Old News

Isadora Duncan

Film of the Day

Still Mine

2012 Film
Starring James Cromwell and Geneviève Bujold

 'All I wanted to do is build a house'

It was the fifth house that Craig Morrison built with his own hands, and the last. He had built things with his own hands for 70 years, often using lumber he produced at his own small sawmill. Now he would build a modest, single-storey house where he could look after his wife, Irene, suffering from Alzheimer's. He would do the work himself, of course. Didn't everyone in New Brunswick? "I'm not flush with money," he explains now. "I didn't want to go into debt."

Thus it was that Mr. Morrison broke ground three years ago - at 88 - for a bungalow on land overlooking the Bay of Fundy near St. Martins, a seaside village east of Saint John. And thus it was that Mr. Morrison got into trouble with the law for the first time in his life.

In the past two years, building inspectors have hauled Mr. Morrison into court six times, each appearance more harrowing than the last. A couple of weeks ago, the provincial agency that employs building inspectors demanded that the court forcibly remove Craig and Irene Morrison from their home, that the house be bulldozed, and that Mr. Morrison be found in contempt of court - meaning, almost certainly, imprisonment.

Mr. Morrison worked long hours into his 92nd year, fixing the inspectors' long lists of defects. But for the court, he made his position clear: He would not vacate the house. If the court found him in contempt, he would go to jail.

In a memorable account of these proceedings, New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal writer Marty Klinkenberg reported Mr. Morrison's lament: "I thought this was a free country, that we had liberties and freedoms like we used to have, but I was sadly mistaken. … All I wanted to do is build a house, and I was treated as if I was some kind of outlaw."

Building inspector Wayne Mercer found many things wrong with Mr. Morrison's house - although it wasn't obvious that the building-code infractions he cited made it particularly unsafe. He noticed that Mr. Morrison's lumber - custom-sawn - did not carry the requisite stickers. The windows did not carry the requisite stickers, either. The roof trusses and floor joists, he thought, were questionable. He wanted the ceilings torn out, drywall removed and wall studs replaced.

"[The inspectors]seemed to find fault with everything I did," Mr. Morrison said. "They were out to get me because I was doing it with my own land and my own lumber and my own trusses and floor joists in my own time."

At one point, a professional home builder, Raymond Debly, volunteered to do an independent inspection. He determined that the house exceeded the requirements of the National Building Code. It was "built like a fort." The lumber, old-growth spruce, was superior to any lumber on the market. ("Some stamped lumber," he said, "shouldn't be used to build a doghouse.") The floors were double strength. ("You could walk an elephant across them.") And the trusses were fine. ("They were built the old-fashioned way," said Mr. Debly, himself 80, "the way we did it in the '60s.")

Mr. Morrison's long struggle with an implacable bureaucracy came to a merciful end in a Saint John courtroom on Nov. 1 when Mr. Justice Hugh McLellan ordered the planning commission to negotiate a settlement with Mr. Morrison, saying, "I'm not going to order a 91-year-old man to jail and have his wife placed in a nursing home." The planning commission subsequently agreed to allow the Morrisons to live in their home, without further molestation, until they die.

Son of a lumberman and cattle rancher, Craig Morrison comes from self-sufficient stock, the sturdy people who built this country with their own hands. He raised seven children (and has 14 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren). Yet, government inspectors almost took him down.

This is a true Canadian story, a cautionary tale of the tremendous power of the state over the individual in an age of pervasive bureaucracy. It is, indeed, a profound parable of irretrievably lost independence and casually forgotten freedoms.

The Globe and Mail

 Craig Morrison Obituary

MORRISON, CRAIG - It is with sad and heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Craig Morrison, husband of Irene (Chestnut) Morrison, of West Quaco, NB, occurred at the Saint John Regional Hospital on Monday, February 11, 2013. He was born on May 8, 1919, in West Quaco, NB, the son of the late Glen and Hattie (Mosher) Morrison. Craig is survived by his loving wife Irene; four sons John Morrison and his wife Laura of St. Martins, NB, Dean Morrison and his wife Alvina of AB, Ben Morrison and his wife Susan of AB, Craig Morrison and his wife Joan of AB; three daughters Ruth Walker and her husband Daryl of Sussex, NB, Edie McGrath and her husband Earl of St. Martins, NB, Linda LeBlanc and her husband Jim of St. Martins, NB; 17 grandchildren; 16 great grandchildren; several nieces, nephews, cousins and many friends. He was predeceased by his brother Ludolf. Craig will be remembered as an energetic man who enjoyed fishing, farming, lumbering, gardening, construction and was also an active baseball fan. Most recently Craig had the opportunity to get his story known in a film titled “Still” due to be released this spring.
He is resting at Reid’s Funeral Home (506-832-5541), 1063 Main Street, Hampton, NB, with visiting on Thursday from 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 PM. Funeral service, conducted by, Rev. Leander Mills, will be held from St. Martins United Church at 11:00 AM, on Friday, February 15, 2013. Interment will take place in West Quaco Cemetery. Donations to the Alzheimer Society or to the memorial of the donor’s choice would be appreciated. Condolences to the family may be made through www.reidsfh.com

Irene Morrison Obituary

MORRISON, IRENE - It is with sad and heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Irene Elizabeth (Chestnut) Morrison, wife of the late Craig Morrison, which occurred at the Dr. V.A. Snow Center on Thursday, August 22, 2013. She was born on April 19, 1926 in Damascus, NB, the daughter of the late George and Elsie (Hayward) Chestnut. Irene is survived by four sons John Morrison and his wife Laura of St. Martins, NB, Dean Morrison and his wife Alvina of AB, Ben Morrison and his wife Susan of AB, Craig Morrison and his wife Joan of AB; three daughters Ruth Walker and her husband Daryl of Sussex, NB, Edie McGrath and her husband Earl of St. Martins, NB, Linda LeBlanc and her husband Jim of St. Martins, NB; 17 grandchildren; 16 great grandchildren; twin sister Isabel Wanamaker; several nieces, nephews, cousins and many friends. She was predeceased by her husband of sixty-six years, Craig; brother Ted Chestnut and niece Joyce Scribner.

