid it down again.”

He told Nixon that the funds cut from anti-poverty programs needed to be reinstated and that Martin Luther King’s birthday should be made a national holiday. But he soon realized Nixon wasn’t listening to him. He regretted supporting Nixon.

Davis was born in Harlem on December 8, 1925 to vaudevillians Sammy Davis Sr. and Elvera Sanchez, who was of Afro-Cuban descent. The couple separated in 1928, and Sammy Jr. lived with his father and his grandmother, Mama. He was just three when he joined the Will Mastin Trio with his father and Mastin. Davis never went to school. In a 2014 Los Angeles Times interview, his daughter Tracey Davis recalled her father telling her, “What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.”

As a youngster, he appeared in short films, including Rufus Jones for President (’33). He toured with the Mastin Trio until he was drafted into the Army during World War II, where he suffered so much abuse from white soldiers that his nose was broken three times. “How did he make it and so many others not make it?,” Tracey Davis reflected. “He had talent. But what he went through would have killed a lot of people or make them bitter or just messed with your life so bad you couldn’t get over it.”

In 1954, Davis survived a car crash on his way home to Los Angeles after performing in Vegas. He lost an eye. He wore an eye-patch for six months and then was fitted with a glass eye. Two years later, he opened on Broadway in the musical Mr. Wonderful.

It was announced in August 2020 that a film is in pre-production about the ill-fated relationship in 1957 between Davis and Kim Novak. The relationship was quashed, as it would have killed Novak’s career and supposedly, it quite literally would have killed Davis – a hit was allegedly put out on his life. To keep the heat off of him, Davis was briefly married in 1958 to dancer Loray White.

In 1960, Davis married striking Swedish actress Mai Britt. According to Tracey Davis, her mother, who had appeared THE YOUNG LIONS (‘58) and THE BLUE ANGEL (‘59), was dropped by 20th Century-Fox because of her marriage. Tracey said her parents “didn’t regret being together. My mom loved my dad like crazy and my dad loved my mother. My mother was so lucky because her parents didn’t care.” Though they divorced in 1968, she said they never fell out of love. Before his death of cancer in 1990 at the age of 64, Davis told his daughter why they broke up: “I just couldn’t be what she wanted me to be. A family man. My performance schedule was rigorous.”

Tracey said that her dad and Sinatra were great friends offstage. “He was like a good cushion for dad.” And, if Davis ran into trouble due to his race, Sinatra was there to fight the good fight for his friend. “He’d say, ‘Oh, Sammy can’t come in here? Then I’m not coming in.’ I think it gave my dad such comfort knowing he had this big brother out there that would go to the mat for him.” Davis, who was a chain smoker and was rarely seen without a glass of vermouth, had a falling out with Sinatra in the early 1970s, because the performer was using drugs. “Frank was mad he was squandering himself, doing stupid things. He let dad know about it and dad was kind of well, I don’t care.’’ Eventually, Davis did care and apologized to the Chairman of the Board.

Being a member of the Rat Pack gave Davis a certain visibility, especially in the films they made together, including OCEAN’S 11 (‘60) and ROBIN AND THE 7 HOODS (‘64), but all of the actors were just having a good time on screen. These vehicles didn’t show Davis’s strength as a dramatic actor. But occasionally, he got the opportunity, such as in ANNA LUCASTA (‘58) opposite Eartha Kitt, CONVICTS 4 (‘62) and A MAN CALLED ADAM (‘66). And in 1964, he returned to the Broadway stage in the Charles Strouse-Lee Adams musical Golden Boy, for which he earned a Tony nomination.

“He was very representative of a time and place,” said Strouse in a 2003 L.A. Times interview. “He was created from a lot of forces, like the Earth coming in and ‘whoop,’ here comes Sammy Davis. He was brilliant along with everything else. He was the biggest star of the day and in the theater, he had no peer. We sold out all the time.”

But Davis also missed a lot of performances of Golden Boy. “He got himself very tired or perhaps depressed or nervous,” reflected Stouse, adding that Davis stretched himself thin “the way lemmings go to the edge of the cliff and then they go off. He didn’t go off, but he was always on the end of the cliff. He was very driven and yet very mild-mannered and almost submissive to Sinatra. He had to be loved. He wouldn’t get off the stage.”

As he got older, Davis stopped wearing flashy clothes and jewelry and got back to basics as a singer and performer. And, he is the best thing about his last film, TAP (‘89), with Gregory Hines. Their tap dance will make your heart beat a bit faster. Tracey Davis said though her father was “incredibly driven,” he had a “huge heart, a zest for life. He had more energy than anyone I had known.”

[alwaysmarilynmonroe]

It’s hard to believe 58 years to the day, on the night of August 4th, the world’s most famous Star would leave us all. Yes, I know a lot of you will be thinking, “wait, didn’t she die on the 5th?” – she was found in the early hours of that morning, and her death was announced then – so that is the “technical” date. However, as with many Marilyn “facts” that too is incorrect and so like every year, I will be posting this on the 4th.

I’m not going to write about all the ridiculous dramas and he said she said statements that have grown rapidly over the years, as they don’t deserve any more coverage. Whenever a major celebrity dies, the more shocking the statement, the more attention it gains, so much so that it’s almost became ingrained into society as being accepted as fact. But, I am going to have a big name and shame moment for the two main culprits – Robert Slatzer and Norman Mailer I’m looking at you both. Also Anthony Summers – you’re a piece of crap and I will never forgive you for publishing Marilyn’s autopsy photo in your toilet paper worthy biography.

Long story short as they don’t deserve any mention with Marilyn’s name – Slatzer created the whole Kennedy, Mafia and basically everything shit and defamatory written about Marilyn in the early 1970s. If you want to find out the actual truth with documented facts click HERE.

Sorry to disappoint any conspiracy lovers – Marilyn didn’t love JFK, nor did any of the Kennedy’s kill her, she died of an either accidental or intentional prescription drug overdose. Was I there? No, I wasn’t even alive, but it’s really not hard to disregard the nonsense and absurd claims, when you actually take the time to do a little (a lot in my case) of research.

Baby Norma Jeane in 1929.

Norma Jeane (left) and a friend at the Los Angeles Orphanage in 1936.

Norma Jeane at the Los Angeles Clifton Restaurant, which she attended with her then Husband Jim Doughtery in 1944.

Marilyn by Richard Miller in April 1946.

Marilyn by J.R. Eyerman in 1950.

Marilyn on her Doheny Drive Patio by Alfred Eisenstaedt in May 1953.

Marilyn in Korea visiting the Troops in February 1954.

Marilyn by Milton Greene on January 28th 1955.

Marilyn by Cecil Beaton on February 22nd 1956.

Marilyn during the filming of Some Like It Hot by Richard Miller in October 1958.

Marilyn during the filming of The Misfits by Erich Hartmann in the Autumn of 1960.

Marilyn during the filming of Something’s Got To Give by Lawrence Schiller in May 1962.

Thankfully, I was lucky and never fell down that ridiculous rabbit hole in the first place. I discovered Marilyn whilst reading an article in Vanity Fair magazine almost ten years ago, discussing the then upcoming release of, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe.

This book is truly one of a kind and is basically a published archive of many of Marilyn’s personal letters, excerpts and anecdotes she had written from 1943 until 1962. Before anyone says it’s disrespectful to publish/share these and it is an invasion of privacy, to an extent I agree. However, as stated a few moment ago, with the amount of disrespectful, outrageous nonsense that has been slurred out over the half a century since Marilyn left us – I think it’s a necessity to see her own words in print. Ironically enough, it’s almost as if Marilyn herself foreshadowed the future of the media, when she said this in an Interview to Georges Belmont for Marie Claire Magazine in April 1960.

“The true things rarely get into circulation, it’s usually the false things.”

Therefore, today I have decided to focus on Marilyn herself, not as a Star, Tragic Icon or a pretty face, but as a human who had a beautiful, sensitive soul. Some of you may already know, but for those who don’t, Marilyn actually wrote numerous poems throughout her years, mostly just for herself. In her rare moments of confidence, she would occasionally show a few to her close friend, Writer Norman Rosten, who said the following in his (must have) book, Marilyn Among Friends.

“She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

“Although she gave the appearance of being so confident and self assured, she was in reality incredibly self conscious and her own biggest critic, which is heartbreaking really as she was truly gifted. She was such a perfectionist that she would spend hours preparing herself mentally and physically for her beloved fans, regularly looking in the mirror at her perceived flaws. Marilyn was infamous for her lateness, which is often viewed as diva like behaviour. However, the reality is, it’s rarely noted that her anxiety was so severe, she would break out in rashes and even vomit, before going on set.

In her final interview with LIFE Magazine, published one day before her death, she even said to Journalist Richard Meryman,

“I’m one of the world’s most self conscious people. I really have to struggle.”

I remember the first time I looked through Fragments, of course it was very upsetting to see her pain written down and think about her suffering, However, I strongly noticed this recurring theme of hope, despite some incredibly sad notes, there was always some sparkle of inner strength and I just thought that should be said. Often we ourselves don’t see are bravery and bouts of determination in our inner self, but others do and I for one am glad I can see in Marilyn what she could not.

I love you with all of my heart Marilyn, from the moment you came into my life, a decade ago in October 2010. Wherever you may be, I hope you know how much love, joy and happiness you have brought and continue to bring to many people’s lives each day. ______________________________________________________________________________

• Undated Poem. 

Life –  I am of both of your directions Somehow remaining hanging downward the most but strong as a cobweb in the  wind – I exist more with the cold glistening frost. But my beaded rays have the colors I’ve seen in a painting – ah life they have cheated you ______________________________________________________________________________

• Undated Poem shared with Norman Rosten and published in his book, Marilyn: An Untold Story.

To the Weeping Willow

I stood beneath your limbs and you flowered and finally clung to me and when the wind struck with.. the earth and sand – you clung to me. ______________________________________________________________________________

• Undated Poem

Stones on the walk every color there is I stare down at you like a horizon – the space / the air is between us beckoning and I am many stories up my feet frightened as I grasp towards you ______________________________________________________________________________

• Undated Poem

Only parts of us will ever touch parts of others – one’s own truth is just that really – one’s own truth. We can only share the part that is within another’s knowing acceptable so one is for most part alone. As it is meant to be in evidently in nature – at best perhaps it could make our understanding seek another’s loneliness out. ______________________________________________________________________________

• Undated Poem

for life It is rather a determination not to be overwhelmed.

for work The truth can only be recalled, never invented ______________________________________________________________________________

• “Record” Black Notebook – Written in throughout 1951.

What I do believe in What is truth I believe in myself even my most delicate intangible feelings in the end everything is intangible my most precious liquid must never spill don’t spill your precious liquid life force they are all my feelings no matter what ______________________________________________________________________________

• “Record” Black Notebook – Written in throughout 1951. Fear of giving me the lines new maybe won’t be able to learn them maybe I’ll make mistakes people will either think I’m no good or laugh or belittle me or think I can’t act. Women looked stern and critical – unfriendly and cold in general afraid director won’t think I’m any good. remembering when I couldn’t do a god damn thing. then trying to build myself up with the fact that I have done things right that were even good and have had moments that were excellent but the bad is heavier to carry around and feel have no confidence depressed mad ______________________________________________________________________________

• Other “Record” Notebook – Written in throughout 1955.

I do know ways people act unconventionally – mainly myself – do not be afraid of my sensitivity or to use it – for I  can & will channel it + crazy thoughts too I want to do my scene or exercises (idiotic as they may seem) as sincerely as I can knowing and showing how I know it is also – no matter – what they might think – or judge from it ______________________________________________________________________________

• Other “Record” Notebook – Written in throughout 1955.

I can and will help myself and work on things analytically no matter how painful – if I forget things (the unconscious wants to forget – I will only try to remember) Discipline – Concentration

my body is my body every part of it. ______________________________________________________________________________

• Other “Record” Notebook – Written in throughout 1955.

feel what I feel within myself – that is trying to become aware of it also what I feel in others not being ashamed of my feeling, thoughts – or ideas

realize the thing that they are – ______________________________________________________________________________

• Waldorf Astoria Stationery – Written in throughout 1955.

Sad, sweet trees –  I wish for you – rest but you must be wakeful ______________________________________________________________________________

• Waldorf Astoria Stationery – Written in throughout 1955.

Not a scared lonely little girl anymore

Remember you can sit on top of the world (it doesn’t feel like it.) You can have any help you want personally – or in your work – or anything else you want – There are technical ways to go about it or problems –  figure out if anything tec. can be done about it because there are people to help you – gladly – you more than most they want to help Remember there is nothing you lack – nothing to be self conscious about yourself – you have everything but the discipline and technique which you are learning & seeking on your own – after all nothing was or is being given to you – you have had none of this work thrown your way you sought it – it didn’t seek you

Too much talent Too much ability and  and much too much sensitivity to invert yourself out of fear – not come to class – or to do things like being afraid to come to class or to get up. ______________________________________________________________________________

• “Italian Agenda” Notebook  – Written throughout 1955 or 1956.

and the more I think of it the more I realize there are no answers life is to be lived

and since it is comparatively so short – (maybe too short – maybe too long – the only thing I know for sure, it isn’t easy

now that I want to live and I feel suddenly not old not concerned about previous thing except to protect myself – my life – and to desperately (pray) tell the universe I trust it ______________________________________________________________________________

• Parkside House Stationery – Written during her stay in England between July 14th – November 20th 1956.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really. ______________________________________________________________________________

• Roxbury Notes – Written throughout 1957 or 1958.

In every spring the green is too sharp – though the delicacy in their form is sweet and uncertain – it puts up a good struggle in the wind  trembling all the while. Those leaves will relax, expand in the sun and each raindrop they will resist even when they’re battered and ripped. I think I am very lonely – my mind jumps. I see myself in the mirror now, brow furrowed – if I lean close I’ll see – what I don’t want to know – tension, sadness,  disappointment, my eyes dulled, cheeks flushed with capillaries that look like rivers on maps – hair lying like snakes. The mouth makes me the saddest  next to my dead eyes. There is a dark line between the lips in the outline of  several waves in a turbulent storm – it says don’t kiss me, don’t fool  me I’m a dancer who cannot dance. ______________________________________________________________________________

• Roxbury Notes – Written throughout 1957 or 1958.

re – relationships

Everyone’s childhood plays itself out No wonder no one knows the other or can completely understand. By this I don’t know if I’, just giving up with this conclusion or resigning myself –  or maybe for the first time connecting with reality –

how do we know the pain of another’s earlier years let alone all that he drags with him since along the way at best a lot of lee-way is needed for the other – yet how much is unhealthy for one to bear.

I think to love bravely is the best and accept – as much as one can bear. ______________________________________________________________________________

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58 Years Without Marilyn. It's hard to believe 58 years to the day, on the night of August 4th, the world's most famous Star would leave us all.

[classicmollywood]

TCMFF  Home Edition Must Watch List

Hello friends!

I was supposed to be on a plane today to go to my first TCM Film Festival, but stuff happens and then you have a pandemic and everything gets canceled and you have to stay home! ANYWAYS, TCM decided to bring us some joy by playing programming for all of us, giving us the film festival, but at home. 

I have decided to list my must watch films for this Home Edition of the festival!

Thursday, April 16th

8 pm: A Star is Born (1954, George Cukor)

Starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, and Charles Bickford

On TCM’s website, this was listed as the inaugural film for the 2010 TCMFF. It’s also a film that is Judy Garland at her best. Garland lights up the screen as Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester. This film has fantastic musical numbers, beautiful colors, and is the best starting film for this festival.

11 PM: Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)

Starring Gustav Frohlich, Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge

If you have never seen a silent film or a German Expressionist film, watch this! Metropolis is the film that aged so well. A futuristic utopia from the lens of the 1920s is very interesting to watch and also some of the themes of this film can be translated to life today. I will say, the film can be described by some as “weird” but I wouldn’t let that stop you from watching it!

Friday, April 17th

2 PM: Eva Marie Saint Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival (2014)

Eva Marie Saint is one of my favorite classic film actresses. She has class, she has poise, and she is very talented. In 2014, TCM had a sit down with the actress to talk about herself and her films. This is such a treat to see!

3 PM: North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)

Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis, and Martin Landau

Another case of mistaken identity and suspense! Hitchcock knew what he was doing when he hired Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint to “sex” up in the screen during the 1950s. Their chemistry is electric. The airplane scene is such an intense watch. And James Mason seems to be good at playing a suave bad guy.

