Amy Goodman: ‘The Comeback Kid’ and the Kids Who Won’t

‘The Comeback Kid’ and the Kids Who Won’t
by Amy Goodman

President Barack Obama signed a slew of bills into law during the lame-duck session of Congress and was dubbed the “Comeback Kid” amid a flurry of fawning press reports. In the hail of this surprise bipartisanship, though, the one issue over which Democrats and Republicans always agree, war, was completely ignored. The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, and 2010 has seen the highest number of U.S. and NATO soldiers killed.

As of this writing, 497 of the reported 709 coalition fatalities in 2010 were U.S. soldiers. The website iCasualties.org has carefully tracked the names of these dead. There is no comprehensive list of the Afghans killed. But one thing that’s clear: Those 497 U.S. soldiers, under the command of the “Comeback Kid,” won’t be coming back.

On Dec. 3, Commander in Chief Obama made a surprise visit to his troops in Afghanistan, greeting them and speaking at Bagram Air Base. Bagram is the air base built by the Soviet Union during that country’s failed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Now run by U.S. forces, it is also the site of a notorious detention facility. On Dec. 10, 2002, almost eight years to the day before Obama spoke there, a young Afghan man named Dilawar was beaten to death at Bagram. The ordeal of his wrongful arrest, torture and murder was documented in the Oscar-winning documentary by Alex Gibney, “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Dilawar was not the only one tortured and killed there by the U.S. military.

Obama told the troops: “We said we were going to break the Taliban’s momentum, and that’s what you’re doing. You’re going on the offense, tired of playing defense, targeting their leaders, pushing them out of their strongholds. Today we can be proud that there are fewer areas under Taliban control, and more Afghans have a chance to build a more hopeful future.”

Facts on the ground contradict his rosy assessment from many different directions. Maps made by the United Nations, showing the risk-level assessments of Afghanistan, were leaked to The Wall Street Journal. The maps described the risk to U.N. operations in every district of Afghanistan, rating them as “very high risk,” “high risk,” “medium risk” and “low risk.” The Journal reported that, between March and October 2010, the U.N. found that southern Afghanistan remained at “very high risk,” while 16 districts were upgraded to “high risk.” Areas deemed “low risk” shrank considerably.

Read the Full Essay @ TruthDig

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Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

The Return of Dr. Lonnie Smith

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Music Review
The Hammond B-3 Lion Roars, Backed by His Pride
by Ben Ratliff

The organist Dr. Lonnie Smith played with his new big band for the first time on Tuesday night at Jazz Standard, and you know what they say about a big band on its first night: don’t go. Hear it after it’s settled a little, when its sound untangles, and the arrangements become refined. Give the soloists time to figure out what roles they will play, how to control themselves within the whole. Let a scene develop too: big bands sound best encircled by returning customers.

But after only two rehearsals, the 14-piece band, directed by the trombonist Corey King, sounded superfine. What I heard operated on two settings: nasty funk and wine-dark ballads. That was enough. The band runs from tuba to flute, with trumpets, trombones and saxophones in between; it sometimes merges three different low-end lines, from tuba, acoustic bass and Dr. Smith’s organ foot-pedals. It’s got an aggressive rhythm section, with the drummer Jamire Williams, the bassist Vicente Archer and the guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg, wielding cutting backbeats and shred guitar.

In original tunes like “Beehive” and “Play It Back,” a song Dr. Smith has been performing for at least 40 years — hear it on his 1970 record “Live at Club Mozambique” — the band cruised through James Brown-style rhythms and vamps, soloists working against a wriggling wall of sound. Crucially, the rhythm-section players followed Dr. Smith’s example by ducking and diving, changing up tone and rhythm, keeping the music bubbling through slow numbers and fast songs with not a lot of chord changes.

You might remember Dr. Smith visually because he wears a turban and has a long white beard. You might remember him aurally because he works with extreme dynamics. That’s what jazz organists tend to do, bossing your emotions with the Hammond B-3; at 68, he’s a lion of that tradition. But Dr. Smith, particularly, rolls around in the dynamic shifts, letting them define the music, making them as important as the notes and chords. On Tuesday, song after song, he dug a valley in the music and spread out, considering his way through it, playing jagged phrases conjoined with negative space, using hard prudence as he engaged the Doppler-tremolo effect of the rotating speaker in the Leslie speaker cabinet behind him.

Read the Full Review @ The New York Times

Trailer: Cabrini Green Mixing it Up

Cabrini Green Public Housing Demolition
Cabrini students challenge Chicago Mayor Daley

Some people called Cabrini Green "the worst housing project in America." They really didn't know the whole story.