She is resting at Reid’s Funeral Home (506-832-5541), 1063 Main Street, Hampton, NB, with visiting on Sunday from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 PM. Funeral service, conducted by, Rev. Leander Mills, will be held from St. Martins United Church at 11:00 AM, on Monday, August 26, 2013. Interment will take place in West Quaco Cemetery. Donations to the Alzheimer Society or to the memorial of the donor’s choice would be appreciated. Condolences to the family may be made through www.reidsfh.com

Life on Mars

American horror Story- (S4 Ep. 2) Jessica Lange

Compromise

 Eartha Kitt on Love and Compromise.

Literary Pick (***)

Not a fan of anything remotely sci-fi, but in the end, I understood.

Quote of the Day

I drink to make other people more interesting.

-Ernest Hemingway

Quote of the Day

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Confucius was a Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history. 

Born: September 28, 551 BC, Lu

Died: 479 BC, Lu

Full name: Kong Qiu

Children: Kong Li, Kong Rao

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali 
Born: January 17, 1942, Louisville, KY
Died: June 3, 2016, Scottsdale, AZ

Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Dies at 74
The legendary boxer leaves a legacy unmatched in sports—a charismatic champion of free speech and civil change


Muhammad Ali, one of the most influential athletes in American history and a three-time heavyweight champion who fought as well with his mouth and mind, has died. He was 74 years old.
The Associated Press, citing a statement from his family, said Ali died Friday. He was hospitalized in the Phoenix area with respiratory problems earlier this week.
A private funeral is scheduled for Thursday in his hometown of Louisville, Ky. On Friday, a procession will carry Ali’s body’s through the city, followed by a memorial service open to the public at the KFC YUM! Center, the AP reported.
Ali called himself “The Greatest,” and many agreed. Among boxers, he certainly ranked among the elite, having won the heavyweight title three times in his 21-year career. But it was his life outside the ring that inspired the strongest adjectives. He was the prettiest, the brashest, the baddest, the fastest, the loudest, the rashest.
He openly attacked American racism at a time when the nation’s black athletes and celebrities were expected to acquiesce, to thank the white power structure that gave them the opportunity to earn wealth and celebrity, and to otherwise keep their mouths shut. Ali’s mouth was seldom shut. He joined the Nation of Islam at a time when the FBI and many journalists labeled the Muslim group a dangerous cult bent on destroying America. He challenged the legitimacy of the Vietnam War and refused to enlist in the military at a time when few prominent Americans were protesting, an act of civil disobedience that led to his suspension from boxing for more than three years.

In a career full of seemingly magical feats, Ali’s greatest trick may have been his transformation—from one the nation’s most reviled characters to one of its most beloved. It was in that journey that the boxer left his marks—including welts, cuts and bruises—on American culture. He was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. on Jan. 17, 1942, in Louisville, Ky., the son of a sign painter and a domestic worker. His paternal grandfather, Herman Clay, was a convicted murderer. His paternal great-grandfather, in all likelihood, was a slave.
The young Cassius Clay was a poor student who struggled to read the printed word, probably as a result of dyslexia, according to his wife, Lonnie Ali. He discovered his talent for boxing by accident, at the age of 12, when he told a police officer that his bicycle had been stolen. The police officer invited Cassius to join a group of young boxers, black and white, who trained at a gymnasium in downtown Louisville.
Team sports held little interest for Cassius, according to his brother, Rahman Ali, who was born Rudolph Clay. Cassius couldn’t stand the notion of wearing a helmet where his face would be obscured or being one of only 10 men on a basketball court or 22 men on a football field.
Cassius wanted nothing more than to be famous, according to his childhood friend, Owen Sitgraves of Louisville, who remembered Ali jogging to Central High School every day beside the bus that carried his classmates.
“He did it for the attention,” not just the exercise, Sitgraves said in a recent interview. In 1960, while taking time off from high school, 18-year-old Cassius Clay won the gold medal as a light heavyweight at the Olympic Games in Rome. He turned professional soon after and won his first 19 fights before earning a chance to fight for the heavyweight championship against Charles “Sonny” Liston in 1964. Liston was the most feared fighter of his time, and reporters covering the fight predicted almost unanimously that Cassius Clay would lose.

When the fight began, however, reporters saw instantly that Cassius Clay was not only bigger than Liston, he was also much faster. Cassius attacked with relentless jabs and combinations until the sixth round, when Liston quit.
“I am the greatest!” the new champion shouted into the microphone of radio reporter Howard Cosell. “I am the greatest! I am the king of the world!”
After the fight, Clay told reporters he had joined the Nation of Islam and embraced the teachings of its leader, Elijah Muhammad, as well the group’s most prominent minister, Malcolm X. At a time when civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. were leading the fight for integration, the Nation of Islam preached separatism, saying white Americans would never give black citizens true equality.
The boxer said he would abandon his so-called slave name and accept the name Muhammad Ali, which had been chosen for him by Elijah Muhammad. As Cassius Clay, the boxer had been deemed a loudmouth who didn’t know his place and didn’t comport himself with the dignity expected of sports heroes. Now, as Muhammad Ali, he was something more threatening. “I pity Clay and abhor what he represents,” wrote Jimmy Cannon, one of the most influential sportswriters of the time. “In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.”