5:45 PM: Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)

Starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, Joe E. Brown, George Raft, and Pat O’Brien

Men witnessing a crime and then parading as women so they don’t get murdered! What a farce! Let’s be real, the best chemistry in the film is between Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. They play off each other so well. I will say, I do believe Marilyn Monroe was at her best in this film! Need a laugh, watch this!

1:30 AM: Grey Gardens (1975, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffy Meyer)

Starring Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale

This documentary is fascinating. It is fun but at times absolutely heartbreaking. Big Edie and Little Edie were definitely a fine pair. It is interesting watching the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, because they aren’t living in luxury, which would be expected due to their relation. Big and Little Edie are characters that you have to see to believe. The irony is, they are real people and not acting roles. 

5 AM: Kim Novak: Live from the TCM Film Festival (2013)

Kim Novak is so much more than her looks and this interview opened my eyes to how amazing she is as a person as well as an actress. 

Saturday, April 18th (AKA MY BIRTHDAY)

6 AM: The Man with The Golden Arm (1955, Otto Preminger)

Starring Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, and Kim Novak

This is one of the grittiest films from the 1950s. It depicts a heroin addict during their ups and downs. I was honestly surprised this film got made at all during the Production Code Era, but am very glad it did. Sinatra is so raw in his performance and Eleanor Parker creates a complex character as his wife. Of course, Kim Novak is wonderful to watch because she is more than just beautiful, she is an actress. This film really showcases her talent. 

1:15 PM: Safety Last! (1923, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)

Starring Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, and Bill Strother

Zany antics a plenty! That’s the best description of this film. Harold Lloyd films are always great to watch because he wasn’t afraid to do crazy things to get a laugh. This film has the infamous clock scene too! 

2:45 PM: They Live By Night (1949, Nicholas Ray)

Starring Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, and Howard Da Silva

If you only watch one movie on this list, THIS NEEDS TO BE THE ONE. It’s ironic that it airs on my birthday, because this is one of my favorite films. The story of doomed lovers who try their best to reform from a life of crime to survive wasn’t a new concept, but man, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell make you fall in love with their characters and hope that they somehow, someway make it to their life of happiness together.

10 PM: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)

Starring Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead

This film is another case of a film that got cut down by the studio, and in case you were wondering, Orson Welles was pissed. I would hope and pray one day we all get to see the full version (kinda doubtful), but this film isn’t so bad. I think the all-star cast really makes it worth it! 

Sunday, April 19th

6 AM: Jezebel (1938, William Wyler)

Starring Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, and George Brent 

I am not gonna lie, my first viewing of this film enraged me. Henry Fonda’s character made me so mad because he was a jerk. But I have decided I need to rewatch this film and see if my attitudes have changed. This film did so many great things for Bette Davis and Henry Fonda, so we should all give it another (or first) go around. Also this was the film Jane Fonda was born during! Just a fun fact.

3:30 PM: Auntie Mame (1958, Morton DaCosta)

Starring Rosalind Russell, Forrest Tucker, Coral Browne, Jan Handzlik, and Roger Smith

I want to be Auntie Mame. She is so much fun and so unique and I love it. The costumes are so grand in this film and Rosalind Russell really does a great job of bringing Mame to life. This film is so fun!!!

6 PM: Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)

Starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, and Jean Hagen

This is in my top 5 musicals. This musical always makes me smile and it is one of the few musicals where I know most of the words to the songs. The trio of Kelly, Reynolds, and O’Connor is something magical. Cosmo Brown is also one of my favorite characters in any film (and one of my cat’s namesakes). The film history alone with this film makes it worth watching! JUST WATCH THIS MUSICAL, OKAY?

9:45 PM: The Hustler (1961, Robert Rossen)

Starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott

Paul Newman is so cool in general, so he was born for this role. I never knew a movie about pool would have my interest, but here we are. The tension between Newman and Jackie Gleason is so well played and the way the film is shot, you feel like you are in the room with them. Also Piper Laurie does a great performance as the conflicted girlfriend of Newman’s ambitious pool shark.

12:15 AM: Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green)

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, and Donald Cook

THIS IS PRECODE HEAVEN! You have a woman who uses sex to get ahead in life and men become entranced, and usually destroyed, by her. Barbara Stanwyck plays her character so well that you have a love-hate relationship with her. She can be cruel, but you understand why she is doing what she is doing. 

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Letter from a disenchanted student of the Divine Principle

Many Unification Church members seem to think people who left the organization are like some kind of lapsed Catholics, but most of those people just recognized Moon’s absurd and contradictory rhetoric had absolutely no relationship to reality – I pointed out many of those obvious contradictions in my previous letter to Rev Moon. Even the vaunted Divine Principle was not his own teaching. Much of it came from a woman called Seong-do Kim whose revelations began in 1923. She stated that Jesus did not come to die (not new because other Christians had taught this previously), she also taught that the fall was a sexual sin (again not new because Jewish scholars suggested this long ago and anyone can recognize the association, even sex shops use a bitten apple to advertise their wares). She also taught about the change of blood lineage through the messiah – thus justifying all the deviant sexual activity involved in the pikareum rituals. Another source was a woman called Chong Deuk-eun who dictated a book called the Principle of Life in 1946-47. It was published in 1958.

The history parallels were taken straight from the teachings of Baek-moon Kim’s Israel Monastery – being the reason they finish in 1917, which was Baek-moon’s birth date rather than 1920 when Moon was born. The final Divine Principle book was composed by a committee guided by Hyo-won Eu with input from Young Oon Kim and various professors. So rather than being a direct revelation, the DP is actually an interesting amalgam of Christian theology, nineteenth century science, Oriental philosophy and shamanism – added to the insights and teachings that were taken from various Korean spiritual groups.



This was why I felt free to approach much of the DP as almost allegorical because the main thing to emphasize was personal spiritual maturity – the development of a loving parental heart. (The real meaning of ‘perfection’.) I never believed that absolute Cain/Abel rubbish spouted by Moon and Japanese leaders. I remember one itinerant worker saying, ‘If my central figure tells me this red dress is blue then it’s blue.’ Absolutely insane – but this is exactly the kind of thing that has been propagated by the Moon family and their minions, especially in Japan, and it leads to all kinds of abuses.



In addition to the DP we also have Rev. Moon’s great blessing theory, whereby through downing a glass of holy wine and being engrafted to his lineage we become capable of conceiving pure offspring, free from original sin. These ‘blessed’ children can then form the core of the heavenly kingdom on earth, of course with the ‘True Parents’ and their children at the absolute center. However, the proof of any pudding is in the eating – regardless of how good the recipe might sound. So let us look at the results, the fruits of the messiah and his teaching.

We can start with some of his own blessed children:   Ye Jin – (Divorced.) Hyo Jin – was a drug addict, I saw him give a sermon one time when he was so stoned he had to hold on to the podium in order to stand up. He punched and kicked his wife, Nansook Hong, watched pornography, walked around with a gun in his pocket and beat up church members. (Divorced.) In Jin – was forced to resign her position because it became public knowledge about her affairs with two married members and the illegitimate child she had with one of them. (Divorced.) Un Jin – said clearly on TV that her father was not the messiah, and that the church was just about power and money. (Divorced.)

 Hyun Jin, the kind-hearted business expert who wanted to cut the salaries of our church’s jewelry workers by a third – I saw a video of him calling a church leader an arrogant bastard and kicking him as the man knelt before him. No matter what the guy was guilty of, this was just one more example of the violence perpetrated by the Moon family. Which of course was epitomized by Cleopas, the black Zimbabwean supposedly embodying the spirit of Heung Jin, who went around the world viciously beating up men and women, putting some in hospital. He even threatened church members with a pistol. (All of it approved by Rev Moon who laughed at the beatings and had himself used a baseball bat on members.)



Kook Jin – an arms dealer who said Abel wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a gun. Divorced his wife and had himself re-blessed with a Korean beauty queen. He now has his own group of armed ‘knights’ willing to do whatever he orders. (Divorced.)

 Hyung Jin, the heir apparent (according to him), lied about getting a BA from Harvard when he actually attained a lower qualification – and if he thinks the parable of the sower is referring to ‘absolute sex’ I think he needs to go back to Divinity School. His Sanctuary Church now promotes the owning of AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles, and has ceremonies with participants carrying these lethal weapons while wearing bizarre crowns of bullets. According to one of his recent speeches, all the women of the world are ‘Brides of Christ,’ and he of course is now in that Christ position.

Don’t want to go into details about some of the others as I feel sorry for them.



So this so-called true family demonstrates clearly that there is no difference between blessed children and any others. Rev. Moon said as much in Korea when he was talking about Sammy Park, his illegitimate son. He said, ‘The sons from the concubine are better because there is more passion involved in their conception.’ So much for the value of the blessing. 



(Of course Mrs Moon blames the bad behavior of her adult, absolute ruler children on the poor church members, as though they could do anything to control it.)



So now lets look at the practical results of all the members’ sacrifice and offerings:

 This Parc One court case (the conflict that began between Kook Jin and Hyun Jin) resulted in at least 700 million dollars of church money going to lawyers and outside companies. This is at a time when Japanese church members were being bled dry; many could not even afford to go to the dentist. (They were commonly referred to as ‘the toothless ones’ in Japan.)



Cheongpyeong – you couldn’t make it up – they were selling apartments in the spirit world! People have to be completely away with the fairies to buy into that. Mrs Hyo Nam Kim (Dae Mo Nim or Hoon Mo Nim) after being denounced as a fraud, walked away with assets worth more than 230 million dollars (including one of the top golf courses in South Korea), so her spiritual real estate business must have been doing very well. It’s as crazy as charging money so that your ancestors can attend workshops with the spirit of Heung Jin, or paying thirty dollars for two bottles of Danjobi shampoo to get evil spirits out of your hair. (This all of course also being done with the consent of Rev Moon.)

Mrs Kim was supposedly channeling Dae Mo Nim, the mother of Hak Ja Han, which was actually a strange choice because Dae Mo Nim and another woman had spent two years in jail for beating a mentally ill youth to death in one of these frenzied ansu sessions (where they beat bad spirits out of people).

That whole Cheongpyeong providence is merely old Korean shamanism, and just because people have spiritual experiences there doesn’t validate what is going on. Something many members don’t realize is that God works to educate and reach people regardless of what religion they are following.



Rev. Moon often praised Korean culture but Korea was a slave society for most of its history. Although the number of slaves had declined during the nineteenth century the institution was not legally banned until 1894, and the system survived in practice until the 1920s. At least one third of the population were slaves in the past, and the children of slaves automatically belonged to their masters – with most wealthy men keeping concubines. The Koreans always had that tradition of the Yangban, or aristocrats, being served by everybody else, even having a caste of sex slaves for that purpose.



Another tradition was idol worship and shamanism. All this drumming and beating at Cheongpyeong is actually for drawing spirits into people, not driving them out. The disgusting business of putting Moon’s semen and blood into the holy wine is more shamanism. Shamans believe if you can get someone to imbibe your bodily fluids they will come under your control. By the way, Rev Moon’s children used to refer to Mrs Kim and her people as ‘the witches of Cheongpyeong.’ To put this in perspective there are still over 300,000 shamans or ‘mudangs’ plying their trade in Korea. 



Conferences. After working on some of them I was shown very clearly that all those big science, arts and other conferences actually had no purpose other than glorifying Rev Moon. He wasn’t at all interested in any results from those meetings, only in how many famous people attended.



About 500 million dollars is donated each year by the Japanese church, but where does it all go? What great world-changing projects do you see it used for? Of what use are all these glorious palaces? The one at Cheongpyeong cost over a thousand million dollars. Just think what good could have been done in the world with such funds. This particular palace is now adorned with giant statues of Hak Ja Han with Jesus kneeling before her and a much diminished figure of Sun Myung Moon in obedient attendance. She has effectively created a new religion centered on herself by changing the basic teachings and proclaiming herself as the Only Begotten Daughter of God, the wife of God, the mother of God and God himself/herself. (What kind of mental gymnastics the present members are doing to believe this utter nonsense is beyond me.)



I know each national church lives in its own little bubble, in effect creating its own version of the Unification society and cherry picking which headquarters’ directions to implement. Each country also seems to hold onto its own view of the ‘messiah,’ effectively editing out anything that does not conform to this ideal. However, with the advent of the Internet this can thankfully no longer be the case.

It is the very core of the Unification Church that needs to be examined. The whole church has been built on lies. Even Rev Moon’s life story is full of falsehoods. Remember that picture of him carrying the man on his back; he let it be known for years that it was him before finally admitting it wasn’t.

The stories about Heungnam – I heard a testimony from one of those early disciples where she went to visit him and found him drinking tea in a nearby village! Chung-hwa Pak had been an officer in the military and was put in charge of the prisoners. He designated which tasks the prisoners should do. He was able to give Moon time off so they could talk together about his beliefs. Moon was not always being worked to death as he later stated.


He said he graduated in electrical engineering at Waseda University in Tokyo, but he actually only attended night classes at a technical high school.


The Church made out that Moon was arrested in North Korea for preaching against communism, but the charges were really for bigamy and adultery. Chong-hwa Kim, the married woman involved, was also jailed. His anti-communist stance came much later.



The story about him meeting Jesus on the mountainside is also untrue. It was Seong-do Kim who first told people she’d had these Easter revelations, then Baek-moon Kim claimed them as his, and finally Rev Moon – whose lies gave him away as Easter did not fall on the date he gave for that year. In his most recent account of that meeting he calls Jesus a bastard, and originally taught that Jesus should have had sex with his mother to restore the fall. He also claimed to have met and talked with Buddha, but until his first visit to India he thought Buddha was Chinese. 



The Tragedy of the Six Marys. This book described the pikareum, or womb-cleansing, ceremonies conducted during the early years of the Unification Church. For years we were told it was untrue, but before the book came out in Japan they started giving lectures explaining the providential reasons why Moon had to have sex not only with the Six Marys, but also with all the wives of the 36, 72 and even the 124 couples. Some of the members listening to those lectures left the church afterwards so they stopped giving them, but they started them again in Korea from what I heard.

The Israel Monastery was a pikareum church with Baek-moon Kim doing the womb cleansing by having sex with the female members. Another similar one was the Olive Tree Movement started by Tae-Seon Park. This had 300,000 members and the churches had special rooms to practice the pikareum rituals. So there were plenty of examples of this grotesque idea for Rev Moon to draw on.



The holy wine ceremony is a symbolic sexual act, but for the first years of the church Rev Moon actually had sex with the female members. This is the core of the church and it is both vile and ludicrous.



I don’t say these things lightly because I needed plenty of evidence before I believed them, but I know people in both Japan and Korea who attended lectures where this behavior was justified. In America Hyung Jin and Kook Jin have admitted such things happened. It was admitted by Young Oon Kim, Papasan Choi, Chung-Hwa Pak, President Eu’s cousin (Shin-hee Eu), Annie Choi (the mother of Sam Park), Deok-jin Kim and many others. Rev Yong also went around the world giving lectures explaining the dispensational necessity of such sex practices.



God of Day and God of Night. There used to be a shrine to this primitive Korean god to the east of Seoul. (Moon was incorporating any kind of rubbish into his mythology by the end of his life.)

I could report on even worse activities and crimes but I think this is enough for now. The Divine Principle itself is a wonderful construct, (Hyo-won Eu being something of a genius) the only problem being that it isn’t true. So much of the numerology, four position foundations, triple objective purposes and so on, is actually meaningless. There was no sexual fall and inherited original sin and Satan are non-existent. The history parallels are extremely contrived, and although interesting, prove nothing at all. There are many more aspects of the book that don’t make sense. Some parts of course are helpful, Jesus not coming to die and so on, but none of these are original ideas, so the book certainly doesn’t prove that Moon is the Second Advent.

▲ Baek-moon Kim was born in 1917. He devised the parallels of history.



As predicted nothing happened on Foundation Day apart from a few pointless ceremonies. The church leadership knew this would be the case, which is why they were already telling people to prepare for 2020, the 100th anniversary of Moon’s birth. Mrs Moon is emphasizing witnessing now. (Because tithes are an ongoing source of revenue.) She recently told the Japanese wives in Korea that if they don’t do well then their descendants will pay lots of indemnity. She seems to have forgotten what her husband said on October 27, 1999, ‘No more indemnity is needed. The providence of restoration is completed.’