Our film that we're making - Cabrini Green Mixing it Up looks at how the demolition of Cabrini Green has affected residents. Who is really benefiting from these demolitions and what happens to all those who lived in the Greens?

This film is a sequel to our documentary, Voices of Cabrini - http://ronitfilms.com/films/voicesofc...

We've been filming at Cabrini for 15-years, documenting all the changes. We're currently raising $5,000 on kickstarter to support the completion of this film.

Please visit the site to check out our trailer, read about the behind-the-scenes making of the project, and consider supporting this film in any way you can.

The URL: http://kck.st/eenlDf

Many thanks!

Ronit Bezalel, Brenda Schumacher, Mark Pratt

Why Obama Weighed in on Behalf of Michael Vick

Why Obama Weighed in on Behalf of Michael Vick
by Ezra Klein | WashingtonPost.com

The weirdest story of the morning is President Obama's call to Jeffrey Lurie, the owner of the NFL Eagles. Two things apparently happened during the call: Obama praised the team for giving Michael Vick a second chance, and then he asked some questions about the Eagles' plans to use alternative-energy sources to power the stadium. Now the White House is spinning the call as the sort of everyday inquiry the president makes into eco-friendly architecture. "The president did place a call to Mr. Lurie to discuss plans for the use of alternative energy at Lincoln Financial Field, during which they spoke about that and other issues," Bill Burton told Mike Allen.

That explanation makes a lot less sense than the one Lurie himself offered, which was that Obama is "passionate" about the fact that "it's never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out of jail. And he was happy that we did something on such a national stage that showed our faith in giving someone a second chance after such a major downfall.''

Patting Lurie on the back for playing Vick might give the White House communications shop some headaches, but it's also worth doing: About one in 100 Americans are currently behind bars, and more were behind bars at some other point in time. And as this Pew report (pdf) shows in grim detail, the punishment doesn't stop when convicts leave prison: "Serving time reduces hourly wages for men by approximately 11 percent, annual employment by 9 weeks and annual earnings by 40 percent." And those numbers hide a serious racial tilt: "Incarceration depresses the total earnings of white males by 2 percent, of Hispanic males by 6 percent, and of black males by 9 percent."

Then there's the downstream effects on children and families ("Even in the year after the father is released, family income remains 15 percent lower than it was the year before incarceration"), and on cities with a high population of ex-convicts, and so on. As you might expect, the recession is making all this even worse.

That Obama would think it important that an NFL team made a major statement about the employability of ex-convicts makes sense. That he'd want to take a risk and throw his weight behind the decision by making that call is admirable. But for the White House to now say that the call was really about energy efficiency in stadium design both makes Obama look a bit Carteresque -- does he really have time to be worrying about the energy efficiency of football stadiums? -- and blunts whatever impact the call itself could have had. That was a call either worth making or not worth making, but it definitely wasn't worth making if the president wasn't willing to stand behind it.

Quincy Jones' Long and Restless Song

Quincy Jones in Bel Air on Nov. 24, 2010. (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

The peerless producer has a new book and album, but he's in a looking-back mood too.

Quincy Jones' Long and Restless Song
by Geoff Boucher|Los Angeles Times

It had been a long night — a concert, a reunion with an old friend, a midnight meal — but as the clock ticked past 2 a.m. Quincy Jones sat in a rare state of silence in his estate at the very top of Bel-Air. The man they call Q nodded at the cellphone sitting on the kitchen counter.

"I've deleted 188 names this year — all the people who died, all these friends of mine," Jones said. "That's what happens when you're 77, man. That's life, man. You start out playing in bands and doing duets and then you worry that in the end it's all going to be a solo."

The song of Q's life began on the South Side of Chicago. It was March 1933 when a new president named Roosevelt told the American people that the only thing they needed to fear was fear itself. Ten days later, Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born as part of a staggering boom-time in the nursery of modern music: Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, James Brown, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Jerry Lee Lewis, Nina Simone, Willie Nelson, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson were also born in that golden window between September 1930 and September 1935.

Most of those peers are gone now, but Jones remains a man in relentless motion. He has a new tribute album, a recently published book and a schedule dense with award shows, fundraisers and jet-set parties. Still, he feels the weight of the years and he also thinks quite a bit about legacy maintenance.

