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Thursday, January 12, 2006
The Famous Shining Trumpet Of A Voice
Birgit Nilsson, Soprano Legend
Who Tamed Wagner, Dies at 87
Published: January 12, 2006
Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish soprano with a voice of impeccable trueness and impregnable stamina, died on Dec. 25 in Vastra Karup, the village where she was born, the Stockholm newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported yesterday. She was 87.
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Louis Melancon/Metropolitan Opera Archives
Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish soprano, known for her Wagnerian opera roles, has died. She was 87. More Photos >
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Birgit Nilsson at The Metropolitan Opera in 1979, with the conductor James Levine. More Photos >
A funeral was held yesterday at a church in her town, the presiding vicar, Fredrik Westerlund, told The Associated Press.
Ms. Nilsson made so strong an imprint on a number of roles that her name came to be identified with a repertory, the "Nilsson repertory," and it was a broad one. She sang the operas of Richard Strauss and made a specialty of Puccini's "Turandot," but it was Wagner who served her career and whom she served as no other soprano since the days of Kirsten Flagstad.
A big, blunt woman with a wicked sense of humor, Ms. Nilsson brooked no interference from Wagner's powerful and eventful orchestra writing. When she sang Isolde or Brünnhilde, her voice pierced through and climbed above it. Her performances took on more pathos as the years went by, but one remembers her sound more for its muscularity, accuracy and sheer joy of singing under the most trying circumstances.
Her long career at the Bayreuth Festival and her immersion in Wagner in general, began in the mid-1950's. No dramatic soprano truly approached her stature thereafter, and in the roles of Isolde, Brünnhilde and Sieglinde, she began her stately 30-year procession around the opera houses of the world. Her United States debut was in San Francisco in 1956. Three years later she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Isolde under Karl Böhm, and some listeners treasure the memory of that performance as much as they do her live recording of the role from Bayreuth in 1966, also under Böhm. The exuberant review of her first Met performance appeared on the front page of The New York Times on Dec. 19, 1959, under the headline, "Birgit Nilsson as Isolde Flashes Like New Star in 'Met' Heavens."
Playing opposite Karl Liebl as Tristan, Howard Taubman wrote, "she dominated the stage and the performance."
When she appeared at the end of the first act to take a solo bow, he wrote, the audience "roared like the Stadium fans when Conerly throws a winning touchdown pass."
Like so many distinctive artists, Ms. Nilsson considered herself self-taught. "The best teacher is the stage," she told an interviewer in 1981. "You walk out onto it, and you have to learn to project." She deplored her early instruction and attributed her survival to native talent. "My first voice teacher almost killed me," she said. "The second was almost as bad."
Birgit Nilsson was born in 1918. Her mother, evidently a talented singer, began Ms. Nilsson's musical education at 3, buying her a toy piano. She began picking out melodies on it.
She once told an interviewer that she could sing before she could walk. "I even sang in my dreams," she added. A choirmaster near her home heard her sing and advised her to study. She entered the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm in 1941.
Ms. Nilsson made her debut at the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1946, replacing the scheduled Agathe in Weber's "Freischütz," who was too ill to go on. The next year she claimed attention there as Verdi's Lady Macbeth under Fritz Busch. A wealth of parts followed, from Strauss and Verdi to Wagner, Puccini and Tchaikovsky.
Her first splash abroad was 1951, as Elettra in Mozart's "Idomeneo" at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. From there, it was a short hop to the Vienna State Opera and then to Bayreuth. She took the title role of "Turandot," which is brief but in need of an unusually big sound, to Milan in 1958 and then to the rest of Italy.
Ms. Nilsson was suspicious of opera's recent youth culture and often remarked on the premature destruction of young voices brought on by overambitious career planning. "Directors and managers don't care about their futures," she once said. "They will just get another young person when this one goes bad."
In today's opera culture, the best managed voices tend to mature in the singer's 40's and begin to deteriorate during the 50's. (Singers like Plácido Domingo, flourishing in his 60's, might dispute such generalizations.) Yet at 66, when most singers hang onto whatever career remains through less taxing recitals with piano and discreet downward transpositions of key, Ms. Nilsson sang a New York concert performance of Strauss and Wagner that met both composers head-on.
"Ms. Nilsson did not sound young," Will Crutchfield wrote in The Times. "Soft and low notes were often precarious; sustained tones were not always steady." He continued: "The wonderful thing is that she doesn't let this bother her. There was never a sense of distress or worry."