I personally think anyone still teaching the Divine Principle has to examine all of the above, and then ask themselves if they are just helping to propagate a gigantic destructive fraud? Thousands of people have gone through real suffering to enrich Moon and his family. Many of them had their lives ruined by being matched and married to people they could not relate to. It’s hard to believe but Moon’s church even advertised for any Korean men who wanted wives to come to one of those big blessings – just to make the numbers up, although he charged them between two and ten thousand dollars for each purchased bride. He then matched dedicated Japanese sisters to men who weren’t even church members – some of whom were unemployed drunkards or worse. (One of these wives eventually killed her Korean husband after suffering years of abuse.) Again, ask yourself whether these matchings were the action of a loving father, or an evil despot with no concern at all for the happiness and well-being of others?



If members were matched with someone they could love and be happy with, then they were in the minority, as it was mostly a matter of luck. Remember he matched physical brothers and sisters on at least four occasions that I know of, then changed the matching when he was told about it, so it certainly wasn’t God guiding him.



If people want God in their lives all they have to do is invite him in. Knock and the door will be opened. You don’t need to go to God through Moon or anyone else, and heaven is a place for heavenly people, so if you aren’t heavenly then no blessing, white robe or inseminated wine is going to get you in there.

And just to be clear, arrogance and avarice are not heavenly attributes.



I believe anyone who has sincerely tried to serve God and create a better world has certainly not wasted their time, because God will remember their efforts whatever religion they followed, but the Unification Church, FFWPU, or Hak Ja Han’s new name for it ‘Heavenly Parent’s Holy Community,’ is nothing but a despotic money-making, power-seeking, destructive scam that should not be supported in any way.



My apologies people, no jokes this time, I’m too disgusted by the whole sorry mess.



Sloe Gin

______________________________________________

Newsweek on the many Korean messiahs of the 1970s

Hwang Gook-joo and his orgies

The Divine Principle is constructed to control members

Sun Myung Moon’s Theology of the Fall, Tamar, Jesus and Mary

Sun Myung Moon – Restoration through Incest

Shamanism is at the heart of Sun Myung Moon’s church

Japanese member, Ms. K, was forced to marry Korean man she did not like

Sun Myung Moon makes me feel ashamed to be Korean

The Fall of the House of Moon – New Republic

Sun Myung Moon’s secret love child – Mother Jones

Cult Indoctrination – and the Road to Recovery

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IT WILL BE ABOUT WHATEVER YOU DISCOVER IN THE COURSE OF TECHNOLOGY, AND SOME TRAINS OF THOUGHT JUST PETER OUT

If you're going to have a deep understanding of what you're doing; the kind of people you want to work on them, and investing is for most of the founders spent all their time building their applications. PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. But it was hard to say at the time that this was a big market. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of exit strategy, because you couldn't establish the level of university you'd need as a seed. Would a basketball team trade one of their own, you can make yourself do it you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can prove what you're saying, or at least lacked some concepts that would have made their lives easier. Result: this revolution, if it isn't, how do you pick good programmers if you're not a programmer? A recruiter at a big company, for whom ideally you'd work your whole career. A few CEOs' incomes reflect some kind of wrongdoing. So the real question is not how to convert that wealth into money.

Underpaying people at the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. The idea even flowed back into big companies. But I do at least know now why I didn't. Maybe it would be a well-paying but boring job at a big company—and that scale of improvement can change social customs. There is some momentum involved. But if you look at how famous startups got started, a lot of catches as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came my way, I used to think the good ones, at least in the US are auto workers, schoolteachers, and civil servants happier than actors, professors, and professional athletes? Indeed, one of our habits of mind to invoke. Wikipedia may be the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of the problem was that he wanted his own computer.

Which means that any sufficiently promising startup will be offered money on terms they'd be crazy to believe your company was going to study philosophy remained intact. The difficulty of firing people is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday concept, human is fuzzy around the edges, there are ways to decrease its effects. The best they can do whatever's required themselves. So if you want to start a startup. If it's a subset, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. A list of n things. A startup is a company designed to grow fast, I mean it in two senses.

So if you're going to start a startup, you're probably going to have to do whatever it is eventually. If you want to attract to your silicon valley. The war was due mostly to external forces, and calls itself I. There continued to be bribes, as there still are everywhere, but only a few of them. All the unfun kinds of wealth creation slow dramatically in a society where I was the richest, but much more on them than the college. But it means if you have a free version and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted. The usual way is to hire good programmers and let them choose.

Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? People did start their own company. I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. But it's not humming with ambition. The key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an audience. P 500 in 1958 had been there an average of 61 years. He called a maximally elegant proof one out of God's book, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. Who would rely on such a test? At the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to work for you without giving them options likely to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and your knowledge won't break down in edge cases, as it would if you were willing to sell early on. And if you don't let people into it. I think the root of the problem, then gradually expand from there?

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to make a conscious effort to find smart friends. Within a few decades of the founding of Apple, Steve Wozniak still hadn't quit HP. People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of delivering desktop-like applications over the web. If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarians, you won't have any habits of mind is to ask whether the ideas represent some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. To do that well meant to get good grades so they can get into a good college. There's nothing more they need to do more than find good projects. In particular, they don't have any is that they don't enjoy it. I doubt I believed I understood them, but though they can end up in the same business. In high school I decided I was going to take care of you. It's significant that the most famous examples is Apple, whose board made a nearly fatal blunder in firing Steve Jobs. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. You needed to take care of the company are the real powers, and the granary the wealth that each family created.

I don't know if I learned anything from them. This probably makes them less productive, because they don't know what you're going to have to think about the future, just that you think may be due to a crime well enough executed that it had been a time of consolidation, led especially by J. If a successful startup usually has three phases: There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out. I spend a lot of users, so they must be smarter than they seem. Whereas if you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. But change was coming soon. Even Microsoft sees it, but it's not part of any specific paper or magazine? 0 referred to whatever those might turn out to be more entrepreneurial, and less afraid of risk. The reason they don't have good colleagues to inspire them.

Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. A couple months ago, one VC firm almost certainly unintentionally published a study showing bias of this type. Materially and socially, technology seems to be a police state, and although present rulers seem enlightened compared to the last, even enlightened despotism can probably only get you part way toward being a great economic power. No matter what you do. You need a big prime number? It's as if they had. So long as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone. Culturally we have ever less common ground. What happened to him? For example, many startups in America begin in places where it's not really legal to run a business.

Thanks to Matthias Felleisen, John Collison, Erann Gat, Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for inviting me to speak.

[blackkudos]

Betty Carter

Betty Carter (born Lillie Mae Jones; May 19, 1929 – September 26, 1998) was an American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and imaginative interpretation of lyrics and melodies. Vocalist Carmen McRae once remarked: "There's really only one jazz singer—only one: Betty Carter."

Early life

Carter was born in Flint, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit, where her father, James Jones, was the musical director of a Detroit church and her mother, Bessie, was a housewife. As a child, Carter was raised to be extremely independent and to not expect nurturing from her family. Even 30 years after leaving home, Carter was still very aware of and affected by the home life she was raised in, and was quoted saying:

I have been far removed from my immediate family. There's been no real contact or phone calls home every week to find out how everybody is…As far as family is concerned, it's been a lonesome trek…It's probably just as much my fault as it is theirs, and I can't blame anybody for it. But there was…no real closeness, where the family urged me on, or said…'We're proud'…and all that. No, no…none of that happened.

While the lack of support from Carter's family caused her to feel isolated, it may also have instilled self-reliance and determination to succeed. She studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory at the age of 15, but only attained a modest level of expertise.

At the age of 16, Carter began singing. As her parents were not big proponents of her pursuing a singing career, she would sneak out at night to audition for amateur shows. After winning first place at her first amateur competition, Carter felt as though she were being accepted into the music world and decided that she must pursue it tirelessly. When she began performing live, she was too young to be admitted into bars, so she obtained a forged birth certificate to gain entry in order to perform.

Career

Even at a young age, Carter was able to bring a new vocal style to jazz. The breathiness of her voice was a characteristic seldom heard before her appearance on the music scene. She also was well known for her passion for scat singing and her strong belief that the throwaway attitude that most jazz musicians approached it with was inappropriate and wasteful due to its spontaneity and basic inventiveness, seldom seen elsewhere.

Detroit, where Carter grew up, was a hotbed of jazz growth. After signing with a talent agent after her win at amateur night, Carter had opportunities to perform with famous jazz artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, who visited Detroit for an extensive amount of time. Gillespie is often considered responsible for her strong passion for scatting. In earlier recordings, it is apparent that her scatting had similarities to the qualities of Gillespie's.

At the time of Gillespie's visit, Charlie Parker was receiving treatment in a psychiatric hospital, delaying her encounter with him. However, Carter eventually performed with Parker, as well as with his band consisting of Tommy Potter, Max Roach, and Miles Davis. After receiving praise from both Gillespie and Parker for her vocal prowess, Carter felt an upsurge in confidence and knew that she could make it in the business with perseverance.

Carter's confidence was well founded. In 1948, she was asked by Lionel Hampton to join his band. She finally had her big break. Working with Hampton's group gave her the chance to be bandmates with artists such as Charles Mingus and Wes Montgomery, as well as with Ernest Harold "Benny" Bailey, who had recently vacated Gillespie's band and Albert Thornton "Al" Grey who would later go on to join Gillespie's band. Hampton obviously had an ear for talent and a love for bebop. Carter too had a deep love for bebop as well as a talent for it. Hampton's wife Gladys gave her the nickname "Betty Bebop", a nickname she reportedly detested. Despite her good ear and charming personality, Carter was fiercely independent and had a tendency to attempt to resist Hampton's direction, while Hampton had a temper and was quick to anger. Hampton expected a lot from his players and did not want them to forget that he was the band's leader. She openly hated his swing style, refused to sing in a swinging way, and she was far too outspoken for his tastes. Carter honed her scat singing ability while on tour, which was not well received by Hampton as he did not enjoy her penchant for improvisation. Over the course of two and a half years, Hampton fired Carter a total of seven times.

Carter was part of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra that played at the famed Cavalcade of Jazz in Los Angeles at Wrigley Field which was produced by Leon Hefflin, Sr. on July 10, 1949. They did a second concert at Lane Field in San Diego on September 3, 1949. They also performed at the sixth famed Cavalcade of Jazz concert on June 25, 1950. Also featured on the same day were Roy Milton & His Solid Senders, Pee Wee Crayton's Orchestra, Dinah Washington, Tiny Davis & Her Hell Divers, and other artists. 16,000 people were reported to be in attendance and the concert ended early because of a fracas while Hampton's band played "Flying High".

Being a part of Hampton's band provided a few things for "The Kid" (a nickname bestowed upon Carter that stuck for the rest of her life): connections, and a new approach to music, making it so that all future musical attitudes that came from Carter bore the mark of Hampton's guidance. Because of Hampton's hiring of Carter, she also goes down in history as one of the last big band era jazz singers in history. However, by 1951, Carter left the band. After a short recuperation back home, Carter was in New York, working all over the city for the better part of the early 1950s, as well as participating in an extensive tour of the south, playing for "camp shows". This work made little to no money, but Carter believed it was necessary in order to develop as an artist, and was a way to "pay her dues".

Very soon after Carter's arrival in New York City, she was given the opportunity to record with King Pleasure and the Ray Bryant Trio, becoming more recognizable and well-known and subsequently being granted the chance to sing at the Apollo Theatre. This theatre was known for giving up-and-coming artists the final shove into becoming household names. Carter was propelled into prominence, recording with Epic label by 1955 and was a well-known artist by the late 1950s. Her first solo LP, Out There, was released on the Peacock label in 1958.

Miles Davis can be credited for Carter's bump in popularity, as he was the person who recommended to Ray Charles that he take Carter under his wing. Carter began touring with Charles in 1960, then making a recording of duets with him in 1961 (Ray Charles and Betty Carter), including the R&B-chart-topping "Baby, It's Cold Outside", which brought her a measure of popular recognition. In 1963 she toured in Japan with Sonny Rollins. She recorded for various labels during this period, including ABC-Paramount, Atco and United Artists, but was rarely satisfied with the resulting product. After three years of touring with Charles and a total of two recordings together, Carter took a hiatus from recording to marry. She and her husband had two children. However, she continued performing, not wanting to be dependent upon her husband for financial support.

The 1960s became an increasingly difficult time for Carter as she began to slip in fame, refusing to sing contemporary pop music, and her youth fading. Carter was nearly forty years old, which at the time was not conducive to a career in the public eye. Rock and roll, like pop, was steadily becoming more popular and provided cash flow for labels and recording companies. Carter had to work extremely hard to continue to book gigs because of the jazz decline. Her marriage also was beginning to crumble. By 1971, Carter was single and mainly performing live with a small group consisting of merely a piano, drums, and a bass. The Betty Carter trio was one of very few jazz groups to continue to book gigs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Carter created her own record label, Bet-Car Records, in 1969, the sole recording source of Carter's music for the next eighteen years:

....in fact, I think I was probably the first independent label out there in '69. People thought I was crazy when I did it. 'How are you gonna get any distribution?' I mean, 'How are you gonna take care of business and do that yourself?' 'Don't you need somebody else?' I said, 'Listen. Nobody was comin' this way and I wanted the records out there, so I found out that I could do it myself.' So, that's what I did. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. You know. We're talking about '69!

Some of her most famous recordings were originally issued on Bet-Car, including the double album The Audience with Betty Carter (1980). In 1980 she was the subject of a documentary film by Michelle Parkerson, But Then, She's Betty Carter. Carter's approach to music did not concern solely her method of recording and distribution, but also her choice in venues. Carter began performing at colleges and universities, starting in 1972 at Goddard College in Vermont. Carter was excited at this opportunity, as it was since the mid-1960s that Carter had been wanting to visit schools and provide some sort of education for students. She began lecturing along with her musical performances, informing students of the history of jazz and its roots.

By 1975, Carter's life and work prospects began to improve, and Carter was beginning to be able to pick her own jobs once again, touring in Europe, South America, and the United States. In 1976, Carter was a guest live performer on Saturday Night Live′s first season on the air, and was also a performer at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1977 and 1978, carving out a permanent place for herself in the music business as well as in the world of jazz.

In 1977, Carter enjoyed a new peak in critical and popular estimation, and taught a master class with her past mentor, Dizzy Gillespie, at Harvard. In the last decade of her life, Carter began to receive even wider acclaim and recognition. In 1987 she signed with Verve Records, who reissued most of her Bet-Car albums on CD for the first time and made them available to wider audiences. In 1988 she won a Grammy for her album Look What I Got! and sang in a guest appearance on The Cosby Show (episode "How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?"). In 1994 she performed at the White House and was a headliner at Verve's 50th anniversary celebration in Carnegie Hall. She was the subject of a 1994 short film by Dick Fontaine, Betty Carter: New All the Time.

In 1997 she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. This award was one of thousands, but Carter considered this medal to be her most important that she received in her lifetime.

Death

Carter continued to perform, tour, and record, as well as search for new talent until she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 1998. She died on September 26, 1998, at the age of 69, and was later cremated. She was survived by her two sons.

Legacy

Carter often recruited young accompanists for performances and recordings, insisting that she "learned a lot from these young players, because they're raw and they come up with things that I would never think about doing."

1993 was Carter's biggest year of innovation, creating a program called Jazz Ahead, which took 20 students who were given the opportunity to spend an entire week training and composing with Carter, a program that still exists to this day and is hosted in The Kennedy Center.

Betty Carter is considered responsible for discovering great jazz talent, her discoveries including John Hicks, Curtis Lundy, Mulgrew Miller, Cyrus Chestnut, Dave Holland, Stephen Scott, Kenny Washington, Benny Green and more.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Betty Carter among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

Discography

CD compilations

1990: Compact Jazz – (Polygram) – Bet-Car and Verve recordings from 1976 to 1987

1992: I Can't Help It – (Impulse!/GRP) – the Out There and The Modern Sound albums on one compact disc

1999: Priceless Jazz – (GRP) – Peacock and ABC-Paramount recordings from 1958 and 1960

2003: Betty Carter's Finest Hour – (Verve) – recordings from 1958 to 1992

On multi-artist compilations

1988: "I'm Wishing" on Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films

1997: "Lonely House" on September Songs – The Music of Kurt Weill

[blogsmith57]

Movies Ansd Tv With Pina Colada Song

Movies And Tv With Pina Colada Song Rupert Holmes

Pina Colada Song Wikipedia

Escape The Pina Colada Song Video

Two Pina Coladas Song

Pina Colada Song Video

Janet learns the lyrics to the Pina Colada song. Janet learns the lyrics to the Pina Colada song. On the movie the sweetest thing who sings the pina colada song its a womens group?

