If watch The Wire, you’ll get a kick out of this. If not, what the hell are you waiting for? It’s only the most critically acclaimed show on television.
Archive for December, 2006
29
Dec
Sheeeeeeit.
25
Dec
R.I.P James Brown
One of the baddest men in the history of music has passed on. On this day of gift giving, let’s remember a man who gave us as all so much musical joy.
James Brown, `Godfather of Soul,’ dead at 73
GREG BLUESTEIN
Associated PressATLANTA – James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured “Godfather of Soul,” whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco as well, died Monday, his agent said. He was 73.
Brown was hospitalized Sunday at Emory Crawford Long Hospital with pneumonia and died around 1:45 a.m. Monday, said Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music. Longtime friend Charles Bobbit was by his side, Copsidas said.
The agent said Brown’s family is being notified of his death and that it’s cause is still uncertain. “We really don’t know at this point what he died of,” Copsidas said.
Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, he was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie’s “Fame,” Prince’s “Kiss,” George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song” were clearly based on Brown’s rhythms and vocal style.
If Brown’s claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.
“James presented obviously the best grooves,” rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. “To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one’s coming even close.”
His hit singles include such classics as “Out of Sight,” “(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and “Say It Out Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.
“I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,” said in a 2003 Associated Press interview. “The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.”
He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (best R&B recording) and for “Living In America” in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.) He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.
He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life. Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to “try to straighten out” rock music.
From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, “Please, Please, Please” in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.”
With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.
In 1986, he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.
Brown’s work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers. “The music out there is only as good as my last record,” Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
“Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I’m saying? You hear all the rappers, 90 percent of their music is me,” he told the AP in 2003.
Born in poverty in Barnwell, S.C., in 1933, he was abandoned as a 4-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Ga., in an “ill-repute area,” as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.
“I wanted to be somebody,” Brown said.
By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served 3 1/2 years in Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Ga., for breaking into cars.
While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.
In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later “Please, Please, Please” was in the R&B Top Ten.
While most of Brown’s life was glitz and glitter, he was plagued with charges of abusing drugs and alcohol and of hitting his third wife, Adrienne.
In September 1988, Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office. Police said he asked seminar participants if they were using his private restroom.
Police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back to Georgia. The chase ended when police shot out the tires of his truck.
Brown received a six-year prison sentence. He spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months in a work release program before being paroled in February 1991. In 2003, the South Carolina parole board granted him a pardon for his crimes in that state.
Soon after his release, Brown was on stage again with an audience that included millions of cable television viewers nationwide who watched the three-hour, pay-per-view concert at Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.
Adrienne Brown died in 1996 in Los Angeles at age 47. She took PCP and several prescription drugs while she had a bad heart and was weak from cosmetic surgery two days earlier, the coroner said.
More recently, he married his fourth wife, Tomi Raye Hynie, one of his backup singers. The couple had a son, James Jr.
Two years later, Brown spent a week in a private Columbia hospital, recovering from what his agent said was dependency on painkillers. Brown’s attorney, Albert “Buddy” Dallas, said singer was exhausted from six years of road shows.
From their most recent release, Easter.
If you’ll celebrate a fat, white man in a red suit coming down your chimney, is it really that big of a stretch to hang out with a black man in a metal mask?
19
Dec
Legalize it.
I highly recommend his book, The God Delusion.
Here’s Richard on Irish television’s The Late Late Show:
On a lighter note, he goes toe to toe with Stephen Colbert:
15
Dec
We’re #1!
December 15, 2006
Fatter, Taller and Thirstier Americans
By SAM ROBERTS
Americans drank more than 23 gallons of bottled water per person in 2004 — about 10 times as much as in 1980. We consumed more than twice as much high fructose corn syrup per person as in 1980 and remained the fattest inhabitants of the planet, although Mexicans, Australians, Greeks, New Zealanders and Britons are not too far behind.
At the same time, Americans spent more of their lives than ever — about eight-and-a-half hours a day — watching television, using computers, listening to the radio, going to the movies or reading.
This eclectic portrait of the American people is drawn from the 1,376 tables in the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, the annual feast for number crunchers that is being served up by the federal government today.