The conductor Erich Leinsdorf thought that her longevity, like Flagstad's, had something to do with her Scandinavian heritage, remarking that Wagner required "thoughtful, patient and methodical people." Ms. Nilsson attributed her long career to no particular lifestyle or regimen. "I do nothing special," she once said. "I don't smoke. I drink a little wine and beer. I was born with the right set of parents."
In sheer power, Ms. Nilsson's high notes were sometimes compared to those of the Broadway belter Ethel Merman. One high C rendered in a "Turandot" performance in the outdoor Arena di Verona in Italy led citizenry beyond the walls to think that a fire alarm had been set off. Once urged to follow Ms. Nilsson in the same role at the Met, the eminent soprano Leonie Rysanek refused.
Ms. Nilsson was known for her one-liner humor. The secret to singing Isolde, she said, was "comfortable shoes." After a disagreement with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, Ms. Nilsson was asked if she thought Ms. Sutherland's famous bouffant hairdo was real. She answered: "I don't know. I haven't pulled it yet." After the tenor Franco Corelli was said to have bitten her neck in an onstage quarrel over held notes, Ms. Nilsson canceled performances complaining that she had rabies.
Ms. Nilsson was also a shrewd businesswoman and negotiated much of her own career. She never ranted or engaged in tantrums. She was also too proud to make outright demands. She would begin contract talks by refusing every offer and being evasive about her availability in general. This tack would continue until the impresario offered something she wanted. Ms. Nilsson's reply would be "maybe." Now in control, she would be begged to accept what she desired in the first place.
She could stand up to intensely wired conductors like Georg Solti as well. When Solti, in "Tristan und Isolde," insisted on tempos too slow for her taste, she made the first performance even slower, inducing a conductorial change of heart.
Partly because Ms. Nilsson was on the scene, Decca Records undertook the audacious and mammothly expensive project of making the first studio recording of Wagner's four-opera "Ring" cycle conducted by Solti and produced by John Culshaw. The effort took seven years, from 1958 to 1965. A film of the proceedings made her a familiar image for arts-conscious television viewers.
Ms. Nilsson's American career was derailed in the mid-70's by a squabble with the Internal Revenue Service, which had filed claims for back taxes. Several years later, cooler heads intervened: a schedule of payments was worked out, and Ms. Nilsson's ill-tempered hiatus from the United States ended. When she returned, Donal Henahan wrote in The Times, "The famous shining trumpet of a voice is still far from sounding like a cornet."
Ms. Nilsson appeared at the Met 223 times in 16 roles. She sang two complete "Ring" cycles in the 1961-62 season, and another in 1974-75. She was Isolde 33 times, and Turandot 52. The big soprano parts were all hers: Aida, Tosca, the Dyer's Wife in Strauss's "Frau Ohne Schatten," Salome, Elektra, Lady Macbeth, Leonore in Beethoven's "Fidelio," and both Venus and Elisabeth in Wagner's "Tannhäuser." For much of this time, the Met's general manager was Rudolf Bing. Ms. Nilsson, when signing a contract, was asked to name a dependent. She wrote in Bing's name.
James Levine, who conducted her in Wagner and Strauss at the Met, said yesterday: "Birgit was unique. Her voice, the dedication of her artistry, her wonderfully wicked sense of humor and her loyal friendship were in a class by themselves. I miss her already, as does the entire Met family." At Mr. Levine's 25th-anniversary gala at the Met in 1996, she spoke briefly and wittily, throwing in a brief and wholly professional Valkyrie hoot at the end.
Ms. Nilsson had by then retired to her childhood home in the Skane province of southern Sweden. Here her father had been a sixth-generation farmer, and here she had worked to grow beets and potatoes until she was 23. A decade ago an interviewer for The Times found her there: happy, serene and as unpretentious as ever. "I've always tried to remember what my mother used to tell me," she said. "Stay close to the earth. Then when you fall down, it won't hurt so much."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/arts/music/12nilsson.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
Posted at 05:43 pm by R7fel
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CWA: Awesome-Alito-A+ -Appoint
To: National Desk
Contact: Stacey Holliday of Concerned Women for America, 202-488-7000 ext. 126
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 /Christian Wire Service/ -- Concerned Women for America (CWA) agrees with the many Americans who have concluded that Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito has done a superb job despite blatant partisan attacks by some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“If ever there’s a pictorial dictionary, under ‘judge,’ it should simply display a photo of Samuel Alito,” said Jan LaRue, CWA’s Chief Counsel. “I knew he is brilliant and possessed a deep knowledge of constitutional law, but he’s left me with a greater appreciation of that and his numerous outstanding qualities. If anyone ever questioned the meaning of judicial temperament, they’ve seen him display it in the midst of baseless attacks on his record and character. Political commentators on the right and left concur that despite the left’s relentless attempts to sink his nomination, they haven’t laid a glove on him.