But many black Americans, even those who didn’t embrace the Nation of Islam, saw in Ali a man who was willing to fight outside the ring. “What white America demands in her black champions,” the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver said, “is a brilliant, powerful body, and a dull, bestial mind—a tiger in the ring and a pussycat outside the ring.”
Muhammad Ali changed that. He became one of the most talked-about men in the world. He criticized Dr. King and other leaders of the civil-rights movement for their timidity. He traveled to Africa and the Middle East, where he was cheered not only for his boxing fame but also for his embrace of Islam. And, in 1967, he stood in opposition to the Vietnam War, refusing to be drafted. On the one hand, he claimed his objection was political—a black man ought not fight for a country that continued to treat him as a second-class citizen. On the other hand, he claimed exemption as a minister in the Nation of Islam, saying his religious beliefs precluded him from fighting.
Courts rejected both arguments, judging him guilty of draft evasion. Boxing officials denied him licenses to fight for more than three years. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction, the war in Vietnam had grown wildly unpopular, with protests erupting all over the country, and Ali’s bold anti-establishment stance made him a hero even among people who cared nothing for boxing.

“He was always very political and moral,” said Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. And while Elijah Muhammad preached separatism, Ali didn’t always adhere to that belief. He loved people and attention too much to ever dismiss anyone for their color or beliefs. The appetite for affection guided much of Ali’s life. It led him through four marriages and countless sexual affairs. It made him a political wild card, too. He offered praise for John F. Kennedy and endorsement for Ronald Reagan while he declined to support the presidential bid of his friend Jesse Jackson.
Ali was the rare man who enjoyed airports because there were so many people there to entertain. When limousine drivers arranged to pick him up on quiet side streets or in alleys, he would rebuff them, saying he wanted to come and go from the busiest spots possible, and he would often stand next to his car until people noticed him. Even at his most subversive, he spoke with a twinkle in his eye, offering poetry and magic tricks, eager to please and torment simultaneously.
In his return to boxing, he lost to Joe Frazier in his first attempt at reclaiming the heavyweight championship. He lost again two years later to Ken Norton, defeated Joe Frazier in a 1974 rematch, and then earned the chance to regain his championship in a fight against George Foreman, who was considered the most devastating puncher the sport had seen since Sonny Liston. In the fight against Foreman, which was held in Zaire, Ali was once again a heavy underdog. Once again, he defied expectations. But while he had been too fast for Sonny Liston in 1964, 10 years later Ali didn’t rely on speed. Instead, he let one of the most powerful punchers in boxing history pound away until Foreman’s arms grew weary and his hope of a quick knockout faded.

“I thought I would knock him out,” Foreman recalled in a recent interview. “I creamed Ken Norton, and Joe Frazier with ease. I thought this would be the easiest of all of them. I had no idea that this guy would be competitive. I beat him up, beat him up, and he survived…Most guys you hit them and they fight back but he covered up. Smartest boxer I ever been in the ring with.”
Once, Ali had described his style as “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Now he called his strategy “the rope-a-dope,” and he would rely on it in the late stage of his career, absorbing an increasing number of punches.
He lost his title to Leon Spinks in 1978, regained it in a rematch with Spinks later that same year and then announced his retirement.

In 1980, Ali emerged from retirement to fight Larry Holmes and suffered a brutal loss. He fought and lost one more time, in 1981, before truly retiring.
In 1984, Ali said he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a degenerative neurological condition. In subsequent years, he traveled widely, raising money for many causes, including the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center in Phoenix. He also traveled on behalf of the American government on diplomatic missions, including negotiations to win the release of hostages.
In 1996, his hands shaking, Ali lit the Olympic torch to launch the Summer Games in Atlanta. In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Ali the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

— Jonathan Eig, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is writing a biography of Muhammad Ali, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

-WSJ 

Prince

Prince

Born: June 7, 1958 Minneapolis, Minnesota, US
Died: April 21, 2016 (aged 57) Chanhassen, Minnesota, US

Prince, an Artist Who Defied Genre, Is Dead at 57 

Prince, the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate showman, died on Thursday at his home, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn. He was 57.

His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, confirmed his death but did not report a cause. In a statement, the Carver County sheriff, Jim Olson, said that deputies responded to an emergency call at 9:43 a.m. “When deputies and medical personnel arrived,” he said, “they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. Emergency medical workers attempted to provide lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 a.m.”

The sheriff’s office said it would continue to investigate his death.

Last week, responding to news reports that Prince’s plane had made an emergency landing because of a health scare, Ms. Noel-Schure said Prince was “fighting the flu.”

Prince was a man bursting with music — a wildly prolific songwriter, a virtuoso on guitars, keyboards and drums and a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop, even as his music defied genres. In a career that lasted from the late 1970s until his solo “Piano & a Microphone” tour this year, he was acclaimed as a sex symbol, a musical prodigy and an artist who shaped his career his way, often battling with accepted music-business practices.

“When I first started out in the music industry, I was most concerned with freedom. Freedom to produce, freedom to play all the instruments on my records, freedom to say anything I wanted to,” he said when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. In a tribute to George Harrison that night, Prince went on to play a guitar solo in “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that left the room floored.

A seven-time Grammy winner, Prince had Top 10 hits like “Little Red Corvette,” “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”; albums like “Dirty Mind,” “1999” and “Sign O’ the Times” were full-length statements. His songs also became hits for others, among them “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinead O’Connor, “Manic Monday” for the Bangles and “I Feel for You” for Chaka Khan. With the 1984 film and album “Purple Rain,” he told a fictionalized version of his own story: biracial (although Prince’s parents were both African-American), gifted, spectacularly ambitious. Its music won him an Academy Award, and the album sold more than 13 million copies in the United States alone.

In a statement, President Obama said, “Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent.”

He added, “He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer. ‘A strong spirit transcends rules,’ Prince once said — and nobody’s spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative.”