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

***

At least in retrospect, the ’70s must have been the wildest, most motley, most all-over-the-place decade in the history of popular music. Some genuine musical revolutions either started in the ’70s or matured during the decade: Hip-hop, punk, disco, funk, prog. But if you look at the ’70s through the lens of the pop charts, as this column does, you see excitement and tedium locked in a constant struggle for dominance throughout the decade, with novelty sneaking around the outside and getting some jabs in.

So really, the ’70s ended the only way they possibly could’ve done: With a badly-sung, infernally catchy soft-rock ditty, an infidelity-themed story-song that ends in an O. Henry twist. Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” has popped up on movie and TV-show soundtracks countless times in the past four decades; it has earned its place within our shared consciousness. And yet I can’t imagine ever being in a situation where I would actively seek the song out, where I would want to hear it. But then, I was three months old when the thing hit #1. Maybe I’m not supposed to know what motherfuckers were thinking.

Rupert Holmes, the man who wrote and produced “Escape” and who thus owns the chart transition from ’70s to ’80s, had been part of the pop-music dream factory for a decade when he got to #1. Holmes was born in the UK, the son of an American Army officer and an English woman. He spent the early years of his childhood in the English village of Northwich and the later years in the New York suburb of Nanuet. Holmes’ parents were both musicians, and Holmes went to the Manhattan School Of Music on a clarinet scholarship. Pretty soon after he finished school, he went to work as a pop-music professional.

Holmes was working as an arranger in the late ’60s when he joined the Cuff Links, an anonymous bubblegum group that also featured Ron Dante, the lead singer of the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar.” When the Cuff Links broke up, Holmes recorded a song called “Jennifer Tomkins.” The single, released under the name Street People, peaked at #36. In 1971, Holmes wrote a cannibalism-themed joint called “Timothy” for the Pennsylvania band the Buoys, and that one peaked at #17. Holmes also wrote ad jingles and scored a little-seen 1970 Western called Five Savage Men. He was in the game.

Holmes released Widescreen, his solo debut, in 1974. Before 1979’s Partners In Crime, the breakout album that gave us “Escape,” Holmes knocked out four solo LPs. None of them sold, but those records helped Holmes build a name for himself as a writer of funny, irony-infused story-songs. Barbra Streisand was a fan, and Holmes wrote songs for her and for the absurdly popular soundtrack for the 1976 film A Star Is Born. Holmes didn’t score a charting single of his own until 1978’s “Let’s Get Crazy Tonight,” which peaked at #72. Private Stock, the label that released “Let’s Get Crazy Tonight,” went out of business when the song was still on the charts.

Holmes got the idea for “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” one night when he was flipping through The Village Voice, the newspaper that once employed me. (“Escape” is the second #1 hit built around classified ads; it arrived eight years after the Honey Cone’s “Want Ads.”) Inspired, Holmes hatched the narrative of a bored couple who, while attempting to cheat on each other, accidentally go out on a blind date with each other. As originally written, the chorus started with the line “if you like Humphrey Bogart.” While he was getting ready to record it, though, Holmes decided that his own songs had too many references to older movies, and to Bogart in particular. He changed “Humphrey Bogart” to “piña coladas” at the last possible minute simply because he didn’t want to let down any of the real Rupert Holmes heads out there.

If you stop to think about “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” for even a second, it’s a pretty nasty little song. The very first line is this: “I was tired of my lady/ We’d been together too long.” The song’s narrator is unhappy with relationship, but he doesn’t do anything to end it. Instead, he sneaks around behind his girlfriend’s back, falling for a sentence in a classified ad. The person described in that ad seems hopelessly basic. Likes: Fruity mixed drinks, rain, champagne, beach fucking. Dislikes: Yoga, health food. But apparently the guy is basic, too, since a few lines of small-print newsprint text are all he needs to ditch his relationship. He takes out his own ad, responding to the first, and he includes grandiose verbiage about planning an “escape.”

He does not successfully execute that escape. It turns out that the girl who took out that classified ad is his own girlfriend, who is just as bored with the relationship as he is. They meet up at an Irish pub and instantly figure out exactly what just happened. The song presents this ending as a happy surprise. In interviews years later, Holmes says that the guy was supposed to be an asshole, and a passive one. The girl, who is also attempting to cheat, was at least the one with the wherewithal to instigate the whole episode. Holmes was hoping that they’d both realize how much they had in common, that they’d recommit themselves to each other. This seems unlikely.

Movies And Tv With Pina Colada Song Rupert Holmes

I have questions. For instance: Where does this couple go from here? They both know that they can’t trust each other. They also know that they don’t really know each other. They’ve got all these completely elementary preferences that they haven’t communicated. After that initial rush of recognition, how does the rest of this relationship look? How long do they stay together? How are they not incredibly pissed off at one another from the moment they spy each other across the bar? How are they not, at the same time, both consumed with guilt upon getting caught? I don’t like this couple’s chances.

I don’t know if this is a good story, but it’s good storytelling. I don’t much like the characters or where they end up, but Holmes sketches out the whole narrative in a few quick words, never losing sight of his own melody. This doesn’t change the reality that the actual music behind this story is exactly the kind of wack-ass soft-rock pablum that I cannot stand. It’s got an awkward, clumpy beat that Holmes recorded with two drummers. (Holmes co-produced it, and he says that the studio band played sloppily that day, so he used the 16 bars he liked the best and looped them.) There’s watery piano. There’s a processed-to-death guitar lead. There’s a groove that can’t stop tripping over itself. And then there are those vocals.

Holmes isn’t a bad vocalist, exactly. He a classic ’70s singer-songwriter guy, a conversational speak-singer. But man, I do not like what happens when he cranks that voice up and hits the hook on “Escape.” The hook is, to be fair, instantly memorable. But this is not always a good thing. Holmes hits that upper register, and I just wish I was someplace else. I don’t even know how people functioned when this thing was all over the radio.

Holmes managed one more big hit after “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” “Him,” the single’s follow-up, was another story-song. This time, Holmes sang from the perspective of a guy who figures out that his girlfriend is cheating. “Him” peaked at #6. (It’s a 4.) Holmes kept putting out albums into the ’90s, but none of them hit. He also went back to writing songs for other people. “You Got It All,” a ballad that Holmes wrote for the teenage Tongan-American Minneapolis-based Mormon family band the Jets, peaked at #3 in 1986. (It’s a 6.) Britney Spears, an artist who will eventually appear in this column, covered it on her debut album. Get ready to be incredibly depressed: Holmes wrote the song for his 10-year-old daughter. Before the song took off, she died of an undetected brain tumor.

I don’t know how you bounce back from something like that, but Holmes did. After “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” Holmes has had more success as a storyteller than as a musician. In 1985, Holmes wrote The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, a Broadway musical based on an unfinished Charles Dickens novel. It won five Tonys, including two for Holmes. Since then, Holmes has written more than a dozen plays, many of them hits. He also created Remember WENN, a drama that ran for three season on AMC in the late ’90s, and he wrote all 56 of its episodes. He’s published a few books, too. The man can write, and the best thing about “Escape” is that you can tell that right away.

But Holmes is a whole lot more famous for “Escape” than for anything else he’s ever done in his life. He’s pretty funny when he talks about it, too. In a 2003 Songfacts interview, Holmes said this:

I have a feeling that if I saved an entire orphanage from a fire and carried the last child out on my shoulders, as I stood there charred and smoking, they’d say, “Aren’t you the guy who wrote ‘The Piña Colada Song?'”

Perhaps Rupert Holmes would like to escape “The Piña Colada Song.” So would I.

Pina Colada Song Wikipedia

BONUS BEATS: Here’s the scene from a 1999 episode of The Simpsons — the same storied episode that predicted the Trump presidency — where the not-aging-well future version of Bart sings a parody of “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” during his sister’s presidential addresss:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the weirdly extremely memorable “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” needle-drop from the 2001 film Shrek:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s Kanye West, noted fan of the aforementioned Shrek scene, quoting “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” on “White Dress,” a song that he contributed to the soundtrack of the 2012 RZA-directed kung fu movie The Man With The Iron Fists:

(Kanye West will eventually appear in this column.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the scene from 2014’s Guardians Of The Galaxy — which, like The Man With The Iron Fists, stars Dave Bautista — where Chris Pratt steals his Walkman back from the space-prison guard who is enjoying “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the great scene from a 2016 Better Call Saul episode where Bob Odenkirk sings a few bars of “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” and spouts some fake biographical facts about Rupert Holmes:

more from The Number Ones

Raised in Hawaii Jack Johnson was the son of a famed surfer and even tried to have a go of his own on the waves. Unfortunately an accident that involved teeth being knocked out and stitches being required kind of halted that dream as he was sidelined from surfing for a while. It wasn’t too long after that however that his musical talents started to become his thing and picked up a guitar and started strumming out a few songs that he’d thought up. He did this throughout college, joining a band and jamming as they performed here and there during their time together. Johnson’s big break came in 2000 however when he not only produced the soundtracks for a couple of films but he tried his hand at making them as well. You could easily say this man is quite talented but it might still be an understatement.

Here are a few of his songs as used in TV and movies.

5. Glee – Bubbletoes

Glee is one of those shows you either liked or didn’t think about. It wasn’t even a matter of not liking if it you didn’t watch it, as the energy and verve of the show was enough to make it interesting. But if you weren’t into the whole song and dance routine then chances are you wouldn’t dislike it but just wouldn’t watch it since the whole idea of not liking the show seemed kind of petty since it was so upbeat a lot of the time, or at least seemed like it. In many way Glee kind of took a lot of people back to their experiences in high school since there are quite a few people that can remember being in similar clubs.

Escape The Pina Colada Song Video

4. Sense8 – The Sharing Song

This show is something else and it was one of Netflix’s top prospects when it first came out. The ability to connect with people miles away due to a special quality that links them all, and the knowledge and skills that can be shared via that link is pretty cool, but it could cause some serious problems as well. You can’t help but think that some of the people that are connected would embrace this after a period of confusion, but others would seek to block it out since this is the kind of thing that humans would rarely ever be able to get used to since it’s not considered natural or normal.

3. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty – Escape (The Pina Colada Song)

Two Pina Coladas Song

Walter Mitty is a man that no one seems to take seriously since he’s kind of a nobody when the film starts, though he’s far more important than many people would care to realize. Working at Time magazine where he’s been for so long he’s been taken for granted and treated like a shadow on the wall since he’s a very quiet and unassuming person. But when an important negative for the last issue of Time goes missing he has to go and track it down by tracking down the photographer. In the end however he finds that it was with him the whole time, he just didn’t know where to look. The adventure he takes though is what was truly important as it finally got him to open up to the world.

2. Curious George – Upside Down

Several generations have grown up with Curious George since in truth he’s been around for a very long time. As a children’s story he’s one of the most classic tales out there and is the kind of story that you’d want your kid to watch since it’s a very touching and educational show that offers a lot of fun and engaging activity that kids will want to emulate. Sure George gets himself into trouble now and again, but that’s the beauty of the design. Kids can learn how they can get themselves out of trouble as well since George is all about having fun but he’s also about problem-solving. This is just a great show for kids and a bit of nostalgia for adults.

1. Jack Johnson – Middle Man

For all his talent and all his skill at music Jack Johnson is still a very diverse man since he’s not only a musician, but a father, a husband, and an environmentalist that spends a lot of his time balancing his life out between the different roles he’s given himself to play. So far in life it seems like he’s done just fine and has kept everything as it should be. He’s a very open person about his life in music, but keeps a lid on the private lives of his kids and family, which seems like one of the best ideas since quite honestly it’s no one else’s business. He’s definitely a family man and someone that cares a lot about what he does.

Pina Colada Song Video

Usually that’s the kind of person that knows just what they want and how to make it happen.

[wineanddinosaur]

How Trader Joe’s Turned the Wine Aisle on Its Head and Helped Create the Modern Grocery Store

Shopping for supermarket wine is an American pastime. And while some of us have always loved the act of buying groceries, pandemic restrictions on “nonessential” activities have made our weekly outings to the market all the more exciting.

Benjamin Lorr, author of “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket,” says that for many adults, grocery stores are like amusement parks. And while there are lots of reasons the supermarket became what it is today, one thing was fundamental to its success: alcohol. Booze, and specifically wine, played an especially important role in the rise of one of America’s favorite grocery stores: Trader Joe’s.

According to Lorr, Trader Joe’s changed the game for supermarket wine, making it the sessionable vino we know and love today. VinePair talked with Lorr about the role of wine in the modern American grocery store, and how Trader Joe’s played a key part in increasing Americans’ access to quality, affordable wine.

1. What inspired you to write “The Secret Life of Groceries”?

There were two paths to this book. One was that I’ve just loved grocery stores my whole life. They are this almost hallucinogenic place that I go to on a daily or weekly basis, with saturated colors on the shelves, as well as a large volume of different objects all screaming from the shelves. They’re simultaneously comforting and menacing. There’s something very powerful about them, and I wanted to scratch the surface behind that.

I don’t want to get too grandiose here, but the grocery store, to me, is this small stand-in for the civil project writ large. This is what we’ve created to meet our needs. It is pretty absurdly impressive when you look back on the human project — the amount of choice, abundance, low price, and high quality is so routine, we take those things completely for granted.

The short story was that I was working on my last book, which was about Bikram yoga and understanding why people were attracted to that as an obsessive pursuit. And in the middle of writing that book, I was trying to get close to this guru and spend time with him, so I went to one of his teacher trainings, where people are locked in a hotel complex for nine weeks doing gobs of yoga, and they would let them out to go to the grocery store. I watched these yogis, grown adults, descend on a Trader Joe’s, and I had never seen happiness like that in adults. There was just this maniacal glee, like adults going to an amusement park, and I think something just clicked.

2. What was Trader Joe’s initial strategy when it came to wine?

Joe [Coulombe] founded Trader Joe’s in 1958, and he realized pretty quickly that he couldn’t compete against big firms that had the power. So he chose to reinvent along several interesting angles, one of which was that he realized that, as the GI Bill promised college education to people who weren’t previously allowed to get one, that more consumers were going to [go to college] — and that was going to change their tastes and what they wanted to buy. Similarly, he saw that travel was increasing. He thought cheap international airfare was going to create customers who wanted items on the shelf that reflected their travel and their education.

Likewise, he thought that network TV offered only one, homogenous advertising experience, and then people would all look at the same TV shows and they would all buy the same giant brands. He just thought that this new consumer wouldn’t want that. So he started to build Trader Joe’s for consumers that are educated, exposed to travel, and who want options that aren’t in that mainstream.

That sounds easy, but he really didn’t have a clue how to do that. The place that he got probably the biggest indication — he calls it the most important decision he made as a marketer — all came from studying wine.

Wine represented a place where the typical rules that govern grocery stores didn’t apply. Shoppers understood that wine changes by vintage, not by brand. Each year, it changes, and it’s in limited supply. It’s scarce, and it’s risky when you’re a buyer, because you have to rely on taste, rather than preconceived notions. Whereas if you’re buying Bounty paper towels or Coca-Cola, it doesn’t matter, because these are bombed out in such consistency.

The wine industry really opened his eyes to the possibility of marketing all foods like wine. When you’re a consumer, you find a good wine shop, and then you start to trust the owner of that [store]. You don’t necessarily try to master everything as a consumer. Using that as a frame for a grocery store was very novel at the time. The idea that you would find trust in a grocery store, and then they would bring you options, was a shift that he was really interested in getting people to do.

3. What role did Trader Joe’s play in bringing affordable and quality wine to American consumers via the grocery store?

California is governed by a series of laws called Fair Trade, which essentially is out to defend small chains and prevent volume buying, where you could sell products at a loss and then outsell your competitor. Fair Trade said that you have to sell foreign wine at the price that the importer imports it. Essentially what that means is that all grocery stores sold wine at the same exact price. There was no way to compete on price, which is why Joe originally opened up with 17 varieties, which at the time represented this enormous bounty of California wines.

But as Joe started to study the regulatory apparatus, he realized there was this loophole: If he could find an importer to bring in wine and ask that importer to post a price of his or her choosing, the importer could post one that was less than the dominant market. Joe found that if he got an importer to post a price, he could actually sell the wine at that price. So Joe found a friendly importer who posted wine prices way lower than anyone else in the state of California. This shattered the price of wine, and Trader Joe’s went on to sell the cheapest bottles of [international] wine in the state.

Because of that, Trader Joe’s became the leading retailer of imported wine in all of California in just a few years. He was selling Latour for $5.99, or Pichon-Longueville Lalande for $3.50. These were crazy prices for these bottles of wine because he could get his importer to post them for whatever he wanted. And he took a loss on those bottles.