“He has conducted himself with dignity and honor, confirming his strong character. Led by Senators Kennedy, Feinstein, Durbin and Schumer, liberals have failed miserably in their attempt to discredit this outstanding nominee. If anything, they only proved that Alito has nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, and everything to be admired for.”
"Judge Alito lived up to¯and beyond¯his outstanding reputation,” said Wendy Wright, CWA’s Executive Vice President. “His intellect and knowledge of the law were on display for all to see, and his judicial temperament placed him above despicable accusations. Senators would only be living up to their duty when they vote for him; any vote against squarely places a senator in opposition to judges who are intelligent, fair, unbiased, and beholden to the law and justice instead of special-interest demands."
Concerned Women for America (CWA) is the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.
Posted at 02:40 pm by R7fel
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Monday, January 09, 2006
Go Ahead, Try to Stop K Street
Christoph Niemann Published: January 8, 2006
WASHINGTON
IN 1872, some Republican elders, revolted by the rampant influence peddling of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, challenged him for re-election. "He has used the public service of the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence," they complained, and "shown himself deplorably unequal to the task imposed on him by the necessities of the country."
Jack Abramoff's trading room was his Signatures restaurant, not the front of the old Willard Hotel, where favor seekers so besieged Grant that he helped popularize the label - lobbyist - that still clings to their descendants with a pejorative sting. But Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea last week to charges of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials prompted similar revulsion among some of the Grand Old Party's canniest hands.
"I think as this thing unfolds, it'll be so disgusting, and the Republicans will be under such pressure from their base, that they will have to undertake substantial reform," said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker (who himself had to pay $300,000 to settle a 1997 ethics case). "This is like Watergate."
But will things really change? After all, Grant himself won a second term, despite the failings that would eventually leave his legacy forever tainted, and his chief Republican antagonist, Horace Greeley, died defeated and insane three weeks after the election. Is corruption just a part of Washington's DNA? What else explains the grim resignation of Washington veterans who wonder when, not whether, some scandal will arise?
"The history of civilization, for starters," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, an ethics group. "This kind of problem is faced by all societies throughout all of history. It comes and goes in cycles, and becomes most prevalent when the activities are viewed as O.K. by the society where it's taking place."
For watchdogs like Mr. Wertheimer, and for many Democrats, such tolerance dates to the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990's, when new leaders like Representative Tom DeLay of Texas began a campaign to fill the capital's K Street corridor with Republican lobbyists, and made it plain that those seeking to influence legislation would have to "pay to play," in the form of political contributions and other largesse.
Mr. DeLay, who was himself indicted last year in Texas on unrelated campaign finance charges and forced to step down from his post as House majority leader, has long had close ties to Mr. Abramoff. Now Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea increases the likelihood that Mr. DeLay will lose his leadership post for good, and raises the prospect that he - and other lawmakers - may be enmeshed in new legal troubles. The sheer scale of Mr. Abramoff's misdeeds - millions of dollars in kickbacks from Indian tribes, a luxury golf outing for politicians to Scotland, misuse of a tax-exempt foundation - make this an extraordinary case.
"There are all sorts of things that have gone on of the same generic kind," said Harry C. McPherson, who came to Washington 50 years ago this month as a Senate aide to Lyndon B. Johnson and has plied his trade as a lawyer-lobbyist since leaving the White House in 1969. "But this is truly a situation where the degree changes everything. It converts something that purists about government would find unpleasant into the utterly unacceptable - into crime."
But the problem is broader than Mr. Abramoff, Mr. DeLay or even the inherent potential for abuse in one-party rule of all three branches of government. It also has to do with the astounding growth of the lobbying industry, a growth that has tracked the growth of the federal government itself. The rise of government regulation - first in the New Deal and then in the 1960's and 70's - spawned a parallel rise in the private sector's efforts to master the new system. Between the early 1970's and the mid-1980's, the number of trade associations doubled; in the first half of the 1980's alone, the number of registered lobbyists quadrupled, according to The Washington Monthly.
A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the early 1990's, political donations from 19 major industries - including
pharmaceuticals, defense, commercial banking and accounting - were split about evenly between the two parties.
By 2003, the Republicans held a 2-to-1 advantage. Since 1998, the center found, more than 2,200 former federal employees had registered as federal lobbyists, as had nearly 275 former White House aides and nearly 250 former members of Congress. Many rules governing their conduct remain deliberately vague, and the House Ethics Committee has been paralyzed because of dysfunction and partisan disputes.