A Unifier of Dualities

Prince recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing every instrument and singing every vocal line. Many of his albums were simply credited, “Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince.” Then, performing those songs onstage, he worked as a bandleader in the polished, athletic, ecstatic tradition of James Brown, at once spontaneous and utterly precise, riveting enough to open a Grammy Awards telecast and play the Super Bowl halftime show. He would often follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music.

On Prince’s biggest hits, he sang passionately, affectionately and playfully about sex and seduction. With deep bedroom eyes and a sly, knowing smile, he was one of pop’s ultimate flirts: a sex symbol devoted to romance and pleasure, not power or machismo. Elsewhere in his catalog were songs that addressed social issues and delved into mysticism and science fiction. He made himself a unifier of dualities — racial, sexual, musical, cultural — teasing at them in songs like “Controversy” and transcending them in his career.

He had plenty of eccentricities: his fondness for the color purple, using “U” for “you” and a drawn eye for “I” long before textspeak, his vigilant policing of his music online, his penchant for releasing troves of music at once, his intensely private persona. Yet for musicians and listeners of multiple generations, he was admired well-nigh universally.

Prince’s music had an immediate and lasting influence: among songwriters concocting come-ons, among producers working on dance grooves, among studio experimenters and stage performers. He sang as a soul belter, a rocker, a bluesy ballad singer and a falsetto crooner. His most immediately recognizable (and widely imitated) instrumental style was a particular kind of pinpoint, staccato funk, defined as much by keyboards as by the rhythm section. But that was just one among the many styles he would draw on and blend, from hard rock to psychedelia to electronic music. His music was a cornucopia of ideas: triumphantly, brilliantly kaleidoscopic.

Runaway Success

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, the son of John L. Nelson, a musician whose stage name was Prince Rogers, and Mattie Della Shaw, a jazz singer who had performed with the Prince Rogers Band. They were separated in 1965, and his mother remarried in 1967. Prince spent some time living with each parent and immersed himself in music, teaching himself to play his instruments. “I think you’ll always be able to do what your ear tells you,” he told his high school newspaper, according to the biography “I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon” (2013) by the critic Touré.

Eventually he ran away, living for some time in the basement of a neighbor whose son, André Anderson, would later record as André Cymone. As high school students they formed a band that would also include Morris Day, later the leader of the Time. In classes, Prince also studied the music business.

He recorded with a Minneapolis band, 94 East, and began working on his own solo recordings. He was still a teenager when he was signed to Warner Bros. Records, in a deal that included full creative control. His first album, “For You” (1978), gained only modest attention. But his second, “Prince” (1979), started with “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” a No. 1 R&B hit that reached No. 11 on the pop charts; the album sold more than a million copies, and for the next two decades Prince albums never failed to reach the Top 100. During the 1980s, nearly all were million-sellers that reached the Top 10.

With his third album, the pointedly titled “Dirty Mind,” Prince moved from typical R&B romance to raunchier, more graphic scenarios; he posed on the cover against a backdrop of bedsprings and added more rock guitar to his music. It was a clear signal that he would not let formats or categories confine him. “Controversy,” in 1981, had Prince taunting, “Am I black or white?/Am I straight or gay?” His audience was broadening; the Rolling Stones chose him as an opening act for part of their tour that year.

Prince grew only more prolific. His next album, “1999,” was a double LP; the video for one of its hit singles, “Little Red Corvette,” became one of the first songs by an African-American musician played in heavy rotation on MTV. He was also writing songs with and producing the female group Vanity 6 and the funk band Morris Day and the Time, which would have a prominent role in “Purple Rain.”

Prince played “the Kid,” escaping an abusive family to pursue rock stardom, in “Purple Rain.” Directed by Albert Magnoli on a budget of $7 million, it was Prince’s film debut and his transformation from stardom to superstardom. With No. 1 hits in “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry,” he at one point in 1984 had the No. 1 album, single and film simultaneously.

He also drew some opposition. “Darling Nikki,” a song on the album that refers to masturbation, shocked Tipper Gore, the wife of Al Gore, who was then a United States senator, when she heard her daughter listening to it, helping lead to the formation of the Parents’ Music Resource Center, which eventually pressured record companies into labeling albums to warn of “explicit content.” Prince himself would later, in a more religious phase, decide not to use profanities onstage, but his songs — like his 2013 single “Breakfast Can Wait” — never renounced carnal delights.

Prince didn’t try to repeat the blockbuster sound of “Purple Rain,” and for a time he withdrew from performing. He toyed with pastoral, psychedelic elements on “Around the World in a Day” in 1985, which included the hit “Raspberry Beret,” and “Parade” in 1986, which was the soundtrack for a movie he wrote and directed, “Under the Cherry Moon,” that was an awkward flop. He also built his studio complex, Paisley Park, in the mid-1980s for a reported $10 million, and in 1989 his “Batman” soundtrack album sold two million copies.

 Business Battles

Friction grew in the 1990s between Prince and his label, Warner Bros., over the size of his output and how much music he was determined to release. “Sign O’ the Times,” a monumental 1987 album that addressed politics and religion as well as romance, was a two-LP set, cut back from a triple.

By the mid-1990s, Prince was in open battle with the label, releasing albums as rapidly as he could to finish his contract; quality suffered and so did sales. He appeared with the word “Slave” written on his face, complaining about the terms of his contract, and in 1993 he changed his stage name to an unpronounceable glyph, only returning to Prince in 1996 after the Warner contract ended. He marked the change with a triple album, independently released on his own NPG label: “Emancipation.”