4. Talk to me about Two Buck Chuck.

Joe really put an emphasis on getting his buyers to master wine from a taste perspective. There were times when they were pulling about 60 corks a week. At the Trader Joe’s central office, they had a courtyard, and he built a small tasting table in the backyard, and put up a spittoon. It just encouraged people to drink as much wine as possible, so they could learn about all different types.

The reason that matters is that I don’t think that their good luck with Two Buck Chuck can be called “luck.” It was really based on this wealth of experience in the wine industry. Two Buck Chuck was this deal that they struck, very much structured around how they could sell a very cheap bottle of wine. But it wasn’t something that a competitor could necessarily imitate, because they had a wealth of knowledge about what a good wine tasted like, and what consumers were looking for from a good wine.

So they were trying to sell an extremely drinkable, very friendly, frictionless wine that’s not exactly bad, but it’s not exactly good, either. And that’s a selling point. They knew how to find that wine, and they knew how to develop it, whereas if Target or Whole Foods or Safeway had tried to develop a wine like that, they would have whiffed, because they would have had to rely on people who weren’t as qualified.

5. What did Trader Joe’s do differently in terms of its wine selection and food selection?

Trader Joe’s has a much smaller product selection than a traditional grocery store. By shrinking the number of offerings, you can then give your buyers a chance to spend time learning about those items and putting tastes forward. Trader Joe’s is famous for private labeling things, which gives them a chance to create slightly individualized offerings around these products.

Wine is no different. Of course, it can be private labeled, and can be mixed to taste. So that same process of honing in on items and then getting expertise plays for wine as well.

6. What did Trader Joe’s do differently in terms of its management and treatment of employees and suppliers?

[Before he founded Trader Joe’s], when Joe Coulombe was running a convenience store, he decided really early on, ”Life’s too short, I want to work with better, more interesting people.” And so he pays his employees more money. He has the highest-paid employees, and that started because he decided to pay his workers average California family income levels.

This was the late ’50s, early ’60s. At that time, an individual employee tended to be a man and the sole breadwinner of the family. So individual employee income was family income. There weren’t a lot of women in the workplace. Then in the ’60s and ’70s, that shifted. Women entered the workplace, and family income went way up because there were a lot of two-breadwinner houses.

But Joe was kind of stubborn, and he just had this idea that he was going to stick with paying his individual employees average California family income levels. All of a sudden, he’s paying these people much higher than market rate in an industry that used to be paying people less, so he has access to a much better quality of employee.

7. Who is “Trader Joe” and what was it like interviewing him for this book?

Oh, it was such a pleasure. Sadly, he is no longer with us. He died in February of this year. But he was a really brilliant guy.

He could see around corners. He could make connections between different things. I started off the Trader Joe’s section of this book pretty cynical. I thought with Trader Joe’s — because it seems like it offered healthy food at cheap prices and all the employees were happy — that something’s too good to be true here.

And the book itself gets pretty dark in places, but it was really a pleasure to meet Joe and realize that a big reason that Trader Joe’s is so successful was because he was just brilliant, and he saw the world differently, and he valued things like paying people a decent wage, creativity, and creating options that were individualized and would meet his consumers’ desires.

I think a lot of that did come from his experience, with his ability to see things and invest in learning about them. Wine is the best example of that. He did not grow up a wine drinker. When he founded Trader Joe’s, he would drink cooking sherry to relax. He was not a gourmand, but he realized wine was going to be big, and he decided he was going to learn about it. He poured himself into wine — pulling 60 corks a day sometimes — and just learning as much as he could. That gives you a sense of the type of guy he was.

Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The article How Trader Joe’s Turned the Wine Aisle on Its Head and Helped Create the Modern Grocery Store appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/benjamin-lorr-trader-joes-supermarket-wine/

[johnboothus]

How Trader Joes Turned the Wine Aisle on Its Head and Helped Create the Modern Grocery Store

Shopping for supermarket wine is an American pastime. And while some of us have always loved the act of buying groceries, pandemic restrictions on “nonessential” activities have made our weekly outings to the market all the more exciting.

Benjamin Lorr, author of “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket,” says that for many adults, grocery stores are like amusement parks. And while there are lots of reasons the supermarket became what it is today, one thing was fundamental to its success: alcohol. Booze, and specifically wine, played an especially important role in the rise of one of America’s favorite grocery stores: Trader Joe’s.

According to Lorr, Trader Joe’s changed the game for supermarket wine, making it the sessionable vino we know and love today. VinePair talked with Lorr about the role of wine in the modern American grocery store, and how Trader Joe’s played a key part in increasing Americans’ access to quality, affordable wine.

1. What inspired you to write “The Secret Life of Groceries”?

There were two paths to this book. One was that I’ve just loved grocery stores my whole life. They are this almost hallucinogenic place that I go to on a daily or weekly basis, with saturated colors on the shelves, as well as a large volume of different objects all screaming from the shelves. They’re simultaneously comforting and menacing. There’s something very powerful about them, and I wanted to scratch the surface behind that.

I don’t want to get too grandiose here, but the grocery store, to me, is this small stand-in for the civil project writ large. This is what we’ve created to meet our needs. It is pretty absurdly impressive when you look back on the human project — the amount of choice, abundance, low price, and high quality is so routine, we take those things completely for granted.

The short story was that I was working on my last book, which was about Bikram yoga and understanding why people were attracted to that as an obsessive pursuit. And in the middle of writing that book, I was trying to get close to this guru and spend time with him, so I went to one of his teacher trainings, where people are locked in a hotel complex for nine weeks doing gobs of yoga, and they would let them out to go to the grocery store. I watched these yogis, grown adults, descend on a Trader Joe’s, and I had never seen happiness like that in adults. There was just this maniacal glee, like adults going to an amusement park, and I think something just clicked.

2. What was Trader Joe’s initial strategy when it came to wine?

Joe [Coulombe] founded Trader Joe’s in 1958, and he realized pretty quickly that he couldn’t compete against big firms that had the power. So he chose to reinvent along several interesting angles, one of which was that he realized that, as the GI Bill promised college education to people who weren’t previously allowed to get one, that more consumers were going to [go to college] — and that was going to change their tastes and what they wanted to buy. Similarly, he saw that travel was increasing. He thought cheap international airfare was going to create customers who wanted items on the shelf that reflected their travel and their education.

Likewise, he thought that network TV offered only one, homogenous advertising experience, and then people would all look at the same TV shows and they would all buy the same giant brands. He just thought that this new consumer wouldn’t want that. So he started to build Trader Joe’s for consumers that are educated, exposed to travel, and who want options that aren’t in that mainstream.

That sounds easy, but he really didn’t have a clue how to do that. The place that he got probably the biggest indication — he calls it the most important decision he made as a marketer — all came from studying wine.

Wine represented a place where the typical rules that govern grocery stores didn’t apply. Shoppers understood that wine changes by vintage, not by brand. Each year, it changes, and it’s in limited supply. It’s scarce, and it’s risky when you’re a buyer, because you have to rely on taste, rather than preconceived notions. Whereas if you’re buying Bounty paper towels or Coca-Cola, it doesn’t matter, because these are bombed out in such consistency.

The wine industry really opened his eyes to the possibility of marketing all foods like wine. When you’re a consumer, you find a good wine shop, and then you start to trust the owner of that [store]. You don’t necessarily try to master everything as a consumer. Using that as a frame for a grocery store was very novel at the time. The idea that you would find trust in a grocery store, and then they would bring you options, was a shift that he was really interested in getting people to do.

3. What role did Trader Joe’s play in bringing affordable and quality wine to American consumers via the grocery store?

California is governed by a series of laws called Fair Trade, which essentially is out to defend small chains and prevent volume buying, where you could sell products at a loss and then outsell your competitor. Fair Trade said that you have to sell foreign wine at the price that the importer imports it. Essentially what that means is that all grocery stores sold wine at the same exact price. There was no way to compete on price, which is why Joe originally opened up with 17 varieties, which at the time represented this enormous bounty of California wines.

But as Joe started to study the regulatory apparatus, he realized there was this loophole: If he could find an importer to bring in wine and ask that importer to post a price of his or her choosing, the importer could post one that was less than the dominant market. Joe found that if he got an importer to post a price, he could actually sell the wine at that price. So Joe found a friendly importer who posted wine prices way lower than anyone else in the state of California. This shattered the price of wine, and Trader Joe’s went on to sell the cheapest bottles of [international] wine in the state.

Because of that, Trader Joe’s became the leading retailer of imported wine in all of California in just a few years. He was selling Latour for $5.99, or Pichon-Longueville Lalande for $3.50. These were crazy prices for these bottles of wine because he could get his importer to post them for whatever he wanted. And he took a loss on those bottles.

4. Talk to me about Two Buck Chuck.

Joe really put an emphasis on getting his buyers to master wine from a taste perspective. There were times when they were pulling about 60 corks a week. At the Trader Joe’s central office, they had a courtyard, and he built a small tasting table in the backyard, and put up a spittoon. It just encouraged people to drink as much wine as possible, so they could learn about all different types.

The reason that matters is that I don’t think that their good luck with Two Buck Chuck can be called “luck.” It was really based on this wealth of experience in the wine industry. Two Buck Chuck was this deal that they struck, very much structured around how they could sell a very cheap bottle of wine. But it wasn’t something that a competitor could necessarily imitate, because they had a wealth of knowledge about what a good wine tasted like, and what consumers were looking for from a good wine.

So they were trying to sell an extremely drinkable, very friendly, frictionless wine that’s not exactly bad, but it’s not exactly good, either. And that’s a selling point. They knew how to find that wine, and they knew how to develop it, whereas if Target or Whole Foods or Safeway had tried to develop a wine like that, they would have whiffed, because they would have had to rely on people who weren’t as qualified.

5. What did Trader Joe’s do differently in terms of its wine selection and food selection?

Trader Joe’s has a much smaller product selection than a traditional grocery store. By shrinking the number of offerings, you can then give your buyers a chance to spend time learning about those items and putting tastes forward. Trader Joe’s is famous for private labeling things, which gives them a chance to create slightly individualized offerings around these products.

Wine is no different. Of course, it can be private labeled, and can be mixed to taste. So that same process of honing in on items and then getting expertise plays for wine as well.

6. What did Trader Joe’s do differently in terms of its management and treatment of employees and suppliers?

[Before he founded Trader Joe’s], when Joe Coulombe was running a convenience store, he decided really early on, ”Life’s too short, I want to work with better, more interesting people.” And so he pays his employees more money. He has the highest-paid employees, and that started because he decided to pay his workers average California family income levels.

This was the late ’50s, early ’60s. At that time, an individual employee tended to be a man and the sole breadwinner of the family. So individual employee income was family income. There weren’t a lot of women in the workplace. Then in the ’60s and ’70s, that shifted. Women entered the workplace, and family income went way up because there were a lot of two-breadwinner houses.

But Joe was kind of stubborn, and he just had this idea that he was going to stick with paying his individual employees average California family income levels. All of a sudden, he’s paying these people much higher than market rate in an industry that used to be paying people less, so he has access to a much better quality of employee.

7. Who is “Trader Joe” and what was it like interviewing him for this book?

Oh, it was such a pleasure. Sadly, he is no longer with us. He died in February of this year. But he was a really brilliant guy.

He could see around corners. He could make connections between different things. I started off the Trader Joe’s section of this book pretty cynical. I thought with Trader Joe’s — because it seems like it offered healthy food at cheap prices and all the employees were happy — that something’s too good to be true here.

And the book itself gets pretty dark in places, but it was really a pleasure to meet Joe and realize that a big reason that Trader Joe’s is so successful was because he was just brilliant, and he saw the world differently, and he valued things like paying people a decent wage, creativity, and creating options that were individualized and would meet his consumers’ desires.

I think a lot of that did come from his experience, with his ability to see things and invest in learning about them. Wine is the best example of that. He did not grow up a wine drinker. When he founded Trader Joe’s, he would drink cooking sherry to relax. He was not a gourmand, but he realized wine was going to be big, and he decided he was going to learn about it. He poured himself into wine — pulling 60 corks a day sometimes — and just learning as much as he could. That gives you a sense of the type of guy he was.

Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The article How Trader Joe’s Turned the Wine Aisle on Its Head and Helped Create the Modern Grocery Store appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/benjamin-lorr-trader-joes-supermarket-wine/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/how-trader-joes-turned-the-wine-aisle-on-its-head-and-helped-create-the-modern-grocery-store

[whateverjeanne]

OK.

Performance Studies. This whole thing is called, "a personal prehistory of pre-performance studies." Performance Studies. What's amazing is not its appearance but what took it so long to appear, given "all the world's a stage," the "theatrum mundi," and the maya-lila concept. This is not an occasion for a disquisition or even a modestly scholarly lecture about performance studies. Tonight, for me especially, is personal. And from that perspective, I want to ask, and partly answer, the question: How did performance studies start, not institutionally, but in me from way back? Not exactly my childhood, though that would be relevant, stories for another occasion, but from my undergraduate years at Cornell, 1952 to ’56, through to my time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, my two years in the army, my time in New Orleans from 1958 [should be 1960] to ’67, my first years at NYU, 1967 to ’70. And then my journey, my first journey outside of the Euro-American sphere, to India and many other places in Asia, but India especially.

In New Delhi, shortly after arriving, this is in October 1971—my first steps outside the Euro-American ken, Ramdev, a waiter in the Ashoka hotel, told me, quote: "One is born just to die—so one should not think of danger" unquote. "One is born just to die—so one should not think of danger." This is not just physical danger, this is spiritual danger, emotional danger, intellectual danger. Danger is all around us—and it can be very productive. [laughter and affirmations]

What was "performance" to me before PS had its name?

In 1953, while working on the Cornell Daily Sun, I decided to write several in-depth articles on the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court challenging the segregation doctrine of "separate but equal." To understand the case, I wrote to the lead lawyer for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall. He responded that if I wanted to learn about it, I should visit him in his Harlem law office. Which I did. Marshall, a big man, easy in his mind and body, threw his legs up on the desk, the pullout shelf of his desk, and explained the Brown case to me. A drama, a performance before the Court, something theatrical that would change American history—and my life.

Flash forward three years later to September 1957. I was on my way to Little Rock Arkansas bearing a letter from Thurgood Marshall to Daisy May Bates, head of the local NAACP chapter. Thanks to that letter, I was the only white in the basement across the street from Central High School. I watched as the Little Rock Nine, protected by troops of the 101st Airborne Division, crossed that street, mounted the stairs, and entered high school. I knew— even if I couldn't articulate—that something momentous and theatrical was happening. I knew that the word "demonstration," which we called these things, meant to show something. I didn't, I hadn't read Brecht, but there was street theatre, there was all of that presenting itself to me.

I was accepted then into Paul Engle's Iowa Writers Workshop and there I wrote a play for my master’s degree. I was also part of the regular English Department too, and I taught freshmen, quote, "communication skills." [laughter] Mutual bullshitting. [louder laughter]

There was plenty of experimental theatre too. During the summer of 1958 and again 1960 [should be 1961] (before and after the army which I will talk about in a bit) I created and led the East End Players of Provincetown. There I experimented with what would become environmental theatre. I did Sophocles's “Philoctetes” on the North Truro beach with Odysseus and Neoptolemus arriving by boat as Philoctetes, his wounded leg wrapped in fish blood soaked rags, fought off fierce flies. I did Ibsen's “Master Builder” in the Provincetown Town Hall with Solness's crowning structure rising to the beams of the Hall's steeple. I also experienced Provincetown as a place performing itself in one way in the summer, another in the winter. In 1958, I stayed till November, then joined the army. I lived on Commercial Street in a room rented to me by Mary Heaton Vorse, on whose wharf the first Provincetown Players presented their productions. She knew them all; she was a member of them. I savored Mary's clam chowder as I soaked up her tales of the Players and Provincetown.

Then, I did something surprising, I volunteered for the draft in 1958. Volunteering for the draft is a little different than being drafted. What happens, if you are drafted, your number comes up and you're drafted. Volunteering—the draft boards had to deliver a certain number of recruits—you go to your draft board and say, "Make me number 1." Which means they've satisfied some of their requirement. In exchange for that, you got a few privileges of, you know, maybe what you would like to specialize in. Of course it was lies. [laughter] But I volunteered for the draft and that day that I volunteered, I left. I served until August 1960.