"The scandal here is not that the rules were broken; the scandal is the rules themselves," said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, who with a Republican colleague, Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and Senators John McCain and Russell D. Feingold, has been a leader in pressing to overhaul campaign finance and ethics rules. "Lobbying is part of our system, but there is a set of ethical standards and rules that ought to be followed."
Together with Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Mr. Feingold, Mr. Meehan has introduced legislation that would, among other things, require lobbyists to file quarterly financial disclosures, instead of semiannual ones and to disclose just whom in the government they lobbied. Former members of Congress would also not be able to lobby their colleagues for two years, as opposed to the current one year. Members would be required to submit detailed itineraries and descriptions of expenses for privately sponsored travel.
Mr. Gingrich has offered more ideas. He would allow unlimited fund-raising in members' states or districts, but bar fund-raising within the District of Columbia, and would require that all contacts between lobbyists and elected and appointed officials be posted weekly on the Internet. And he would shrink a government that has only grown further with post Sept. 11, 2001, spending.
"There is $2.6 trillion spent in Washington, with the authority to regulate everything in your life," he said. "Guess what? People will spend unheard-of amounts of money to influence that. The underlying problems are big government and big money."
Of course, the record suggests that for every loophole any new law might close, lobbyists will find a way to open another. The ban on so-called "soft money" contributions to political parties led to the rise of new special-interest spending groups, for example. Entrenched industries - and entrenched incumbents of both parties - can be expected to resist change that would threaten the way they know how to do business.
For their part, some lobbyists hope legislators intent on reform resist painting with too broad a brush.
"A lot of what we do is an enormous educational effort, to avoid what we consider even well-meaning but wrong-headed legislation," said Joseph Tasker, senior vice president for government affairs of the Information Technology Association of America, which represents companies like I.B.M. and Microsoft, on issues including privacy, piracy and Internet security.
"Congressmen don't know things; they're not experts in technology," he said. "In the mid-1990's, we were meeting with a Congressman about high-definition TV standards and we were talking about pixels and so on, and he said, 'Fellas, look, I'm trying to stay with you here, but one of the first times I ever took a ride on an airplane was when I came to Washington to take my seat and I remember looking out the window and I thought part of the wing was falling off when we landed, because the flaps came up.' "
And, this being Washington, even the best-intentioned efforts to stick to the rules can lead to overreaching silliness.
In 2004, David McKean, a veteran Senate aide, published a critically praised book on Thomas "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran, perhaps the most successful Washington lobbyist of the 20th century. But the Senate ethics committee advised him not to disclose on the dust jacket the name of the senator he worked for, John Kerry, lest he be seen as using his position for commercial gain.
The restriction hampered his ability to promote his book. Indeed, when a Washington bookstore inadvertently identified Mr. McKean's position in an advertisement, he had to cancel an appearance there. A very small victory, one would guess, for the capital's reputation.
Todd S. Purdum, a former reporter for The New York Times, is national editor of Vanity Fair.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/weekinreview/08purdum.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1136819375-sAlMXsQBYTzUkAfFYKRlWQ
Posted at 10:12 am by R7fel
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Sunday, January 08, 2006
Pope Attacks 'Culture of Death'
Sunday, January 8, 2006; Posted: 10:53 a.m. EST (15:53 GMT)
The pope baptizes a child in the Sistine Chapel Sunday.
The pontiff, abandoning his prepared sermon, compared the wild excesses of the ancient Roman empire to 21st century society and urged people to rediscover their faith.
"In our times we need to say 'no' to the largely dominant culture of death," Benedict said during his improvised homily in the frescoed Sistine Chapel where he was elected pope last April.
"(There is) an anti-culture demonstrated by the flight to drugs, by the flight from reality, by illusions, by false happiness ... displayed in sexuality which has become pure pleasure devoid of responsibility," he added.
Benedict did not spell out what he meant by a "culture of death", but the phrase was a rallying cry of his predecessor John Paul who regularly used the term to define abortion and artificial birth control.
With Michelangelo's dramatic depiction of the Last Judgment as a backdrop, Benedict attacked the "thing-infliction of mankind", suggesting that people had become little more than objects to be traded, picked up and discarded at will.
He singled out ancient Rome's Colosseum amphitheatre and the gardens of the emperor Nero, where Christians were once martyred, as a "real perversion of joy and a perversion of the sense of life."
"The anti-culture of death was a love of lies and of deceit. It was an abuse of the body as a commodity and as a product. Even in our times there is this culture and we must say 'No' to it," he said.