For the next two decades, Prince put out an avalanche of recordings. Hip-hop’s takeover of R&B meant that he was heard far less often on the radio; his last Top 10 hit was “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” in 1994. He experimented early with online sales and distribution of his music, but eventually turned against what he saw as technology companies’ exploitation of the musician; instead, he tried other forms of distribution, like giving his 2007 album “Planet Earth” away with copies of The Daily Mail in Britain. His catalog is not available on the streaming service Spotify, and he took extensive legal measures against users of his music on YouTube and elsewhere.

But Prince could always draw and satisfy a live audience, and concerts easily sustained his later career. He was an indefatigable performer: posing, dancing, taking a turn at every instrument, teasing a crowd and then dazzling it. He defied a downpour to play a triumphal “Purple Rain” at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2007, and he headlined the Coachella festival in 2008 for a reported $5 million. A succession of his bands — the Revolution, the New Power Generation, 3rdEyeGirl — were united by their funky momentum and quick reflexes as Prince made every show seem both thoroughly rehearsed and improvisational.

His survivors include a sister, Tyka Nelson, and several half-siblings. His marriages to Mayte Garcia and Manuela Testolini ended in divorce.

A trove of Prince’s recordings remains unreleased, in an archive he called the Vault. Like much of his offstage career, its contents are a closely guarded secret, but it’s likely that there are masterpieces yet to be heard.

 Correction: April 27, 2016

An obituary on Friday about Prince referred imprecisely to which elements of the character he played in the movie “Purple Rain” were autobiographical and which were fictional. Although the character, known as the Kid, is biracial, Prince himself was not. (Both his parents were African-American.)

-NYT

Quote of the Day

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

David Bowie

David Bowie

Born: David Robert Jones January 8th 1947, Brixton, London, England
Died: January 10 2016, age 69, New York City

David Bowie, the legendary singer-songwriter and actor, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 69.

The artist's Facebook page announced the news, with the singer's rep confirming his death to Rolling Stone. "David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer," the statement read. "While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family's privacy during their time of grief."
One of the most original and singular voices in rock & roll for nearly five decades, Bowie championed mystery, rebellion and curiosity in his music. Ever unpredictable, the mercurial artist and fashion icon wore many guises throughout his life. Beginning life as a dissident folk-rock spaceman, he would become an androgynous, orange-haired, glam-rock alien (Ziggy Stardust), a well-dressed, blue-eyed funk maestro (the Thin White Duke), a drug-loving art rocker (the Berlin albums), a new-wave hit-maker, a hard rocker, a techno enthusiast and a jazz impressionist. His flair for theatricality won him a legion of fans.


Along the way, he charted the hits "Space Oddity," "Changes," "Fame," "Heroes," "Let's Dance" and "Where Are We Now?" among many others. Accordingly, his impact on the music world has been immeasurable. Artists who have covered Bowie's songs and cited him as an influence include Nirvana, Joan Jett, Duran Duran, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson, Arcade Fire, Oasis, Ozzy Osbourne, Morrissey, Beck, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lady Gaga, Bauhaus and Nine Inch Nails.
Bowie's son, Duncan, tweeted a photo of his father holding him early Monday morning and wrote, "Very sorry and sad to say it's true."

"David Bowie was one of my most important inspirations, so fearless, so creative, he gave us magic for a lifetime," Kanye West wrote on Twitter. "I pray for his friends and family."
The singer had kept his cancer diagnosis secret, even to some of his closest friends. Ivo van Hove, who directed Bowie's off-Broadway play Lazarus, said, though, that the singer had told him early on that he was battling liver cancer and would not be able to attend all of the rehearsals. "Bowie was still writing on his deathbed, you could say," van Hove told NPO Radio 4, via DutchNews.nl. "I saw a man fighting. He fought like a lion and kept working like a lion through it all. I had incredible respect for that."
Bowie was born David Robert Jones on January 8th, 1947 in a working-class London suburb. His father, Heywood Jones, worked in promotions for a charity that benefitted children and his mother, Margaret Mary Jones, was a waitress. A fight with a classmate when he was young left the singer with a permanently dilated left pupil. He began learning saxophone at age 13 and attended a high school that would prepare him for a career as a commercial artist. By 20, he had spent time at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland and dabbled in theatrical troupes.
Once he began focusing on music, he played with groups like the King Bees, the Manish Boys (who once recorded with Jimmy Page) and Davey Jones and the Lower Third. He took on the Bowie pseudonym – after the knife – in an effort to prevent confusion with Monkees singer Davy Jones. Bowie put out a folky self-titled album in 1967, but it charted poorly in the U.K. and not at all in the U.S. That would change with his next release.
With 1969's Space Oddity, whose dramatic title track told the story of ill-fated astronaut Major Tom, he had a hit. His friend Marc Bolan of T. Rex had introduced Bowie to producer Tony Visconti, leading to one of the most fruitful and longest-lasting producer-artist relationships in music. The song "Space Oddity" hit Number One in the U.K. and Number 15 in the States, and the album made it to the Top 20 in both countries. Each album he released thereafter offered a new glimpse at his genius. On the following year's The Man Who Sold the World, he experimented with psychedelia, and in 1971, he fused pop-rock with art pretense and experimentalism with Hunky Dory, his first significant album.
The album contained the hit "Changes" and its threat/promise "Look out you rock & rollers/ One of these days you're gonna get older," fan favorites "Oh! You Pretty Things" and "Life on Mars" and songs about Bob Dylan ("Song for Bob Dylan") and Andy Warhol ("Andy Warhol"). (He'd portray the latter artist years later in the film Basquiat.) 