For the first time, the abstract quantifies same-sex sexual contacts (6 percent of men and 11.2 percent of women say they have had them) and learning disabilities (among population groups, American Indians were most likely to have been told that they have them).
The abstract reveals that the floor space in new private one-family homes has expanded to 2,227 square feet in 2005 from 1,905 square feet in 1990. Americans are getting fatter, but now drink more bottled water per person than beer.
Taller, too. More than 24 percent of Americans in their 70s are shorter than 5-foot-6. Only 10 percent of people in their 20s are.
More people are injured by wheelchairs than by lawnmowers, the abstract reports. Bicycles are involved in more accidents than any other consumer product, but beds rank a close second.
Most of the statistical tables, which come from a variety of government and other sources, are presented raw, without caveats; and because the abstract is so concrete, the statistics can suggest false precision. The table of consumer products involved in injuries does not explain, for example, that one reason nearly as many injuries involve beds as bicycles is that more people use beds.
With medical costs rising, more people said they pray for their health than invest in every form of alternative medicine or therapy combined, the abstract reports.
Adolescents and adults now spend, on average, more than 64 days a year watching television, 41 days listening to the radio and a little over a week using the Internet. Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.
“The demand for information and entertainment seems almost insatiable,” said James P. Rutherfurd, executive vice president of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, the media investment firm whose research the Census Bureau cited.
Mr. Rutherfurd said time spent with such media increased to 3,543 hours last year from 3,340 hours in 2000, and is projected to rise to 3,620 hours in 2010. The time spent within each category varied, with less on broadcast television (down to 679 hours in 2005 from 793 hours in 2000) and on reading in general, and more using the Internet (up to 183 hours from 104 hours) and on cable and satellite television.
How does all that listening and watching influence the amount of time Americans spend alone? The census does not measure that, but since 2000 the number of hobby and athletic nonprofit associations has risen while the number of labor unions, fraternities and fan clubs has declined.
“The large master trend here is that over the last hundred years, technology has privatized our leisure time,” said Robert D. Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”
“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone,” Mr. Putnam said. “That is from many points of view very efficient. I also think it’s fundamentally bad because the lack of social contact, the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should.”
More Americans were born in 2004 than in any years except 1960 and 1990. Meanwhile, the national divorce rate, 3.7 divorces per 1,000 people, was the lowest since 1970. Among the states, Nevada still claims the highest divorce rate, which slipped to 6.4 per 1,000 in 2004 from 11.4 per 1,000 in 1990, just ahead of Arkansas’s rate.
From 2000 to 2005, the number of manufacturing jobs declined nearly 18 percent. Virtually every job category registered decreases except pharmaceuticals. Employment in textile mills fell by 42 percent. The job projected to grow the fastest by 2014 is home health aide.
One thing Americans produce more of is solid waste — 4.4 pounds per day, up from 3.7 pounds in 1980.
More than half of American households owned stocks and mutual funds in 2005. The 91 million individuals in those households had a median age of 51 and a median household income of $65,000.
That might help explain a shift in what college freshmen described as their primary personal objectives. In 1970, 79 percent said their goal was developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2005, 75 percent said their primary objective was to be financially very well off.
Among graduate students, 27 percent had at least one foreign-born parent. The number of foreign students from India enrolled in American colleges soared to 80,000 in 2005 from 10,000 in 1976.
As recently as 1980, only 12 percent of doctors were women; by 2004, 27 percent were.
In 1970, 33,000 men and 2,000 women earned professional degrees; in 2004, the numbers were 42,000 men and 41,000 women.
There’s a piece in today’s LA Weekly that feels all to familiar to me. What’s amazing is that whenever I share stories similar to this with white friends, they’re actually shocked.
I wonder if Dixon experiences much of my personal favorite; the “Please don’t kill me black man!” mega smile that so often greets me when I’m walking around my neighborhood or hiking in Runyan Canyon.