It was the first time since he became pope that Benedict has ignored the prepared text of his homily, sent to the media beforehand, and instead spoken at length off the cuff.
The official speech focused on the significance of baptism, which marks the admission of a person into the community of Christians.
Benedict was following in John Paul's footsteps by performing baptisms in the Sistine Chapel on the day when Roman Catholics remember Christ's own baptism in the river Jordan.
"This is a 'yes' to Christ, a 'yes' to the victors of death, a 'yes' to life," Benedict said before carefully pouring water on the heads of the babies - 5 girls and 5 boys.
John Paul baptized almost 1,400 infants during his 26-year reign, but was forced to miss the Sistine Chapel ceremony in the last two years of his pontificate because of ill-health.
Posted at 12:17 pm by R7fel
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Saturday, January 07, 2006
Lou Rawls, The Voice Wrapped In Silk
By Wil Haygood Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 7, 2006; Page C01
They were the Pilgrim Travelers and they were roaming the countryside in the 1950s singing their gospel. Black men in a time of segregation.
A day would unfold like this: A gospel fest in the afternoon, then dinner -- smothered chicken, collard greens, cornbread, maybe some sweet potato pie, whatever a kind host set on the table -- then back on the road. Jesse Whitaker was one of the Pilgrim Travelers, and so was the young Lou Rawls. Whitaker and the others always tried to upset Rawls by playing jokes, by ribbing him -- they looked on him as just a youngster. "We teased him a lot," Whitaker, 85 and the last surviving member of the Travelers, recalled yesterday from his home in Missouri. "But he was slow to anger."
If ever there was a cool-cool singer, it was Lou Rawls, who died yesterday at the age of 72 in California of brain and lung cancer. Rawls's recording career stretched across genres, covering pop, gospel, blues and jazz. "Lou had a big, strong voice," Whitaker says. "He could go up or down, whatever you needed in a song."
Rawls, raised poor in Chicago, cut his teeth in the world of gospel. There'd be church ladies inside those brick Chicago churches, patting young men on their heads, young men who sang so pretty, who hummed so fervently. Rawls was just one Chicago youth, Sam Cooke was another. Where other young men may have had different pursuits -- sports, the nightlife, dreams of teaching in black colleges -- Rawls and his ilk were in basements, singing "Jesus Met the Woman at the Well."
There seemed no better training ground for singers than gospel music, that world with its own rules -- natural-born singers believing in themselves, hungry for management and a road out of poverty. And the really good ones knew they'd be venturing away from the tent of gospel, sooner or later.
"During those days, gospel singers would drive 1,000 miles to make just $200. And then they'd spend that among themselves," says Bobby Womack, a longtime Rawls acquaintance, talking yesterday by phone from his California office.
Womack says he believes that Rawls had no problem walking the road from gospel to pop. "He believed in God. So I believe Lou said, 'I love singing so much, let me make a living doing it.' He knew it was hard to make a living in gospel."
Rawls and Cooke -- who himself went on to rhythm and blues fame before being shot dead by a motel employee in 1964 -- ventured out to heady Los Angeles together in the late 1950s. They played small nightclubs and lent each other dollar bills.
"Lou had both ambition and curiosity to explore different areas," says Peter Guralnick, who befriended Rawls while researching his recently published biography, "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke."
Guralnick goes on: "Rawls marked off a territory of his own that was a takeoff from his gospel roots that had a sophisticated, uptown feel. He synthesized all these different elements from his upbringing -- blues, jazz, gospel."
The hits began in the 1960s with "Tobacco Road" and "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing" and "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)."
Rawls's singing style was masculine and confident. He looked up to Arthur Prysock, to Billy Eckstine, to Percy Mayfield. "He was an old-school singer," says Billy Vera, who produced or co-produced four of Rawls's albums, including the much-praised "Rawls Sings Sinatra." "He didn't write songs like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles. You just gave him material that fit that wonderful voice. He was a singer rather than an auteur."
For all their gifts, Prysock and Eckstine were singing in smaller venues by the 1970s. Lodge halls offered a paycheck different from the Hollywood Bowl. Jazz singers had to scuffle.
Rawls, always savvy in the marketing of his career, told David Brokaw -- his publicist and later manager -- that he was going to call legendary songwriters Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. They were revered for their "sound of Philly soul" -- gritty and sweet tunes that were the rage of inner-city America from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s and featured, among others, Billy Paul and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. "He had imagination," Brokaw says of Rawls.
Rawls's Gamble & Huff hits -- "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine," "Groovy People" -- were huge.