It was on 1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, though, where Bowie hit his stride. In the role of the titular rock-star also-ran, he innovated a glammy look for himself which he amplified in his highly theatrical live shows where he'd tussle with guitarist Mick Ronson. A far cry from the Sixties hippie idealism he'd come up with, Ziggy was brazen and arrogant, a decadent rogue who was also endearing to fans. In addition to the title track, "Starman," "Suffragette City" and "Five Years" became audience favorites. The album would be certified gold in the U.S. in 1974.
Around this period, Bowie began working behind the scenes for some of his friends. In 1972, he produced and played saxophone on Mott the Hoople's All the Young Dudes album, writing the album's hit title song. That same year, he resuscitated former Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed's career by giving him a glam makeover on Transformer. And in 1973, he mixed Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power. A few years later, during his Berlin period, Bowie would also work on Iggy Pop's solo breakthrough LPs The Idiot and Lust for Life, touring with Pop as his pianist to support the records.
Bowie kept the Ziggy Stardust persona on 1973's Aladdin Sane, which contained "The Jean Genie," "Drive-In Saturday" and a rag-tag cover of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together." Pin Ups, Bowie's covers album, followed later that year. He'd attempted to retire Ziggy for 1974's cabaret-ready Diamond Dogs, but the overwhelming glamminess of "Rebel Rebel" suggested otherwise. 
He did an about-face on 1975's Young Americans, incorporating soul, funk and disco into songs like the title cut and "Fame," and he co-wrote "Fascination" with Luther Vandross. It was a risky move, but it reached Number Two in the U.K. and Number Nine in the U.S. He delved deeper into funk on the following year's Station to Station, picking up a well-documented cocaine habit along the way, and scored a hit with the buoyant "Golden Years." The album as a whole, though, signaled a newfound interest in the avant-garde.
It was to be a short-lived transformation, though, as Bowie would disappear to Berlin and dive deeper into experimenting with music and with drugs. Beginning with 1977's Low, which combined art-rock with ambient minimalism, the singer stumbled on an acidic, epic sound, bolstered by collaborating with Brian Eno. The LP contained the U.K. hit "Sound and Vision" and set the tone for his next two records, that year's "Heroes," with its iconic title song, and 1979's Lodger, which contained the hit "Boys Keep Swinging." Minimalist composer Philip Glass would later write a symphony using music from Low.
Bowie quit drugs in the Seventies and emerged in the Eighties with a renewed interest in more radio-friendly music, scoring a Number One hit in the U.K. with "Ashes to Ashes," which continued the story of Major Tom, and the hit "Fashion." Both appeared on 1980's Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). In 1981, he recorded the duet "Under Pressure" with Queen, weaving his voice with Freddie Mercury's for another Number One in the U.K. and a Top 30 single in the U.S. 
In 1983, he put out Let's Dance, which he co-produced with Chic mastermind Nile Rodgers. The collaboration, which included lead guitar work by Stevie Ray Vaughan, proffered the singles "Let's Dance," "China Girl" and "Modern Love." He'd follow these with the hit "Blue Jean," off Tonight the following year. Bowie notched his final Number One in the U.K. in 1985 with a cover of Martha and the Vandella's feel-good hit "Dancing in the Street," a duet with Mick Jagger. 

With the exception of the Beatlesesque 1986 single "Absolute Beginners," the rest of the Eighties were less fruitful for Bowie musically. He put out Never Let Me Down in 1987, and closed out the decade as a member of the hard-rock group Tin Machine, which would put out another record in 1991.
Bowie changed his musical output again in 1993 and put out the electronic-influenced Black Tie White Noise, another co-production with Nile Rodgers that proved less commercially successful in the U.S. He flirted with industrial on 1995's Outside, and the following year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne.
In 1997, he celebrated his 50th birthday with an all-star concert at New York City's Madison Square Garden; Lou Reed, the Cure's Robert Smith, Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan, Pixies' Black Francis, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth all joined him onstage. He pioneered "Bowie Bonds," a way in which people could invest in him, that year, earning him $55 million. Also, that year, he collaborated with Trent Reznor on the Brian Eno co-produced Earthling, and returned to rock on 1999's Hours…. It's a sound he'd improve upon on 2002's Heathen and the following year's Reality, both of which found him working again with Visconti.
The singer suffered a heart attack in 2004 and subsequently retired from touring, though he'd make occasional appearances, singing with Arcade Fire and David Gilmour, among others. He made his last singing appearance onstage in 2006, where he dueted with Alicia Keys. During this time, he also sang on records by TV on the Radio, Scarlett Johansson and Arcade Fire.
Concurrent with his music, Bowie also enjoyed a long career as an actor. His first starring role was as Thomas Jerome Newton in 1976's The Man Who Fell to Earth, a surrealistic film about a marooned alien attempting to bring water back to his home planet. In 1980, he played the titular role in a theatrical production of The Elephant Man. He played a vampire in Tony Scott's 1983 erotic horror The Hunger and had roles in Julien Temple's 1986 film Absolute Beginners, Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ and David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. In 1986, he played the shrub-haired, codpiece-wearing Jareth the Goblin King in the puppet-starring musical Labyrinth. Beginning in 2000, he hosted a TV series based on The Hunger, and he played himself in Zoolander and the TV show Extras. He also played Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, lent his voice to SpongeBob SquarePants and played himself in the Vanessa Hudgens film Bandslam.
In 2013, Bowie put out his first album in a decade, The Next Day, which went to Number One on the U.K. chart and Number Two in the States. He had recorded the LP in secret and announced its existence on his birthday that year.
Two days before his death, the singer put out ★ (pronounced "Blackstar"), this time on his birthday. The record reflected the ever-evolving artist's interest in jazz and hip-hop. "We were listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar," producer Tony Visconti told Rolling Stone of the recording sessions. "We wound up with nothing like that, but we loved the fact Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn't do a straight-up hip-hop record. He threw everything on there, and that's exactly what we wanted to do. The goal, in many, many ways, was to avoid rock & roll." 