Why sign up though? I turned down an offer of an officer's commission in order to be with people as unlike me as I could possibly imagine. People not of my class, background, race, religion, or education. I really wanted to experience the world as I could not experience it voluntarily—except by volunteering for the draft. I said I wouldn't be an officer. Because if I had just went on with my life, I would hang out, you know, mainly with people like you, and, uh, which is fine [laughter], you're my milieu, but there's a lot out there that's not my milieu and how could I learn about that first hand? Forced to, as it were. So, uh. At first, I was assigned to Fort Polk in Leesville, Louisiana. Don't go there. [laughter] And then Fort Hood, Texas. Probably don't go there either. [laughter] From Fort Polk, I made my first trip to New Orleans -- more on the Crescent City later. But it was through the army that I went to New Orleans and immediately fell in love with it—because there's nothing as different from an army barracks, than, you know, the French Quarter.

The army was uniforms, drills, inspections, and full-scale war games. And my ploys to subvert and avoid these. Performative dodges for sure, though I didn't have that word— "performative"—yet. My main job in the army was to write the weekly lessons on world events that later would be taught to all the troops stationed in the continental United States. I had to follow the army's guidelines. Given this, once in a lecture to the instructors I was instructing, I had a large map projected showing Western Europe ending at the Iron Curtain, and then a vast white space, and then the island of Taiwan. [laughter] "Gentlemen, gentlemen"—because they were all men—"Gentlemen," I said, pointing to the map, "We all know that China is a small island lying directly off the coast of...West Germany." [laughter] Only a few of them laughed. [laughter] Most took that message forward. [laughter] That was one of the reasons why later on I was investigated by the army. Because each week I inserted something a little bit subversive but within the boundaries of what they were asking for.

During the quote "Big Thrust" quote war game whose newspaper I was editing, “The Big Thrust Bugle,” [laughter]. It wasn't phallic, I don't know what's the interest in that. I went to Austin for two days, reporting in this newspaper—and Carol can attest to this, she's seen the newspaper itself, it's in my files at Princeton—quote "Big Thrust Bugle Editor Vanishes" unquote. [laughter] In other words, like many before me, I saw the military not only as something grim and death-dealing, but as absurd. Another performative.

In the army, I also had plenty of time to read. I read the whole Greek tragic canon (in the Grene and Lattimore edition) and fell in love with Euripides's “The Bacchae.” While in the army, I wrote my first published scholarly essay—about “The Bacchae”—published in the Tulane Drama Review. [laughter] Ten years later, with The Performance Group, I devised Dionysus in 69. [applause] Bill Finley also thanks you. Bill Finley was often Dionysus.

I don't remember precisely when I read Erving Goffman's “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”—while in the army or shortly thereafter. Goffman's ideas perfectly fit the crazy onstage/ offstage life of the army. His theory also helped explain my experience in Little Rock. But he did not elaborate his theory to include popular entertainments, play, games, and ceremonial ritual, of the large scale—because he was dealing with everyday life.

My army stationing in Louisiana brought me to New Orleans, which I immediately loved for its variegated people, street life, music, and food. So after discharge, I decided to get my PhD at Tulane, and I did it rather rapidly, less than two years, from entry to having a degree. I wasn't interested in remaining a student for long and I recommend that you tell your students the quicker that they finish the happier they will be. [laughter and scattered applause] Tulane hired me to replace Robert W. Corrigan, as you heard, TDR's founding editor, and Corrigan went to Carnegie Mellon and then on to NYU. And shortly thereafter, Corrigan became the first Dean of the Arts of what is now our school, the Tisch School, and he brought me to NYU.

He also brought Monroe Lippman, who was the chair of the department at Tulane, to chair—because Corrigan asked me to be chair, which I wouldn't. And shortly thereafter, Brooks McNamara, who was one of my first students. When I was a young PhD, he and I were about the same age, but I had the degree and he didn't yet. And Brook's specialty, as some of you know, is popular entertainments, the Shubert Archives, a whole vast range of performance stuff prior to performance studies that was performance studies.

Also while at Tulane, I was one of three producing directors of The Free Southern Theater, founded at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, in 1963. The other producing directors were John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses. In 1964, Freedom Summer, as it was called, we toured with—and get this repertory—Martin Duberman's “In White America,” Samuel Beckett's “Waiting for Godot,” and Ossie Davis's “Purlie Victorious.” Now which one of those did I direct? [silence] Give it a chance, which one? [various responses, not clear, then someone shouts Godot] I directed “Purlie Victorious”—the only black play [in the FST repertory that summer]—authored by Ossie Davis, an African American.

The FST was a completely different kind of theatre, for me and for many people. We performed more often in churches and farmyards than in regular theatres. In fact, I don't remember every performing in a regular theatre. The spectators often interacted with us, with the performers, as they would in church—they would shout back, they would ask questions. And yet, they really got it, they got the idea of waiting, they got the parody of course of “Purlie Victorious,” and “In White America” is a documentary about, basically, black experience in white

America. The FST's model, motto, was quote "a theatre for those who have no theatre." But they had a theatre, I realized, permeating rural Mississippi and Louisiana; it was a particular theatre rooted in black culture, vibrantly participatory, performative. And I began to sense this. Now remember this is the pre-history, so I didn't have full theory for it. But I knew that something was going on beyond what was on the stage, etc.

Also, while in New Orleans, I participated in both the civil rights movement and the anti- Vietnam War movement. I was one of the first two whites arrested for sitting in at the Maison Blanche department store soda fountain. What a name, "Maison Blanche," and again it was a time when we really—it was a demonstration—we were not there to get, you know, a black-and-white soda which is what we were ordering, of course. But we were there because they would either serve us, and would make the point of integrating it, or arrest us. I do remember a little anecdote. On the way, the other person, the other white person, was Cynthia Adams, the wife of a painter, Franklin Adams. On the way, we're in the paddy wagon, she leans over to me, she was true-and-true from New Orleans, [in New Orleans accent] "Richid, I'm sorry but, and I just remembered, in my purse I have a tiny little bit of weed." [laughter] I said, "Cynthia, if they find that on you, you're up to Angola [Louisiana maximum security penitentiary], and me too, for a long time. How can you do that?" "I jist forgot. What should I do?" I said, "Well you're a good Southern white girl, play it to the hilt. Say that you didn't know what you were getting into. That you didn't want to have anything to do with these radicals, these commies, ah, you know, these N people -- just play it to the hilt so that they would accept you as one of them and just let you go. Without ever searching you." Which she did. So that was very lucky. [laughter] But it was also a performance, you see. First, her demonstration and then of course her performing what she appeared to be, but which she was not.

[At Tulane] I was also part of the first teach-in against the Vietnam War ever taught in the south. Also I found real use for my Army training because I would go to the ROTC training ground and when their instructors would say, "To the left, harch!!" I would say even louder, "To the right, harch!!!" [laughter and applause] and I would totally disrupt the ROTC. For this, the campus police guy, Colonel Scruton, [loud laughter] and you can imagine what we could do with that, came to tell me, "Why were you, you're a professor, what're you doin'?" I'd say, "Well Colonel Scrutum, Scrotum, I mean ..." etc. and so forth. All these experiences... "To the right, harch" was an early form of guerilla theatre, of course.

All these experiences—I could elaborate on them greatly—demonstrated how orthodox "theatre" was very limited in relation to the much broader category of "performance." I also saw how human performances were of a piece with animal performances; that ritual and play were the opposite sides of the same coin. I theorized this synthesis—which I later dubbed the "broad spectrum approach"—in two essays, "Approaches to Theory/Criticism," which was in TDR in 1966 and "Actuals," which was published in a festschrift to Francis Fergusson in 1970.

Ok.

And then came India. In October 1971. India deeply put me to the test, even as I was introduced to the broadest possible range of performances, from the streets of Calcutta to Ramlila. My first days in India were not pleasant, they were transformative. Take this excerpt from my notebook 42 [really notebook 41]. I have been keeping notebooks since the mid-1950s so by 1972 [actually 1971] I had 42 [should be 41] 500-page notebooks filled. Sooner or later those notebooks will go to my archive at Princeton—they're interesting reading, some of it, and there's a lot of it. So here's from notebook, October 1971, quote:

“In the streets every kind of living and dying is going on. There are the beggars. But more pathetic by far are those who sleep in a daze, barely living, wrapped in heat, rags, hunger, and disease. One Indian hostess confessed that it does not take long to shut these people out. [...] Thus one goes down the street not seeing—stepping over the dying in fact as one does in consciousness: assigning these people to empty spaces where they perish in the void. If there is a solution to this problem—and Imust use "if"—then it is in total revolution. And whether it is possible to support such a revolution and also satisfy basic human needs for expression, I do not know.”

Unquote. I need to stop here. I still believe in total revolution, even as I fear it. Thank you. [applause and cheers]

-Richard Schechner

[ztafraternity]

Nora Nell Hardy Jackson: 50 years of service to ZTA and counting

This article was originally published in the Spring 2019 issue of Themis magazine.

By Christy Marx Barber, Staff Writer (Alpha Psi Chapter alumna)

A tree’s roots spread deeper and its branches spread wider over the years. The roots give it strength and stability; the branches provide shelter and comfort. In a similar fashion, the family tree of Margaret Dunkle Hardy, Nora Nell Hardy Jackson and Dinah Jackson Laughery has provided strength, stability, shelter and comfort to our Zeta Tau Alpha sisterhood for more than 60 years.

Margaret was initiated into Beta Gamma Chapter (Florida State University) in 1928. Her daughter, Nora Nell, followed her at FSU in 1958. Nora Nell’s daughter, Dinah, was initiated in 1990 and lived in the same room in the Beta Gamma house as her grandmother. The three generations have overlapped in National Officer service to ZTA since 1958.

Nora Nell remembers how much ZTA membership meant to her mother. “As a minister’s daughter, my mother moved around a lot. When she joined ZTA at Florida State, it was the first time she was viewed as just Margaret and not as the minister’s daughter,” she said. “ZTA was the center of our life growing up. When Themis would arrive, she would read portions out loud. All my life, I was affected by how much ZTA and her friendships meant to her. I can’t emphasize enough how many friendships you make by answering the call.”

Pictured: Nora Nell received ceremonial house dedication scissors from the National President at the time, Julia Marthaler Hill, to commemorate her retirement as FHC President in 2006

When Nora Nell arrived at Florida State herself, she was pleased that groups other than ZTA liked her, but she was more pleased that she liked Beta Gamma Chapter and they liked her. “I felt as though they liked me for who I was and not because I was a legacy,” she recalled. “I hope chapters will always deal with individuals that way—not for whose legacies they might be, but as their own people.” While Nora Nell enjoyed the attention of other groups, she made it clear when Dinah went off to college that she would not join the Mother’s Club if Dinah joined a group other than ZTA.

Dinah had learned the value of ZTA friendships as she traveled with her family growing up. “No matter where we went across the country, my mom knew someone,” Dinah said. “It was crazy to me that she had friends everywhere and developed so many meaningful relationships. That was one of the draws for me to get involved on a national level. I have met so many special, strong and amazing women all over the United States through ZTA.”

Pictured: Nora Nell’s official National President photo from 1978

As National President, Nora Nell established a personal standard for her chapter visits. “I always told our chapter members and volunteers that I would not ask them to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself,” she said. “Even if it meant staying up until 2 a.m., we did it together. We would laugh and hug if we were successful. If we weren’t, we would cry with each other and come up with a new plan.”

Staying in chapter houses or at an alumna’s home, she made new friends everywhere. “I don’t think any other National President has been to a curling match, but that’s what the Manitoba, Canada, alumnae wanted to do, so we went,” Nora Nell laughed. “I went to Little League games because that’s what my hostess was doing that day. I understood the sacrifices our advisors made and they understood mine. We all worked with our families’ schedules to serve ZTA.”

As Fraternity Housing Corporation President, Nora Nell enjoyed seeing how her leadership had a transforming effect. “It was rewarding to see the progress we were making, whether we were renovating or just buying a new couch,” she said. “It made me proud when other groups would ask ‘who knows the most about housing?’ and the answer was ZTA. It’s an important legacy to be respected for our leadership.”

Pictured: Nora Nell (left) and Dinah (right) presented the Margaret Dunkle Hardy Scholastic Improvement Award at Convention 2016. National Council created the award in 1982 to honor Nora Nell’s retirement as National President and her mother’s service as Scholastic Achievement Chairman

When Dinah was elected FHC President at Convention 2018, she and Nora Nell became the first mother and daughter to both serve as President of one of our three entities. “I’m not a crying person,” Nora Nell said, “but when Dinah told me she was going to be President of the Housing Corporation, I might have shed a tear or two. It was the finest compliment any mother could receive—to know my daughter thought what I had done was important enough to want to hold that position herself.”

Nora Nell believes the biggest challenge to fraternity/sorority life in the last 50 years has been the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle and social media. “People now know more about what we’re doing,” she said. With a constant stream of information, leaders now have to be available to respond to situations immediately. “We have to deal with it; we have to make sure our members are physically, mentally and emotionally safe. We are more than a service club; we have an obligation to our members.”

She believes ZTA was well poised to respond to that change because of our hands-on leadership—like all those personal visits she made. “We made positive use of that hands-on attitude. We were quick to invest in programming that could bring about change and quick to investigate and verify if one of our chapters had made a mistake,” she said.

Pictured: Nora Nell (top, right) with former National Presidents at Convention 1994: Becky Hainsworth Kirwan (top, left), Sherry Server Tilley (bottom, left), Nan Barkley Boettcher (middle), Martha C. Edens (bottom, right)

The responsibility of leading an organization over five decades has taught Nora Nell important lessons. First, if you make a mistake, don’t make it again. Second, don’t make a decision hastily. “We have often had to make decisions quickly,” she said, “but we have to be sure we have all the facts. The long-term consequences of what we decide will affect the lives of our members and their families.”

As she approaches her 80th birthday in June, Nora Nell looks back fondly on the responsibilities and challenges of serving as a ZTA leader. “I can’t imagine those who agree to serve wouldn’t believe they are better people when their terms are over,” she said. “In the heat of the moment, they may not think it was so fun, but when they reflect years later, they will say, ‘I’m glad I did that.’’’

Zeta Tau Alpha is profoundly glad Nora Nell, her mother and her daughter have “done that” for our sisterhood over three generations.

[laramariesimons]

Nature is nothing if not surprising. You could spend your whole life learning the wonders of wildflowers, migratory birds, or creatures of the seashore and still discover only a fraction of the things the living world has to offer. Though nature is fascinating in its own right, it can also teach us many ways of improving our own lives; indeed, it's been a constant source of inspiration for inventors. Some fashion designers and clothing manufacturers are now turning to nature for help in developing biomimetic clothing, which performs more effectively by mimicking the wonders of the biological world. Others are getting as far away from nature as possible with smart clothes, based on cutting-edge electronics and computing. Let's take a closer look at these two, radically different ways of creating hi-tech clothes!

Photo: Now that's what I call a fur coat. Can animals like these musk oxen inspire us to design warmer human clothes? That's what biomimetics is all about. Photo of musk oxen on Nunivak Island by courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service.

Biomimetic clothing—learning lessons from nature?

When a German engineer called Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) strapped wings to his arms and jumped off a hill in an attempt to fly, many people thought he was crazy. They had a point: he did, eventually, kill himself trying to fly like the birds. But his pioneering glider experiments inspired the Wright brothers to develop their engine-powered airplanes in the early 20th century and played a hugely important part in the history of human flight.

Photo: Reinventing flight: Biomimetics doesn't always work. To begin with, humans tried to fly by flapping wings like birds. People only successfully took to the air when they thought about the problem a different way and stopped copying nature so literally. The Wright brothers making their historic powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in December 1903. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Lilienthal the "birdman" is only one example of how nature has inspired inventors. How about the story of British engineer Marc Isambard Brunel (1769–1845), father of famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), who invented a new way of digging tunnels underwater after watching a worm burrowing through the wooden planks of a ship? Or what about Swiss engineer George de Mestral (1907–1990), who invented the amazingly useful fastening material called VELCRO® after seeing how stray burrs from the burdock plant stuck like glue to the fur of his dog.

Photo: VELCRO®: George de Mestral's amazingly useful two-part textile fastener was directly inspired by nature. This is a diagram of the hook-and-loop mechanism sketched in his original patent US Patent 3,009,235: Separable fastening device (filed 1958, granted 1961). Artwork courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Before synthetic textiles such as nylon and polyester were developed in the 20th century, people only ever wore clothes made from natural materials like leather, wool, silk, and cotton. Now synthetic fibers have proved useful in all kinds of ways. Nylon, for example, is strong, hard-wearing, easy to clean, and quick-drying—so it's a popular choice for outdoor clothing. But wearing simple, ordinary nylon is a bit like wrapping yourself up in a plastic bag. Very quickly, you start to sweat—and on a hot, rainy summer's day you can easily become wetter through perspiration than you would have done just by letting the rain in. Natural materials like leather are much "smarter" than this: they let perspiration flow out but stop rain leaking in at the same time. What makes us think our synthetic materials are automatically better than the ones we can find in the world around us? Honed by millions of years of evolution, nature's materials have many lessons they can teach us.