A whole generation that had become accustomed to lounge singer Lou Rawls had lost him to the disco era. "Lou had this innocent ego," Brokaw says. "Not arrogance. He was having fun in a kind of cocky way. These Gamble & Huff songs opened things up for him."
Rawls was offered $15,000, Brokaw says, to do a voice-over commercial for Budweiser. The commercial was a hit. Rawls wasn't satisfied. "He said, 'How do we make this bigger?' " Brokaw says.
Rawls proposed inviting Busch wholesalers and distributors to his shows. He'd chat with them backstage. "He'd take pictures. We got to know everybody," Brokaw says.
Rawls befriended beer magnate August Busch III. "August really loved Lou," Brokaw says.
Rawls also came up with an idea for a college fundraiser for the United Negro College Fund. He told Brokaw to call Busch, and Busch came aboard. Rawls eventually helped raise more than $200 million by hosting the annual event.
There were occasional acting gigs, more albums later in life. He talked to friends about his life, which he thought lucky: an Army paratrooper who was never hurt, survivor of an awful car accident (Sam Cooke also was in the car), a singer who escaped the harsh pavement of Chicago.
Last November, Lou Rawls was invited to a celebratory event in Cleveland, honoring Cooke at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was ailing, and there were many who believed he wouldn't make it. But there he was, the kid who used to have to tie string on the door of the old Oldsmobile to keep it from flying open when Jesse Whitaker was at the wheel during those true and lovely and struggling days of gospel traveling.
At the event, Lou Rawls sang "Jesus Be a Fence Around Me."
People cried.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/06/AR2006010601794.html?referrer=email
Posted at 11:53 am by R7fel
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| Hugh Thompson Jr., left, shakes hands with Lawrence Colburn at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in... |
Saturday, January 7, 2006 5:41 AM EST
The Associated Press
By JESSICA BUJOL
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.
Thompson, whose role in the 1968 massacre did not become widely known until decades later, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Alexandria, hospital spokesman Jay DeWorth said.
Trent Angers, Thompson's biographer and family friend, said Thompson died of cancer.
"These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them," Thompson recalled in a 1998 Associated Press interview.
Early in the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson, door-gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta came upon U.S. ground troops killing Vietnamese civilians in and around the village of My Lai.
They landed the helicopter in the line of fire between American troops and fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pointed their own guns at the U.S. soldiers to prevent more killings.
Colburn and Andreotta had provided cover for Thompson as he went forward to confront the leader of the U.S. forces. Thompson later coaxed civilians out of a bunker so they could be evacuated, and then landed his helicopter again to pick up a wounded child they transported to a hospital. Their efforts led to the cease-fire order at My Lai.
In 1998, the Army honored the three men with the prestigious Soldier's Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving conflict with an enemy. It was a posthumous award for Andreotta, who had been killed in battle three weeks after My Lai.
"It was the ability to do the right thing even at the risk of their personal safety that guided these soldiers to do what they did," Army Maj. Gen. Michael Ackerman said at the 1998 ceremony. The three "set the standard for all soldiers to follow."
Lt. William L. Calley, a platoon leader, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the killings, but served just three years under house arrest when then-President Nixon reduced his sentence.
Author Seymour Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his expose of the massacre in 1969 while working as a freelance journalist. The massacre became one of the pivotal events as opposition to the war was growing in the United States.
Hersh called Thompson "one of the good guys."
"You can't imagine what courage it took to do what he did," Hersh said.
Although Thompson's story was a significant part of Hersh's reports, and Thompson testified before Congress, his role in ending My Lai wasn't widely known until the late 1980s, when David Egan, a professor emeritus at Clemson University, saw an interview in a documentary and launched a letter-writing campaign that eventually led to the awarding of the medals in 1998.
"He was the guy who by his heroic actions gave a morality and dignity to the American military effort," Tulane history professor Douglas Brinkley said.
For years Thompson suffered snubs and worse from those who considered him unpatriotic. He recalled a congressman angrily saying that Thompson himself was the only serviceman who should be punished because of My Lai.
As the years passed, Thompson became an example for future generations of soldiers, said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the U.S. Military Academy's behavioral sciences and leadership department. Thompson went to West Point once a year to give a lecture on his experience, Kolditz said.
"There are so many people today walking around alive because of him, not only in Vietnam, but people who kept their units under control under other circumstances because they had heard his story. We may never know just how many lives he saved." |
Posted at 10:03 am by R7fel
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Friday, January 06, 2006
'El Gringo' Rodriguez Disses His Fellow Dominicans, AGAIN!!!
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Sources: A-Rod Likely to Play for U.S.