Black Man Walking
By ART NIXON
Wednesday, December 13, 2006 – 3:00 pm
I’m a 6-foot-2 African-American male who likes to take leisurely, healing walks in my hood, and when I first moved into my apartment 14 years ago, I had much I needed to heal from, including two marriages. My walks became a way for me to attempt to get centered, to gradually dilute — step by step — the cumulative frustrations of self doubts, regrets, fears of failing health and the worry of old age without a decent pension. Nowadays, the only thing that interrupts my reverie is them. When I see them, I quickly cross the street and do my best to avoid eye contact. Knowing that I’m a black male hoofing around the neighborhood, you may be guessing the trouble I’m trying to avert would be feuding gangbangers and their errant fusillades. Far from it. It’s peaceful in the eclectic section of Los Feliz where I live. Who I try to avoid is white people.It wasn’t always so.
In the beginning, I was willfully oblivious to everyone around me. The last thing I wanted was to have to remember names, to stress myself with polite small talk, or profound talk, for that matter. Slowly, though, I eventually emerged from my self-absorption and began to make acquaintances around the neighborhood, on my block and in my apartment building. But I also began to notice something else when I would venture off the trendy stretches of Hillhurst, Vermont and Sunset, and onto the quiet residential streets.
White people — old, young, middle aged, even teenagers — would cross the street when they saw me strolling in their direction. Even white men who seemed to be in their 20s would, more often than not, cross the street when I approached. Soon, even at a distance, I started to be able to sense when they, particularly the women, were preparing to cross the street as I drew near: First comes the sudden interest in where their wallets are. Then comes the pat down — is it in the purse; is it in the back pockets, or is it the jacket pocket?What a relief… it’s in the purse… perhaps the purse would be more snatch-proof if the strap were looped over the head and worn in the style of the old pony express mail carriers, from one shoulder and across the body.
I’ve seen these women do double takes when they look up to see that I’ve beaten them to the punch and crossed the street first.
One day after emerging from the subway at Vermont and Sunset, instead of hopping onto the shuttle bus I decided to walk up the hill to Los Feliz Boulevard. I eventually settled into a floating, meditative zone in which I was able to observe the world in what I felt was an honest way. I noticed a young woman who, at first glance, appeared very trendy with her crimson hair and black leather ensemble. She looked up from the bus bench, saw me and, in one smooth effort, quickly drew her two colorful, expensive-looking shopping bags closer to her as I passed by. As an afterthought, I did something I rarely do — I looked back at her and caught her glaring after me. That’s when it became clear: This 20-something woman actually knew that I would no sooner snatch her bags than I would apologize to her for the fact that I was wearing a suit and tie and not pushing a shopping cart filled with all my worldly belongings. But I got what she was doing.
It’s this: In today’s P.C. world, even the most intractable haters wouldn’t dream of calling me a nigger aloud (except, maybe, the indomitable Mr. Richards, who apparently does dream, and in color to boot). These days, the more sophisticated way to get the N word across loud and clear is to simply act it out. That’s what this woman’s intense stare was about while she gathered her bags close to her. It wasn’t fear at all. It was more like, “There, I still get to let you know what I think of you.” Now, another question presented itself. If the folks in this neighborhood weren’t frightened that I was going to rob them, molest them, say something weird or even make eye contact with them, then what was really taking place?
The answer was obvious, but shrouded by the hip accouterments of the supposedly liberal, urban sophisticate of the independent bookstores, book signings, cineastes’ queues, Mini Coopers, coffeehouses, biscottis, delicate tattoos, pierced bellies, yoga, Pilates and, of course, political correctness across the board. In spite of all this, when these folks cross the street to avoid me on the residential byways of Los Feliz, it registers as a silent scream of “Oh my God… nigger.” For some it may be almost instinctual, even mean. For most, crossing the street is probably nothing personal, just a wistful nod toward a collective memory when life was so much safer and simpler.
When I beat the white pedestrian to the punch and cross the street before he or she does, I feel that I accomplish several things: I mirror whatever it is that informs their behavior toward me. I get to continue on my way and not get marooned on a plateau of ugliness for the rest of my walk. If I sublimate my own anger, then, despite how negatively they may regard me, their human value (like my own) is still potentially redeemable. Finally, crossing the street myself allows me a kind of existential distance from how simultaneously ridiculous and pathetic we both are. With that, I can shake my head and giggle inwardly with sad but genuine amusement.
http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=4817067&siteId=36
Pastor resigns over homosexuality
By Eric Gorski
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com
Article Last Updated:
What do you think about this? Post your comments below.