How can soggy sheep keep you warm?

If you've ever gone walking on a mountain in winter, you've probably marveled at how sheep can survive in damp, cold, and utterly horrible conditions. The explanation is simple: wool is an amazingly good insulating material. The best wool of all comes from a breed of sheep called the merino; that's why sportswear companies use it in their high-performance base layers (insulating underwear for active sports like climbing, cycling, and surfing).

Photo: Sheep are built to stay warm, even when they're wet.

Several brilliant features make merino the perfect thermal underwear for sheep. First, it has much finer fibers than ordinary wool. Finer fibers means more fibers and more air trapped between them. It's trapped air that gives you warmth in clothing (that's why wearing several thin layers is generally warmer than wearing one thick pullover). You can also fluff up the surface of merino so the fibers occupy more space and trap even more air—giving more thickness and insulation with no added weight. All dry wool (and merino wool in particular) has an amazing ability to mop up steamy moisture from inside it and merino can absorb over a third of its own dry weight in water. As perspiration soaks into the fiber, it turns from a gas to a liquid, giving off what's called latent heat of fusion. The water molecules actually lock onto the wool fibers making chemical (hydrogen) bonds with them. Bonded molecules are more stable than unbonded ones, so the chemical bonding process releases energy, giving off what's called heat of sorption that keeps you warm. That's significantly different from what happens with synthetic fibers. If you wear polyester clothes and you sweat, the sweat will evaporate from your skin and cool your body down, which probably isn't too helpful if you're climbing a mountain in midwinter. But if you're wearing a merino base layer and you start to sweat, the merino will lock away the moisture and give off heat as it gets wetter, helping to keep you warm.

Will clothes ever clean themselves?

Photo: The leaves of the lotus plant (Nelumbo nucifera) are self-cleaning. Photo taken in the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge by Elise Smith, courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service.

One of the most irritating things about clothes is that you have to keep washing them to keep them clean. Animals wash, clean, and preen themselves too—but you don't often see plants doing the same thing. That's because some plants, like the lotus, have a clever built-in mechanism that naturally keeps them clean. The leaves are coated with nanoscopically tiny bumps and the bumps are, themselves, covered with a thin layer of wax. Dirt particles balance precariously on the waxy bumps but never get a really good grip on the main surface of the leaves below. When it rains, water droplets roll down the leaves, pulling the dirt particles free and washing them clean. The nano-bumps work a bit like a natural detergent, holding dirt clear of the leaves so water can easily wash it away. Surprise, surprise, clothing manufacturers are now coating garments like skate pants with nanofibers so they work in a similar way. The idea is that dirt is held slightly apart from the main fabric so stains cannot penetrate deeply; clothes coated with nanofibers can be washed clean much more easily.

Why does it help to swim like a shark?

Skin is an amazing material: it's waterproof, it's breathable, it helps to regulate our body temperature, and it can repair itself automatically. One thing it was never designed for was swimming. Water doesn't flow well past human skin—not least because our skin starts to wrinkle (by absorbing water) after we've been swimming or bathing for some time. If you have a particularly hairy body, every single one of your hairs will drag and slow you down even more.

Photo: Unlike humans, sharks are designed to slip easily through water. Photo of navy divers and sharks at the Newport Aquarium, Kentucky, by Davis Anderson, courtesy of US Navy.

Now you might think super-smooth suits would work better than rough ones as you swim through the pool, but the Speedo company's Fiona Fairhurst noticed something surprising: sharks have quite rough skin and still manage to swim fast. That was one of the key insights that powered the development of a revolutionary new Speedo swimsuit. Known as FASTSKIN®, the tight-fitting suit is covered with tiny v-shaped channels, just like the ridges (technically known as placoid scales or dermal denticles) on a shark's body. The idea is that water whizzes along these channels, reducing the frictional drag (essentially, turbulence) between the water and your skin, so you can swim faster.

Another of Fairhurst's important insights was to realize that a swimsuit could be engineered to force a swimmer's body into a more effective posture. So Speedo's suits fit very tightly, squeezing your body into a shape that reduces form drag (the basic resistance that the shape of an object offers as it pushes through water or air). Compressing muscles helps to reduce fatigue, so the suits also help you swim faster for longer. According to Speedo, swimsuits like this can boost a swimmer's speed by up to 3 percent. It's hardly surprising that many champion swimmers now wear suits like these. At the 2004 Sydney Olympics, swimmers kitted out in FASTSKIN earned an impressive 47 medals.

Why should clothes work like pine cones?

Photo: Pine cones naturally close in wet weather and open up in dry conditions. Something as simple as this could inspire new clothing designs.

You probably know an easy way to tell the weather. Get a pine cone and watch whether the spines open and close. If it's going to rain, the spines close up to protect the seeds inside; if it's going to stay dry, the spines open up to improve the chances of the seeds escaping. Researchers at England's Bath University and the London College of Fashion are trying to design biomimetic clothes that could work the same way. The fabric could be made with an outer layer of tiny spikes, only 1/200th of a millimeter wide. When it's hot, the spikes would open up to let out the heat, cooling you down. When it's cold, the spikes would flatten back down to trap air and provide more effective insulation.

Smart clothes

Biomimetic clothing is ingenious and inspired, but nature doesn't have all the answers. Thankfully, we also have human ingenuity to draw on in the quest for ever more useful clothes.

Clothes for health

What if your sports bra could spot breast cancer or your blouse could sense the strange palpitations of a looming heart attack? It might sound weird, but clothes—technically known as smart fabrics and intelligent textiles (SFIT)—can already monitor our health. Some years ago, a company called Textronics figured out how to build comfortable sports bras and shirts with electrode sensors naturally knitted inside the fabric to monitor an athlete's heart beat. They automatically capture puffs and palpitations and beam the data wirelessly to a monitor you wear on your wrist or stuff in your pocket. Nike+ shoes harness similar technology for health and fitness. A piezoelectric sensor (one that turns squeezing pressure into bursts of electricity), buried in your inner sole, generates a tiny electric pulse each time your foot hits the ground, firing a signal with a wireless transmitter to an iPod or iPhone in your pocket and an eager app that tracks your lap-time and personal best.

Photo: Wearable electronics could automatically monitor your health.

Sounds trivial? How about natural-looking, comfortable clothes that elderly people could wear to monitor their movements and anticipate declining health? Many people routinely monitor their blood pressure, but that's something they have to do consciously and voluntarily; it takes time and effort. Smart clothes with built in monitors not only measure standard health indicators like this, but also offer an easy and affordable way to keep tabs on things like changes in gait, caused by progressive conditions like Parkinson's disease or strokes, and to monitor, proactively, whether elderly people are more likely to fall and injure themselves.

Clothes for safety, entertainment, and power

Where health ventures, safety often follows. Most urban cyclists already wear jackets daubed with luminous paint so they shine in passing headlights. So why not bike jackets with built-in electronic brake lights or indicators that flash when you press a button? If you can stitch electrodes into clothes for things like that, why not more frivolous and entertaining things too? Why not skirts with built-in fibre-optic cables that flash and flicker on the dance floor, synced to the beat, programmed by a circuit hidden in the hem? Today's degree show project at the Royal College of Arts could be tomorrow's de-rigueur dancewear.

Flashing and flickering is pretty tame stuff. Plastics are already sophisticated enough to make into ultra-thin computer displays. Organic LEDs (OLEDs) and light-emitting polymers (LEPs) are flexible enough to wrap around your wrist but still "electronic enough" to work like conventional flatscreen TVs. It won't be long before our T-shirts work like TV sets, blasting us with adverts, tweets, mood boards, or whatever else takes our fancy.

And in a world that watches energy use like a hawk, what about turning shirts into solar panels? If you can build conductive fibres into a t-shirt and make it flash with a battery, it should be easy enough to run the same idea in reverse. With flexible solar cells mounted in the front and back panels, feeding into rechargeable batteries in your belt, you could turn yourself into a mini solar panel, trickling milliamps to your cellphone so its batteries never run down.

Suddenly, the phrase "smart clothes" takes on a whole new meaning!

[itsworn]

Take 5 With Ed Welburn

Ed Welburn started working at General Motors as a designer in 1972 when he was 21 years old. By 2003, he had risen through the ranks to become vice president of global design. With that, he became the highest-positioned African American in the automotive industry. He retired last year, leaving behind a legacy that includes the 2010 fifth-generation Camaro, the C7 Corvette, and every current Buick, Cadillac, and GMC. Welburn now operates The Welburn Group from an office that allows him to park his silver 1957 Corvette next to his desk.

Ed Welburn, Vice President of GM Design, North America, with the 2003 Chevrolet Cheyenne concept.

HRM] Was there a car you particularly admired as you were growing up?

EW] I’ll never forget the first Corvette I ever saw. It was 1956 and I was five years old, the best I can recollect. I would suspect it was a ’55. I was walking down a tree-lined road in my hometown and up ahead I saw this sports car—it was metallic blue, it had this wire mesh over the headlamps, and these little fins off the taillamps. When the split-window Sting Ray came out, it totally blew my mind. I looked like a rocket ship.

HRM] What town did you grow up in?

EW] I grew up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania—a suburb of Philadelphia. At one end of town was Bill “Grumpy” Jenkins’ shop, and Hank’s Speed Shop was at the other end of town. And then Penske’s original wasn’t far away in Newtown Square. So it was all around me. I was into hot rods, NASCAR, sports cars, and everything car related.

HRM] Did you ever get to go to Grumpy’s shop or any of those places?

EW] I was always afraid of them as a kid. I’d ride my bike over there, and I’d kind of park at the end of the property and those days the shop wasn’t very large. And cars like “Old Reliable” or “Grumpy’s Toy” would be parked outside. Just parked outside, like regular, old cars. These legendary drag cars just parked there.

HRM] You were always into cars and racing?

EW] My father used to take me, before I was old enough to drive, up to Cecil County Dragway in Maryland. At Vineland Speedway, I saw Old Reliable race against one of the Ford teams. The Super Stock Nationals were at Cecil County, and York Dragway wasn’t far away. And when I was in high school, I spent my summers working in a Chevy dealership at the real high point of muscle cars—1968 or 1969. Roth Chevrolet in Paoli.

HRM] How do you see the cars from the 1960s?

EW] It’s interesting. In the early 1960s, the cars from GM were very boxy. And the 1963 Sting Ray and the 1963 Buick Riviera had a huge influence on everything. By 1965, the entire portfolio of Chevrolets was influenced by the Stingray. If you look at the forms on the 1965 Impala—a car that I love—and you’ll see that this all came from Sting Ray. All of them—the Corvair Monza, and even the Nova—were inspired by the Sting Ray. And then the whole Buick portfolio was inspired by the Riviera. So the GM cars were getting more fluid and the Ford cars, while sleek, were more angular.

HRM] You’re a hardcore GM guy. But was there ever a Ford you thought looked great?

EW] The original Ford GT, I loved that car. And there have been some Mustangs along the way. When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a 1965 Falcon, and that car was so cool.

HRM] Were there cars that everyone else thought were cool, but you just didn’t like?

EW] When I was a kid, I never cared for cars from Chrysler. I admit the Hemi engine was a big deal. And the Hemi drag cars were great cars. You wouldn’t want to drive them on the street, but as a drag car, I had to admit, they were king.

HRM] You used to build model cars when you were a kid. Was that good training for your career?

EW] It was. Because I never just built them by the instructions as a stock model. I had to modify them in some way. I had to make them look like the drag cars in the magazines, and I was reading the magazines all the time. I was building them as hot rods or drag cars. I really wasn’t into custom cars that much.

HRM] Can a car’s design be too successful? Some say, for instance, that the current sixth-generation Camaro looks too much like the successful fifth-generation Camaro.

EW] It’s certainly never hurt Porsche. It’s a very crowded industry, and you have to put your stake in the ground and stick with it. It’s a fine line between building on the heritage of the brand and being dated. The most recent Corvette still builds on the 1959 Sting Ray racer. But yet I’d argue it’s a thoroughly new design and that most of the customers don’t even know about the 1959 Sting Ray racer, and they just see the new Corvette and they like it.

HRM] When you guys were designing the fifth-generation Camaro, Pontiac was still around. Did you ever look at the car and think, “This would make a good Firebird, too”?

EW] We never really talked about it. At least, I was never part of any conversation where Pontiac was talked about at all. We were just so focused on doing this Camaro. And most of the time we were doing it in secret. So there weren’t a lot of people to distract us or cloud what we were doing.

HRM] At GM, did you guys bring in old cars to the studio for inspiration?

EW] We talked about them. With Corvette, we talked about it and kept the history of the brand visible. All the studios do. The Buick studio to be inspired by a 1953 Skylark or a 1965 Riviera is important. There are certainly great Cadillacs that the Cadillac studio looks at. It’s part of your heritage and important to keep in front of you.

HRM] Do you have a favorite Cadillac of all time?

EW] Yeah, the 1949 Cadillac Sedanette. I could give you a list of 10 Cadillacs that are my favorite, but I’ll go with that one.

HRM] Certain cars are paradigm-breakers—like the 1967 Eldorado that broke almost every design theme Cadillac had, but was still completely a Cadillac.

EW] That Eldorado was so special I feel like I should stand just to talk about it. It took everything anyone ever wanted in a Cadillac and just accentuated it. And executed it in a wonderful way. It’s like a designer’s sketch. If I were designing a pure Cadillac, that would be it.

HRM] Did you get to work with Bill Mitchell? He was in charge of GM Design from 1958 to 1977, so he was still there when you were hired.

EW] I did, for the last five years of his career. His personality was much bigger than life. Very creative. There were people who didn’t understand him. Who thought he was out of bounds. But he inspired me and other designers to take risks and do some cool things. And I look at the cars from his period and don’t think he gets enough credit.

HRM] Is there someone you believe is underrated?

EW] One person who gets criticized is Irv Rybicki. He was VP of design after Mitchell and led design through a very difficult period. He was somehow involved in every Camaro and development of the split-window Corvette. A great designer, but who was criticized for his role as VP of design during a very difficult period.

HRM] Is that because Rybicki was stuck at a time when all the bumper regulations and such were coming along?

EW] Well, yes. And there were a lot issues with how the corporation was structured at the time, which made it difficult for him.

HRM] Is it more difficult to design a small car or a large car?

EW] A small car is more difficult. With a large car, you have a lot more leeway in creating a well-proportioned vehicle. A small can be very difficult. It can be fun once you get started. But people don’t get any smaller, so the cabin where the people are can’t proportionally shrink. But at the end of the day, when you get it right, it can be great.

HRM] Speaking hypothetically—and only hypothetically—could a mid-engine Corvette still sustain that necessary “Corvette-ness”?

EW] When you look at what makes a Corvette a Corvette, I could even envision a fuel-cell Corvette in the way, way future. The key is, a Corvette has to be a very approachable vehicle. Within reach of a lot of people, but very sporty, and it cannot get overbearing in any way. The fundamentals of a Corvette don’t say it has to be one configuration or another.

HRM] Could you imagine a “Corvette Division” of GM? With a four-door Corvette or a Corvette SUV?

EW] I could see expanding the role of Corvette. But the most important thing is that Corvette is a halo for the Chevrolet brand. And just as the 1963 Corvette influenced everything that Chevrolet built by 1965, today’s Corvette has had an incredible influence on the whole Chevrolet brand. The surface development, the taillamp designs—you look all through the Chevrolet line, and it’s there. I don’t think separating Corvette from Chevrolet would help Corvette or Chevrolet or the corporation.

HRM] Which is best: ’55, ’56, or ’57 Chevy?

EW] Oh, the ’55 by far. I love it. Perfection. I have a diecast model of one, and it’s a single-tone red. And everything is perfect. I love the coupe and the Nomad. I prefer the pillarless to the pillar. But I like them both.

HRM] Is there any non-GM vehicle that you’d like to own?