By Barry M. Bloom / MLB.com |
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Team USA has been told by credible sources that Alex Rodriguez will probably play for the Americans during the upcoming World Baseball Classic, but the team is awaiting confirmation before rosters have to be set later this month, said one of USA Baseball's top officials.
"We've heard through unofficial channels that A-Rod will be playing for us," Bob Watson, Major League Baseball's vice president of on-field baseball operations and USA Baseball's general manager, told MLB.com on Thursday. "Now we're waiting for confirmation from A-Rod's camp, the players association and the Yankees."
Sixty-man rosters for each of the 16 teams competing in the tournament must be submitted on Jan. 17. At that point, drug testing under international rules begins and any player not already committed at that point can't participate in the tournament. The games are currently scheduled from March 3-20 in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Japan. It will be the first international baseball tournament in history to include Major League players.
Watson said Team USA intends to announce its complete roster on Jan. 17. Team Canada said on Wednesday that its roster will be announced on Jan. 14 at a press conference in Toronto.
Reports have been swirling for days that Rodriguez, the reigning American League Most Valuable Player, has changed his mind and will commit to participating in the event for the U.S. Rodriguez, the Yankees' third baseman, said recently in a published report that he would rather not play than offend either his native Dominican Republic or the U.S.
Rodriguez spent the early years of his life living in the Dominican, but was raised in Miami where he went to high school.
Scott Boras, A-Rod's agent, told The New York Times that his client had agreed to discuss the issue with baseball officials.
"Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association have requested that he talk with them," Boras said in Thursday's editions. "And that is something he's going to do in the next week or so."
Rodriguez has been on vacation with his family since the holidays, and told the New York Post in Thursday's editions that he would not be back in New York until Jan. 29.
The decision must obviously be made long before that.
"If you look at the history of this, A-Rod has already changed his mind at few times," Watson said. "When we rolled out the names at the Winter Meetings back in December, you'll remember we said at the time that he would play, but he hadn't made up his mind between the Dominican and the U.S. Then he said he wouldn't play so he wouldn't offend either country, and now we've heard he'll be playing for us."
In December, A-Rod said during a radio interview that he was leaning toward playing for the Dominican Republic, but told the Post just days later that he would skip the event altogether.
"After thoughtful deliberations with my family, I am announcing my decision to withdraw from the World Baseball Classic," Rodriguez told the paper. "When faced with the decision to choose between my country, the United States of America, and my Dominican heritage, I decided I will not dishonor either."
Buck Martinez, the manager of Team USA, said he has had no direct contact with Rodriguez and he has not been informed officially of any change in his status.
"I've heard the same thing everybody else is hearing, but nothing firm," Martinez said when reached by telephone on Wednesday. "I think this is a tougher decision for him than anyone really imagines."
The U.S. team already has commitments from such stars as Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, Roger Clemens, who is a free agent, Ken Griffey Jr. of the Cincinnati Reds, Dontrelle Willis of the Florida Marlins and Derek Jeter of the Yankees.
The only other Yankees currently planning to play in the WBC are Johnny Damon for Team USA, Robinson Cano for the Dominican and Bernie Williams for Puerto Rico. Hideki Matsui recently told the Japanese team that he would not be playing for them in the tournament.
The Yankees were the only one of the 30 Major League clubs that abstained from voting for the tournament when the owners passed it with a 29-0 vote during a meeting at Philadelphia in August 2004, Watson said.
Barry M. Bloom is a national reporter for MLB.com. Mark Feinsand contributed to this story. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.
Posted at 03:43 am by R7fel
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Monday, January 02, 2006
Do They Think It’s Worth It?
by Laurence M. Vance
by Laurence M. Vance
The work in Iraq is difficult and it is dangerous. Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country.
~ President Bush
The president uttered these words before a friendly audience at Fort Bragg, North Carolina – not in front of a crowd of wounded U.S. troops. The official number of these troops is 16,155, although unofficial estimates range up to almost 50,000. It is easy for Mr. Bush and supporters of this war, both inside and outside the government, to say that it’s worth it. But perhaps we should get another opinion. Why don’t we ask the wounded U.S. troops if they think it’s worth it?
This twenty-year-old young man was trapped for twenty minutes in a fiery ammunition truck in Iraq. He was left with disfiguring burns on his face, head, arms and legs. This is what he looks like after more than two dozen surgeries. Does he think it’s worth it? For the rest of his life kids will laugh at him and call him Frankenstein or a freak. For the rest of his life he will have to look at his face in the mirror in the morning. For the rest of his life people will silently stare at him – thinking that he reminds them of someone they saw in a horror movie. Finding a girlfriend or even a job will be a difficult thing. Does he think the war in Iraq is worth the price of his face?
