SELECT WRITING
Culture
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Starting most noticeably with Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor's 1991 bestseller, The Overworked American, scholars and journalists began pointing out that Americans were increasingly overworked and underleisured. Perhaps not coincidentally, several of the best of those books are by Boston or Boston-linked authors. We asked four of these writers – Schor, Brandeis professor and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich (The Future of Success); BC political science prof Alan Wolfe (One Nation, After All); Jill Andresky Fraser (White-Collar Sweatshop), finance editor of Boston-based Inc. magazine; plus Galbraith himself, who lives in Cambridge – what had happened since Galbraith's prediction to alter conditions so dramatically. Why are we working so hard and what can we do about it?
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“Well, the actions of a number of the prosecutors involved in the Hernandez and Rolando Cruz prosecutions didn’t merely surprise me — they appalled me. I really didn't think some of the things they did could be done to Americans. I didn’t think people would knowingly try to convict a man with prints from a woman’s shoe. I just didn’t think things like that happened in our courtrooms. But they did.”
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Over lunch at Market on Main, Kim recalled how she had wept as she moved from painting to painting when she viewed Wyeth's landscapes in Japan. “That was when I realized it was time to move back,” she said. “They don't have anything that looks like that over there.”
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Miller introduced European grape varietals to New York, but how he came to be here is a story in itself. Miller was among the best-known magazine illustrators in the world after World War II, renowned for his drawings of handsome young couples in lust. An Oklahoma transplant, he made his mark first in New York City, then for nearly a decade in Burgundy illustrating European magazines. It was there he acquired his interest in old world varietals, but before decamping for France he had already bought the 36-acre farm he would rename Benmarl, for a few hundred dollars.
Miller recalled the elderly farmer who mistook Miller's reticence for reluctance as he mulled over purchasing the farmhouse as a weekend retreat from Manhattan. “He said, ‘Son, I'm getting to be an old man. If you make up your mind today, I'll throw in the farm.’”Read more . . .
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Dan Morgenstern witnessed a breakthrough moment for the singer at the 1961 Newport Jazz Festival. By this time, Sloane, a Providence native, had spent time touring with a big band and been tapped by Jon Hendricks to substitute for Annie Ross in the vocalese super trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross whenever Ross was unavailable. Hendricks also helped secure Sloane a slot for young, lesser-known talents at that year’s Newport festival, and she made the most of it.
“I said to the piano player, I want to sing ‘Little Girl Blue,’” she recalls in the film. The pianist knew the tune but not the verse, and Sloane wanted to sing the verse. “I said, ‘Well, it’s OK. Just play an arpeggio in B-flat and I’ll sing the verse a cappella.’ People didn’t do that. You didn’t sing a verse a cappella and be expected to be in tune when it got to the chorus.”
But this 24-year-old singer managed it, and then some.
“She opened her mouth,” recalls Morgenstern, “and the moment she did we were all transfixed.”
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Rita Dove wrote poems dedicated to the parade, Sissle, the Castles, and other events connected to Europe’s service overseas in her 2004 collection American Smooth. But most Americans are unfamiliar with Europe’s story. Until recently, that included jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran. But lately it has become an obsession of his.
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That the music at Big Ears has always been the kind of high-quality stuff that Duke Ellington called “beyond category” is largely thanks to Knoxville native Ashley Capps, who worked his way from hosting a cutting-edge public radio show to running an ahead-of-its-time (and long since defunct) local music club called Ella Guru’s to founding AC Entertainment, the company that for many years produced the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. Last year Capps divested himself of AC Entertainment, retaining control of Big Ears and turning it into its own separate nonprofit company, one geared toward the adventurous musical offerings he had favored since his DJ days. My old friend and former colleague Jack Neely, who has become a leading authority on Knoxville’s local history, suggested to me that Capps had hung onto Big Ears, which he started in 2009, as a labor of love.
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Giovanni is dismissive of Golden Boy. “Well, you have Sammy Davis Jr. playing a boxer,” she explains. “What kind of sense does that make? He must weigh 50 pounds.”
But Davis’s version of “Night Song” inspired a magnificent cover by Simone. Giovanni’s rendition was not hampered by her not being a singer; if anything, that made it more affecting. “Nina was a good friend,” she says. “It was one of her favorite songs.”
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We have a huge challenge for humanity, and that's global warming. We can't solve that fighting these stupid wars that are going on now, having values turned upside down. Having power being at the top of the list, having money being at the top of the list. That's not what should motivate people. That's just greed and ignorance. What's going to lead us into a more harmonious road is placing value in the potential that every human being has. The greatness that's in every human being. That's what Buddhism talks about—about building and encouraging that.
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I don't want to go to my grave thinking, I wish I could have one more bottle of Moët & Chandon. Or, I wish I could have one more sirloin steak.Those are things of this world.
Once I find a way to live properly, the dying will take care of itself.
Look at Coltrane. Coltrane, at the end, all he was talking about was spiritual things. That's the kind of music he was trying to play. That's where he was at. The goal is not to be one person off the stage and another person on the stage. The goal is to be a complete circle.
There's beauty in the world. If there wasn't, forget about it. But it's the ugly things that you have to work on.
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“The world does not need another compilation CD,” explains Marsalis by phone from North Carolina. “I told Blumenthal it would be cool if they just got an artist and had him re-create the songs. And Bob says, ‘Would you be interested in doing it?’ And I said, ‘No, I'm going on vacation. It's my first vacation in five years, and I'm taking it.’ And my manager, Ann Marie Wilkins, called me and said, ‘You should do it.’ And I'm like, ‘I'm not hearing this.’”
Blumenthal and Wilkins weren't hearing Marsalis, either. Instead of telling O'Meally that his answer was “no,” they told him that Marsalis was considering the idea. O'Meally sent Marsalis a book of reproductions of the paintings being used in the exhibit, which Marsalis brought with him on a concert tour.
“As we started looking at these pictures,” he recalls, “everybody in the band was like, ‘Man, we really need to do this.’ So we did it.”Read more . . .