"We all wonder how we will be remembered," says Jones, who rarely gets through any conversation without mentioning the famous friends and sparkling moments of the past. His friendship with the late Charles, especially, tugs at his memory, but instead of maudlin repetition a conversation with Jones is like talking to a jukebox loaded with platinum singles. He's just playing the old hits so new generations can learn the beat.

"You can't know the present or the future without knowing the past, and for young black Americans especially, it's a sin to forget where we've been and what we've done in music," Jones said. "The history is who we are. Without it we're in trouble. We need to teach music history the same way we teach science history."

Elementary school

A few weeks ago, Jones — resplendent with a shiny, blue pinstripe suit that could have been worn in a "Guys and Dolls" production and a striped scarf that reached his knees — trekked down to East 33rd Street. The Los Angeles Unified School District had invited him to cut the ribbon on Quincy Jones Elementary, which sits less than a mile from the old Dunbar Hotel, the hub of the Central Avenue jazz scene and the place where Duke and Dizzy and Basie and Billie all played.

Jones gigged at the Dunbar too ("I didn't know where Sunset Boulevard was when I moved to L.A., but sure I knew Central"), but he tried not to talk about all those old ghosts too much as he looked out on a schoolyard of young faces. "When I was growing up as a poor kid in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Chicago, I could not have imagined that I would stand here with you today and witness the dedication of a school with my name on it," Jones said. "This is one of the greatest honors of my life."

Jones found his path to fame in Seattle where, as a youngster playing trumpet, he found Charles and the defining friendship of his life. His career seemed kissed by fate. Count Basie became a mentor, and Lionel Hampton invited him to bring his trumpet on tour. He became a coveted arranger and wrote charts for Ellington, Tommy Dorsey and others. One day the phone rang and it was Frank Sinatra, and Jones knew he had reached the summit. "When you get to work with Sinatra, well, that's the best there is."

Jones has won 27 Grammys, more than any other living person, but he's prouder in some ways that he was named vice president of Mercury Records in 1962, breaking the color barrier as far as top-level music executives at major labels. Today, he's just a few notches below Oprah Winfrey as cosmic-level macher for black America — instead of arranging musical notes he now arranges careers and seeks to compose history.

It's telling that on his first visit to Southern California as a presidential hopeful, Illinois politician Barack Obama ended up in Jones' living room listening to war stories about Cairo concerts with Dizzy Gillespie or the view from the soundboard on the night "We Are the World" was recorded in 1985.

As the producer of Michael Jackson's three signature albums — "Off the Wall," "Thriller" and "Bad" — Jones created a sonic template for pop that can still be heard in the music of Usher, Justin Timberlake and dozens of other stars. "I watch what Quincy Jones has done, and that's the guy I want to be," says will.i.am, leader of the Black Eyed Peas and a Grammy-nominated producer himself. "He is the man."

Read the Full Article @ The Los Angeles Times

Remembering Teena Marie

Teena Marie is remembered as an important contributor to R&B and Soul music, who against all logic sustained a 30-year-plus singing career with an overwhelmingly Black audience base.

Remembering Teena Marie
by Mark Anthony Neal|Essence.com

In a 1985 profile in People Magazine, the late Rick James called Teena Marie "the most important White female singer since Barbara Streisand; and her own race forgot her." James' comments came on the heels of Marie's only taste of crossover success, with the top-ten pop hit "Lover Boy." Twenty-five years later, with her death at the age of 54, Marie is remembered as an important contributor to R&B and Soul music, who against all logic sustained a 30-year-plus singing career with an overwhelmingly Black audience base.

Though there have been many who might be described as "sounding Black" -- many fans on Twitter and Facebook sheepishly recalled finding out for the first time that Marie was not Black -- what was always clear in Marie's music is that she was not only influenced by Black culture, but had a legitimate passion and respect for it. That she never actively sought to find a broader audience for her music, despite the fact that she had the talent to sing anything she wanted, speaks volumes about the integrity of the woman simply known as "Lady Tee."

Born Mary Christine Brockert in Venice Beach, Calif. in 1956, Marie joined Motown Records in 1976. The label had previously signed White acts such as the band Rare Earth (Hip-Hop pioneer Kool Herc cites the group's cover of "Get Ready" as one of his favorites), Chris Clark (Berry Gordy's one-time lover) and even comedian Soupy Sales, but most were thought of as little more than novelty acts. Marie represented something all together different; a White woman whose vocal gifts were reminiscent of soulful belters like Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin and Linda Jones, whose "Hypnotized" she covered in 1994.

Read the Full Essay @ Essence.com

Bob Marley: "Rastaman Chant" (Live)