In a tearful videotaped message Sunday to his congregation, the senior pastor of a thriving evangelical megachurch in south metro Denver confessed to sexual relations with other men and announced he had voluntarily resigned his pulpit.
A month ago, the Rev. Paul Barnes of Grace Chapel in Douglas County preached to his 2,100-member congregation about integrity and grace in the aftermath of the Ted Haggard drugs-and-gay-sex scandal.
Now, the 54-year-old Barnes joins Haggard as a fallen evangelical minister who preached that homosexuality was a sin but grappled with a hidden life.
“I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy,” Barnes said in the 32- minute video, which church leaders permitted The Denver Post to view. “… I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away.”
His wife, Char, cradled his hand. Barnes declined an interview request through the church.
Unlike Haggard, who had the ear of the White House, Barnes is not a household name. He is a self-described introvert who avoids politics, preferring to talk about a Gen-X service at the nondenominational church he started 28 years ago in his basement, church officials said.
Barnes and Grace Chapel stayed out of the debate over Amendment 43, a measure approved by Colorado voters last month defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
“I can’t think of a single sermon where he ever had a political agenda,” said Dave Palmer, an associate pastor.
Palmer said the church got an anonymous call last week from a person concerned for the welfare of Barnes and the church. The caller had overheard a conversation in which someone mentioned “blowing the whistle” on evangelical preachers engaged in homosexuality, including Barnes, Palmer said.
Palmer met with Barnes, who confessed. At an emergency meeting Thursday, a board of elders accepted Barnes’ resignation after he admitted “sexual infidelity,” violating the church’s code of conduct. Church leaders also must affirm annually that they are “living the moral and ethical teachings of Scripture in my public and private life.”
Asked for details of Barnes’ transgressions, Palmer called them “infrequent events in his life” that to his knowledge did not take place in recent months.
Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.
In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a “fag” approached him.
Barnes thought, “‘Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed.”
When Barnes experienced a Christian conversion at 17, it gave him a glimmer of hope. But his homosexual feelings never went away, he said. He said he cannot accept that a person is “born that way,” so he looks to childhood influences.
Barnes said he asked God many times why he was called to ministry, to start Grace Chapel, carrying a “horrible burden.”
The soft-spoken Barnes is an unlikely big-church pastor.
After graduating from Dallas Theological Seminary, Barnes and his wife moved to Denver and began a Bible study. His church met in a school and a mortuary, bought property at Colorado Boulevard and Arapahoe Road, and now occupies a campus off County Line Road that used to be a car dealership.
Barnes described struggling with what he believes is the biblical teaching that homosexuality is an abomination. Over the years, he grew to accept that “this is my thorn in the flesh.”
Barnes expressed hope for a future where one can “be who you are” and be accepted and loved in the Christian community and also spoke about “separating some of the teachings from Scripture” from Jesus Christ.
Palmer said he wasn’t sure what Barnes meant, but Barnes told him that he believes God views homosexuality as a sin.
Barnes said he has been in counseling three times and never found anyone he could talk to.
His wife said on the video that she didn’t know about her husband’s struggles until he confided in her last week. The couple has two daughters in their 20s.
Char Barnes said she feels “like I’m living someone else’s life” but was grateful her husband revealed himself. The couple said they hope to stay in Denver. Near the tape’s end, Paul Barnes says, “This is what it is, it’s right, and it’s time.”
Church elder Russ Pilcher said the reaction at services Sunday was largely concern for the couple. “I thought, ‘Where did I fall short in making myself so unapproachable that he couldn’t come to me?”‘ Pilcher said.
Paul and Char Barnes will get counseling, but unlike Haggard, they will not go into seclusion or report to a board of reconcilers, Palmer said. He said it will be more personal and that church members will play a role.
Associate pastor John Zivojinovic is the interim senior pastor, and choosing a successor is still months away, Pilcher said.
Given the Haggard story, Pal mer was asked whether Barnes’ fall from grace would expose the evangelical community to further charges of hypocrisy.
“The criticism is valid if you look at perfection being the mark, because the next person who stands at our pulpit is going to be guilty of not being perfect as well,” he said. “Does that mean we have to change what we say about the word of God? We can’t do that.”
Staff writer Eric Gorski can be reached at 303-954-1698 or egorski@denverpost.com
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