The artist's latest theatrical foray was the 2015 off-Broadway play Lazarus, which stars Michael C. Hall and continues the story of Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth. Along with songs from throughout Bowie's career, it also featured new tunes.
Bowie married his first wife, Mary Angela Barnett, in 1970. A year later, Angela gave birth to the couple's son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones. The couple would divorce in 1980.
Despite his marriage, Bowie claimed to be gay in the British music press in 1972, and, in 1976, he came out to Playboy as bisexual. He'd later regret the assertion. "The biggest mistake I ever made was telling that Melody Maker writer that I was bisexual," he told Rolling Stone in 1983. "Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting." He also said he'd never done "drag." He later recanted his unhappiness with coming out as bisexual, saying he didn't like the way Americans put emphasis on it.
In 1992, Bowie married Somali-American model Iman. The couple had a daughter named Alexandria Zahra Jones in 2000.
"He always did what he wanted to do, and he wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way," Visconti wrote on Facebook after the news of Bowie's passing was out. "His death was no different from his life – a work of art. He made ★ for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn't, however, prepared for it. He was an extraordinary man, full of love and life. He will always be with us. For now, it is appropriate to cry."

~Rolling Stones

Patty Duke

Patty Duke

Born: December 14, 1946, Elmhurst, New York City, NY

Died: March 29, 2016, Coeur d'Alene, ID

Height: 5′ 0″

 

 Patty Duke, Child Star and Oscar Winner, Dies at 69

Patty Duke, an Oscar-winning actress renowned at midcentury as a child star of stage, film and television, who, amid public struggles with bipolar disorder, went on to cultivate a respected career in adulthood as an actress and mental-health advocate, died on Tuesday at a hospital near her home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She was 69.

The cause was complications of a ruptured intestine that Ms. Duke suffered on Thursday, said her husband, Michael Pearce.

Ms. Duke came to wide public notice in 1959, at 12, when she starred as Helen Keller in the original Broadway production of William Gibson’s drama “The Miracle Worker.” Anne Bancroft played Helen’s teacher, Annie Sullivan.

For her performance in the 1962 Hollywood film adaptation, in which she and Ms. Bancroft reprised their roles, Ms. Duke won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

She came to even wider attention the next year, with the debut of “The Patty Duke Show,” the popular ABC sitcom in which Ms. Duke played the dual roles of Patty Lane, an unaffected Brooklyn girl, and her worldly, Scottish “identical cousin,” Cathy Lane.

Broadcast on ABC, the show ran through 1966, and also starred William Schallert as Patty’s father.

Homey, comforting and sentimental, the show, with its emblematic theme song (“Where Cathy adores a minuet,/The Ballets Russes, and crêpes suzette,/Our Patty loves to rock and roll,/A hot dog makes her lose control;/What a wild duet!”) remains a touchstone of American nostalgia.

But in an irony not lost one iota on Ms. Duke, the fame she won for playing a typical teenager — who inhabited a world of bubble gum, bobby socks and few real problems — belied the lifelong upheavals that began in childhood.

Among them were a threadbare upbringing; parental alcoholism; her removal from her home by her managers, who co-opted not only her earnings but also, Ms. Duke later wrote, her very identity; implication in the television quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s; sexual abuse; four marriages; and more than one suicide attempt.

In the end, however, Ms. Duke found contentment in an enduring fourth marriage; the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild; the proper diagnosis and treatment of her bipolar disorder; her public lobbying for causes including mental health, AIDS awareness and nuclear disarmament; and a renewed television career that brought her three Emmys.

The youngest of three children, Anna Marie Duke was born in New York City on Dec. 14, 1946, and reared in Queens. Her father, John Patrick Duke, was a handyman and cabby; her mother, the former Frances McMahon, was a cashier.

Her mother, Ms. Duke later said, was chronically depressed; her father was an alcoholic. When Anna was 6, her father left the family, and she saw him again only occasionally.

Anna began acting at about 8, when she was taken on by John and Ethel Ross, husband-and-wife managers who represented her older brother Raymond.

The Rosses immediately set to work neutralizing Anna’s prominent Queens accent. They also changed her name to the pert, less ethnic-sounding Patty.

“Anna Marie is dead; you’re Patty now,” she was told, as she recalled in a memoir, “Call Me Anna” (1987, with Kenneth Turan).

As Patty Duke, she landed bit parts in films and on television before being cast in “The Miracle Worker.” To prepare her to audition for the part, the Rosses took to blindfolding her and moving the furniture around.

Playing the young Helen Keller — a rigorous role that required her to act, persuasively but without sentimentality, the part of a deaf-blind child subject to fearsome rages; to learn the manual alphabet; and to engage nightly in an ad-libbed, highly physical onstage fight with Ms. Bancroft that could last nearly 10 minutes — she won critical plaudits and enduring fame.

Reviewing the play in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote:

“As Helen, little Miss Duke is altogether superb — a plain, sullen, explosive, miniature monster whose destructive behavior makes sympathy for her afflictions impossible, but whose independence and vitality are nevertheless admirable.”

In the view of many critics, Ms. Duke’s passage from Helen Keller to Patty Lane was a voyage from the sublime to the ridiculous.

From its pilot episode, scripted by Sidney Sheldon, the show gloried in its preposterous premise: two cousins so genetically indistinguishable that, as its theme song proclaimed, “They laugh alike, they walk alike, at times they even talk alike.”

But the public ate it up, along with vigorously marketed merchandise like dolls, clothes, puzzles and board games.

The show’s success — and Patty Lane’s popularity in particular — was something Ms. Duke came to deplore.

“I hated being less intelligent than I was,” she later wrote. “I hated pretending I was younger than I was, I hated not being consulted about anything, having no choice in how I looked or what I wore, I hated being trapped.”

The Rosses, who by now saw Ms. Duke as a golden goose, removed her, against her wishes, from her mother’s home and took her to live with them. They monitored her every movement, she later said, telling her what to wear, what to do and what to eat, and fiercely controlled her mother’s access to her.