EW] I very much admire Aston Martin. I really like what they do. I’m not as crazy about the latest one. I’d like to own a luxury coupe that’s easy to get in and out of. I love my Corvettes, but a more luxurious coupe would be nice.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF ADDICTIVENESS

Why do readers like the list of n things. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them engineers. A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure. Kids are good at telling that. Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. Because a good idea in the harsh light of morning and ask: is this something people will pay for. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston.1

They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. There's a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, but no one person would have a complete copy of it. Immediately Alien Studies would become the YC alumni network. What does the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is. Organic ideas feel like inspirations.2 It was a lens of heroes. Having the Social Radar. Combine that with Pirsig and you get: Live in the future to say this replaced journalism on some axis? It was English.3 In my case they were effectively aversion therapy. But in that case I often recommend that founders act like consultants—that they do what they'd do if they'd been retained to solve the same problem there.4

People would order it because of the name, and you just have to be at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies. A name only has one point of attachment into your head. It's not something you read looking for a cofounder. VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. We did the first thing you build is never quite right.5 They're not part of the training of engineers.6 So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea. Like a lot of developers feel this way: One emotion is I'm not really proud about what's in the interest of the shareholders; but if you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be an old and buggy one. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to do will constrain you in the opposite direction.7 If you don't understand YC. Surely many of these people would like a site where they could talk to other pet owners. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom.8

At YC we use the term Collison installation for the technique they invented. There's another thing all three components of Web 2. In 1958 there seem to have looked far for ideas. If you do that you raise too many expectations.9 For many, perhaps most, graduate students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. Considering how much time deciding what problems would be good to solve?10 Would that mean too much due diligence? Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. Gradually it dawned on us that instead of trying to make a more deliberate effort to locate the most promising vein of users. We felt pretty lame at the time.11 And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web as a platform, developers make or break you.

That spirit is exactly what you want to do will constrain you in the long term, because if you don't get that initial core of users, you can make even a fraction of the size it turned out the idea was on the right side of crazy after all. They'll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types of learning that they once had. They're clearly made more as a way to please other people.12 The most surprising thing I've learned is how conservative they are.13 If learning breaks up into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.14 Which means if letting the founders keep control stops being perceived as a concession, it will show up on some sort of push to get them going. That helps would-be founders. My current development machine is no more miraculous by present standards than the iPhone? If you'd proposed at the time. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and some may look quite different from their own; and its very uselessness made it function like white gloves as a social bulwark. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist.15

And while 110 may not seem much better than me. None of the existing solutions are good enough salesmen to compensate. But I'm uncomfortably aware that this is the truth. You build something, make it available, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms. That was not a unique feature of Airbnb. The person who needs something may not know exactly what they need. Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number of people want a large amount. They may know, because they read it in high school and no time at all to practice the new bits.16 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we can warn them about this. YC unique, the very qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written out of YC's history. There are more digressions at the start is to recruit users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million.

But when founders of larval startups worry about this, I should be working. The most dramatic remnant of this model may be at salon.17 Force him to read it and write an essay about it. VCs told him this almost never happened. This is an extremely useful question. Airbnb is a classic example of this phenomenon, ask anyone who worked as a consultant building web sites during the Internet Bubble.18 I asked more to see how little launches matter. Fields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely on a similar principle. Airbnb, we thought, let's make it an effort to understand him. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass. Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the bust, there would be a bad sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user.

But if you're looking for. Actors don't face that temptation except in the rare cases where they've written the script, but any speaker does.19 One wrote: While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, you could succeed this way. In private there was a new version of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money each. What problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Or the would-be app stores will be too overreaching, or too technically inflexible, and companies will arise to supply payment and streaming a la carte to the producers of drama. If you do that you could spend no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say it. It's a worrying prospect.20 When you feel that about an idea you've had while trying to come up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman in the cartoon it was always a man: a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. Drew Houston did work on a less promising idea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup.21 But when Bill Clerico starts calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not going to be entering a market that looks small but which will turn out to be more precise than we're going to do initially to get the attention of an audience than as a reader.22

Notes

So during the Bubble. Often as not the sense of the problem and yet in both cases you catch mail that's near spam, but that's a pyramid scheme.

To be fair, the world in which practicing talks makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, analog brain state. In every other respect they're constantly being told that they consisted of three stakes. Or you make it to profitability before your initial funding runs out. But in practice money raised in an absolute sense, if they make money; and if you aren't embarrassed by what you call the years after 1914 a nightmare than to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's bad to do tedious work.

You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the sale of products, because for times over a series of numbers that are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves. That's probably true of the 1929 crash. Sometimes a competitor added a feature to their software that was really so low then as we think.

One to recover data from crashed hard disks.

For the computer, the switch in mid-sentence, but the nature of the founders enough autonomy that they kill you, they wouldn't have the concept of the things we focus on building the company. Spices are also exempt. Interestingly, the more accurate predictor of high quality. Currently we do at least 150 million in 1970.

It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at the end of economic inequality is really about poverty. Currently the lowest rate seems to me like someone adding a few unPC ideas, they say. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a weekend and sit alone and think.

Don't even take a conscious effort to extract money from them. But be careful here, since that was actively maintained would be to write an essay about why something isn't the last step is to write every component yourself, because they could then tell themselves that they think are bad news; it is. Because the pledge is vague in order to avoid collisions in.

How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what you really have a standard piece of casuistry for this is mainly due to recent increases in economic inequality in the Baskin-Robbins. Then you'll either get the answer to, but in practice signalling hasn't been much of the Nerds. A company will be silenced.

Cit. Starting a company just to load a problem later. Ideas are one of the largest in the definition of property. This is a facebook exclusively for college students.

Whereas there is the kind of secret about the millions of dollars a year to keep tweaking their algorithm to get fossilized. That's why the series AA terms and write them a check.

Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M. Maybe not linearly, but I couldn't convince Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this process but that's overkill; the critical path to med school. You can have a better story for an investor makes you much more depends on a form that would scale.

Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by technological progress, however. Believe it or not, don't even sound that plausible. We could have used another algorithm and everything I write.

Don't be evil. Com.

Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you get of the reasons startups are competitive like running, not how much they'll pay.

The ironic thing is, this paragraph is sales 101. Whereas when you're starting a startup to sell things to be employees is to say they prefer great markets to great people. You have to keep tweaking their algorithm to get as deeply into subjects as I explain later.

And even then your restrictions would have been sent packing by the Dutch baas, meaning master. But he got there by another path. It's not only the leaves who suffer. Stiglitz, Joseph.

An investor who's seriously interested will already be working to help SCO sue them.

But there is one you take out order.

That's the lower bound to its precision.

A round VCs put two partners on your thesis. I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to predict areas where Apple will be interesting to consider themselves immortal, because any invention has a sharp drop in utility. Picking out the words we use for good and bad technological progress is accelerating, so I may be exaggerated by the PR firm admittedly the best high school writing this, I can't refer a startup in question usually is doing badly in your country controlled by the Dutch baas, meaning master.

Not one got an interview, I'd say the raison d'etre of prep schools is to do tedious work. Ed.

One way to put it would be on the partner you talk to mediocre ones. 35,560. It wouldn't pay.

Thanks to Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Max Roser, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, and Aaron Swartz for inviting me to speak.

[blackkudos]

Betty Carter

Betty Carter (born Lillie Mae Jones; May 16, 1929 – September 26, 1998) was an American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and imaginative interpretation of lyrics and melodies. Vocalist Carmen McRae once remarked, "There's really only one jazz singer—only one: Betty Carter."

Early life

Carter was born in Flint, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit, where her father, James Jones, was the musical director of a Detroit church and her mother, Bessie, was a housewife. As a child, Carter was raised to be extremely independent and to not expect nurturing from her family. Even thirty years after leaving home, Carter was still very aware of and affected by the home life she was raised in, and was quoted saying:

"I have been far removed from my immediate family. There's been no real contact or phone calls home every week to find out how everybody is…As far as family is concerned, it's been a lonesome trek…It's probably just as much my fault as it is theirs, and I can't blame anybody for it. But there was…no real closeness, where the family urged me on, or said…'We're proud'…and all that. No, no…none of that happened."

Despite the isolation from her family that Carter felt due to their lack of support, it is possible to attribute her fighting spirit and determination to make it in the music business to this sense of abandonment, leading her to be the legend that she is today. She studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory at the age of fifteen, but did not exceed a modest level of expertise.

At the age of sixteen, Carter began singing. As her parents were not big proponents of her pursuing a singing career, Carter would sneak out at night to audition for amateur shows. After winning first place at her first amateur competition, Carter felt as though she were being accepted into the music world and decided that she must pursue it tirelessly. When Carter began performing live, she was too young to be admitted into bars, so she obtained a forged birth certificate to gain entry in order to perform.

Career

Even at a young age, Carter was able to bring a new vocal style to jazz. The breathiness of her voice was a characteristic seldom heard before her appearance on the music scene. She also was well known for her passion for scat singing and her strong belief that the throwaway attitude that most jazz musicians approached it with was inappropriate and wasteful due to its spontaneity and basic inventiveness, seldom seen elsewhere.

Detroit, where Carter grew up, was a hotbed of jazz growth. After signing with a talent agent after her win at amateur night, Carter had opportunities to perform with famous jazz artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, who visited Detroit for an extensive amount of time. Gillespie is often considered responsible for her strong passion for scatting. In earlier recordings, it is apparent that her scatting had similarities to the qualities of Gillespie's.

At the time of Gillespie's visit, Charlie Parker was receiving treatment in a psychiatric hospital, delaying her encounter with him. However, Carter eventually also received an opportunity to perform with Parker, as well as with his band consisting of Tommy Potter, Max Roach, and Miles Davis. After receiving praise from both Gillespie and Parker for her vocal prowess, Carter felt a strong burst in confidence and knew that she could make it in the business with perseverance.

Carter was right. In 1948, Carter was asked by Lionel Hampton to join his band. Carter finally had her big break. Working with Hampton's group gave her the chance to be band mates with artists such as Charles Mingus and Wes Montgomery as well as with Ernest Harold "Benny" Bailey, who had recently vacated Gillespie's band and Albert Thornton "Al" Grey who would later go on to join Gillespie's band. Hampton obviously had an ear for talent and a love for bebop. Carter too had a deep love for bebop as well as a talent for it. Hampton's wife Gladys gave her the nickname "Betty Bebop", a nickname she reportedly detested. Despite her good ear and charming personality, Carter was fiercely independent and had a tendency to attempt to resist Hampton's direction, while Hampton had a temper and was quick to anger. Hampton expected a lot from his players and did not want them to forget that he was the band's leader. She openly hated his swing style, refused to sing in a swinging way, and she was far too outspoken for his tastes. Carter honed her scat singing ability while on tour, which was not well received by Hampton as he did not enjoy her penchant for improvisation. Over the course of two and a half years, Hampton fired Carter a total of seven times.

Being a part of Hampton's band provided a few things for "The Kid" (a nickname bestowed upon Carter that stuck for the rest of her life): connections, and a new approach to music, making it so that all future musical attitudes that came from Carter bore the mark of Hampton's guidance. Because of Hampton's hiring of Carter, she also goes down in history as one of the last big band era jazz singers in history. However, by 1951, Carter left the band. After a short recuperation back home, Carter was in New York, working all over the city for the better part of the early 1950s, as well as participating in an extensive tour of the south, playing for "camp shows". This work made little to no money, but Carter believed it was necessary in order to develop as an artist, and was a way to "pay her dues".

Very soon after Carter's arrival in New York City, she was given the opportunity to record with King Pleasure and the Ray Bryant Trio, becoming more recognizable and well known and subsequently being granted the chance to sing at the Apollo Theatre. This theatre was notorious for giving up-and-coming artists the final shove into becoming household names. Carter was propelled into notoriety, recording with Epic label by 1955 and was a well-known artist by the late 1950s. Her first solo LP, Out There, was released on the Peacock label in 1958.

Miles Davis can be credited for Carter's bump in popularity, as he was the person who recommended to Ray Charles that he take Carter under his wing. Carter began touring with Charles in 1960, then making a recording of duets with him in 1961, including the R&B-chart-topping "Baby, It's Cold Outside," which brought her a measure of popular recognition. In 1963 she toured in Japan with Sonny Rollins. She recorded for various labels during this period, including ABC-Paramount, Atco and United Artists, but was rarely satisfied with the resulting product. After three years of touring with Charles and a total of two recordings together, Carter took a hiatus from recording to marry. She and her husband had two children. However, she continued performing, not wanting to be dependent upon her husband for financial support.

The 1960s became an increasingly difficult time for Carter as she began to slip in fame, refusing to sing contemporary pop music, and her youth fading. Carter was nearly forty years old, which at the time was not conducive to a career in the public eye. Rock and Roll, like pop, was steadily becoming more popular and provided cash flow for labels and recording companies. Carter had to work extremely hard to continue to book gigs because of the jazz decline. Her marriage also was beginning to crumble. By 1971, Carter was single and mainly performing live with a small group consisting of merely a piano, drums, and a bass. The Betty Carter trio was one of very few jazz groups to continue to book gigs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Carter created her own record label, Bet-Car Records, in 1969, the sole recording source of Carter's music for the next eighteen years:

....in fact, I think I was probably the first independent label out there in '69. People thought I was crazy when I did it. 'How are you gonna get any distribution?' I mean, 'How are you gonna take care of business and do that yourself?' 'Don't you need somebody else?' I said, 'Listen. Nobody was comin' this way and I wanted the records out there, so I found out that I could do it myself.' So, that's what I did. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. You know. We're talking about '69!

Some of her most famous recordings were originally issued on Bet-Car, including the double album The Audience with Betty Carter (1980). In 1980 she was the subject of a documentary film by Michelle Parkerson, But Then, She's Betty Carter. Carter's approach to music did not concern solely her method of recording and distribution, but also her choice in venues. Carter began performing at colleges and universities, starting in 1972 at Goddard College in Vermont. Carter was excited at this opportunity, as it was since the mid-1960s that Carter had been wanting to visit schools and provide some sort of education for students. She began lecturing along with her musical performances, informing students of the history of jazz and its roots.

By 1975, Carter's life and work prospects began to improve, and Carter was beginning to be able to pick her own jobs once again, touring in Europe, South America, and the United States. In 1976, Carter was a guest live performer on Saturday Night Live′s first season on the air, and was also a performer at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1977 and 1978, carving out a permanent place for herself in the music business as well as in the world of jazz.

In 1977, Carter reached a new high in fame for herself, being lauded by critics, media, and fans for her talent, and even teaching a master class with her past mentor, Dizzy Gillespie, at Harvard. In the last decade of her life, Carter began to receive even wider acclaim and recognition. In 1987 she signed with Verve Records, who reissued most of her Bet-Car albums on CD for the first time and made them available to wider audiences. In 1988 she won a Grammy for her album Look What I Got! and sang in a guest appearance on The Cosby Show (episode "How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?"). In 1994 she performed at the White House and was a headliner at Verve's 50th anniversary celebration in Carnegie Hall. She was the subject of a 1994 short film by Dick Fontaine, Betty Carter: New All the Time.

In 1997 she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. This award was one of thousands, but Carter considered this medal to be her most important that she received in her lifetime.

Death

Carter continued to perform, tour, and record, as well as search for new talent until she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 1998. She died on September 26, 1998, at the age of 69, and was later cremated. She was survived by her two sons.

Legacy

Carter often recruited young accompanists for performances and recordings, insisting that she "learned a lot from these young players, because they're raw and they come up with things that I would never think about doing."

1993 was Carter's biggest year of innovation, creating a program called Jazz Ahead, which took 20 students who were given the opportunity to spend an entire week training and composing with Carter, a program that still exists to this day and is hosted in The Kennedy Center.

Betty Carter is considered responsible for discovering great jazz talent, her list including such names as John Hicks, Curtis Lundy, Mulgrew Miller, Cyrus Chestnut, Dave Holland, Stephen Scott, Kenny Washington, Benny Green and more.

Miscellaneous

Carter is mentioned along with other jazz luminaries in Gang Starr's jazz rap "Jazz Thing."

In 1999 she was posthumously inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.

She is name-checked in Chapter 22 of Saul Williams's The Dead Emcee Scrolls.

Discography

Compilations

1990 Compact Jazz – Polygram – Bet-Car and Verve recordings from 1976 to 1987

1992 I Can't Help It – Impulse!/GRP – the Out There and Modern Sound albums on one compact disc

1999 Priceless Jazz – Verve – ABC-Paramount and Peacock Recordings from 1958 and 1960

2003 Betty Carter's Finest Hour – Verve  – recordings from 1958 to 1992

On multi-artist compilations

"I'm Wishing" on Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films (1988).

"Lonely House" on September Songs - The Music of Kurt Weill (1997).

Wikipedia