They also, Ms. Duke said, fed her uppers and downers and introduced her to alcohol. Both members of the couple, she later wrote, sexually molested her on occasion.

There was also financial malfeasance. In 1959, testifying before a congressional committee, Mr. Ross, admitted that Patty, who had appeared not long before on the TV quiz show “The $64,000 Challenge,” had been fed the answers by the show’s producers.

She won $32,000 on the show, of which Mr. Ross took his standard 15 percent fee.

By the time Ms. Duke broke with the Rosses as a young woman, she later said, she discovered that they had embezzled the vast portion of her career earnings — about $1 million.

To extricate herself from the Rosses’ Svengali-like clutches, she married Harry Falk, an assistant director on “The Patty Duke Show,” when she was still a teenager; the marriage ended in divorce. A second marriage, to Michael Tell, was annulled after 13 days.

In 1972, Ms. Duke married the actor John Astin; during their marriage, she was billed as Patty Duke Astin. They divorced in 1985.

Her other roles include the female lead in “My Sweet Charlie,” a 1970 TV movie in which she portrayed a pregnant runaway who falls in love with a black man, played by Al Freeman Jr. Her performance garnered her the first of her three Emmy Awards.

On the big screen, she appeared in “Valley of the Dolls,” the 1967 adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s novel, playing Neely O’Hara, a woman addicted to sex, drugs and alcohol.

But all the while, Ms. Duke was dealing increasingly with a real-life emotional lability for which she had no name. She attempted suicide several times, and was committed to mental hospitals.

Only in 1982 did she receive a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, along with proper medication. She recounted her experiences in another memoir, “A Brilliant Madness: Living With Manic-Depressive Illness” (1992, with Gloria Hochman).

Ms. Duke’s survivors include her fourth husband, Mr. Pearce, an Army drill sergeant whom she married in 1986 (she preferred afterward to be known in private life as Anna Pearce); her brother, Raymond; two sons, the actors Sean Astin and Mackenzie Astin; a stepdaughter, Charlene Gibson, from her marriage to Mr. Pearce; a son, Kevin, with Mr. Pearce; and six grandchildren. Another stepdaughter from her fourth marriage, Raelene Pearce, died in 1998.

Among Ms. Duke’s other television credits are the 1976 NBC mini-series “Captains and the Kings,” for which she won her second Emmy, and a 1979 TV adaptation of “The Miracle Worker” for which — playing Annie Sullivan to Melissa Gilbert’s Helen — she won her third.

Ms. Duke played her adult self in “Call Me Anna,” a 1990 TV movie based on her memoir. Over the years she had guest roles on a string of shows, including “The Love Boat,” “Amazing Grace,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Glee.”

She served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988.

In a quotation on her website, officialpattyduke.com, Ms. Duke summed up her quicksilver life in lines whose final word fairly rings with resonance:

“I’ve survived,” she wrote. “I’ve beaten my own bad system and on some days, on most days, that feels like a miracle.”

-NYT

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco

Born: January 5, 1932, Alessandria, Italy

Died: February 19, 2016, Milan, Italy

Areas of interest: Semiotics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Umberto Eco, Italian novelist and intellectual, dies aged 84

The revered literary critic, author and essayist – most famous for 1980 novel The Name of the Rose – had been suffering from cancer

The celebrated Italian intellectual Umberto Eco, who shot to fame with his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, has been remembered as a master of Italian culture after his death at the age of 84.
Eco died on Friday night after suffering from cancer, prompting tributes to pour in for the esteemed writer.
He was “an extraordinary example of a European intellectual, combining unique intelligence of the past with a limitless capacity to anticipate the future”, said Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi. “It’s an enormous loss for culture, which will miss his writing and voice, his sharp and lively thought, and his humanity,” Renzi told the Ansa news agency.
Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said Eco remained youthful until his last day. “A master who brought Italian culture to the whole world,” Franceschini wrote on Twitter.
Leading daily Corriere della Sera called Eco “the writer who changed Italian culture”, while newspaper La Stampa described a country in mourning for the author’s death.
Through Eco’s academic writings and his bestselling books, he became a respected intellectual voice both in Italy and abroad.
Internationally, he remains best known for his bestseller The Name of the Rose, a medieval detective novel set in an Italian abbey, which follows Brother William of Baskerville as he investigates a series of suspicious deaths. The novel captured imaginations globally and was turned into a film starring Sean Connery as William.
The work secured Eco’s international reputation and he went on to pen a number of other novels, including Foucault’s Pendulum in 1988. His most recent work, Numero Zero, was published last year and centres on a new newspaper in Milan funded by a meddling tycoon. Later this year a final novel will be released posthumously, Italian media reported.
Although Eco’s works sold millions of copies, he was not one to pander to popular tastes. “It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged,” he told the Guardian in 2011.
While his first novel was not published until 1980, Eco said he had always had a “narrative impulse” and began writing stories at the age of 10 or 12. Born on 5 January 1932 in Alessandria, north-west Italy, Eco rejected his father’s wish that he study law and instead read philosophy and literature at the University of Turin.
After finished his doctoral thesis, Eco lectured at his alma mater and during the same period worked at Italy’s state broadcaster, RAI, as a cultural editor. He went on to develop his interest in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, and became a professor of the subject at the University of Bologna. His significant academic writings include On Beauty and the later On Ugliness, exploring how people’s perceptions are shaped through history.
George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, credited his friend with changing academia’s approach to literature by giving respectability to the study of popular art forms.
“He showed how not only to understand culture, in general, but to create new culture that way. That is what this man was about,” Lakoff told the BBC World Service. “Not only that, he loved it, he enjoyed every minute of it. To be with Eco was to just enjoy life.”

-The Guardian