This soldier lost his left hand and will probably lose his right arm. Does he think it’s worth it? For the rest of his life he will not be able to open a door or a can of coke. For the rest of his life he will not be able to go to the bathroom by himself. For the rest of his life he will not be able to turn on the radio or type an e-mail. Picking up his kids, if he ever has any, will be very difficult. Does he think the war in Iraq is worth the price of his hands?
This soldier will have to have his feet removed. Does he think it’s worth it? For the rest of his life he will not be able to walk or drive a car. For the rest of his life he will not be able to participate in any sports. For the rest of his life he will be confined to a wheelchair. Running and playing with his kids, if he ever has any, will be impossible. Does he think the war in Iraq is worth the price of his feet?
The Pentagon frowns on photographers and the press from seeing, watching, or taking photos of wounded U.S. troops arriving from Iraq via Ramstein Air Base in Germany and being transported to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Medical Center. What if the American people were allowed to see thousands of pictures of wounded U.S. troops instead of just the three I have included here? What if they could see the grieving parents, spouses, children, and friends that God sees? How quickly public opinion would be turned against Bush and his war!
A month before Bush made his Fort Bragg speech in which he said the Iraq war was worth it, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll recorded that 57 percent of those polled said they did not believe it was worth going to war in Iraq, versus 41 percent who said it was. As more and more Americans conclude that the war is not worth it, both in lives and in dollars, Bush’s approval rating goes down further and further. We can only hope that these numbers continue on their upward and downward paths until the former number reaches one hundred and the latter number reaches zero. But until that day comes, how many more faceless, handless, and feetless soldiers will have to suffer?
There is a group of U.S. troops that we can’t ask about the war being worth it. They died for a lie. They will never enjoy the finer things in life like eating a good meal, walking on the beach, visiting a museum, or relaxing under a shade tree. They will no longer know the love of a parent, a spouse, or a child. They will never have any more children and will never see their grandchildren. They will never buy a house, retire from a job, or take a vacation. They’re dead Mr. Bush. Do they think the war in Iraq was worth their life?
 The president now acknowledges that he is "responsible for the decision to go into Iraq." This means that he is responsible for the scared faces, the missing hands, the missing feet, and the coffins of dead Americans. Will there be any repercussions? Perhaps not in this life, but certainly at the Judgment.
January 2, 2006
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] is a freelance writer and an adjunct instructor in accounting and economics at Pensacola Junior College in Pensacola, FL. He is also the director of the Francis Wayland Institute. His new book is Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
Laurence M. Vance Archives
Posted at 03:07 pm by R7fel
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A member of a certain church, who previously had been attending services regularly, stopped going.??After a few weeks, the pastor decided to visit him.
It was a chilly evening. The pastor found the man at home alone, sitting before a blazing fire.??Guessing the reason for his pastor's visit, the man welcomed him, led him to a comfortable chair near the fireplace and?waited.
The pastor made himself at home but said nothing.??In the grave silence,?he contemplated the dance of the flames around the burning logs.??After some minutes, the pastor took the fire tongs, carefully picked up a brightly burning ember and placed it to one side of the hearth all alone.??Then he sat back in his chair, still silent.??The host watched all this in quiet contemplation.??As the one lone ember's flame flickered and diminished, there was a momentary glow and then its fire was no more.??Soon it was cold and dead.
Not a word had been spoken since the initial greeting.??The Pastor glanced at his watch and realized it was time to leave.??He slowly stood up, picked up the cold, dead ember and placed it back in the middle of the fire. Immediately it began to glow, once more with the light and warmth of the burning coals around it.
As the pastor reached the door to leave, his host said with a tear running down his cheek, "Thank you so much for your visit and especially for the fiery sermon.??I shall be back in church next Sunday."
We live in a world today, which tries to say too much with too little.??Consequently, few listen.?? Sometimes the best sermons are the ones left unspoken.
If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything!
This is an amazing picture! The "longer" you look at this picture, the "more" you see.
Look at the lines the artist used to draw this picture of Christ.. It is of scenes from Christ's life. I have not seen anything like this and wanted you to see it, too. |
Posted at 02:19 pm by R7fel
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Friday, December 30, 2005
London Calling, With Luck, Lust
and Ambition
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: December 28, 2005
Because Woody Allen's early films are about as funny as any ever made, it is often assumed that his temperament is essentially comic, which leads to all manner of disappointment and misunderstanding. Now and then, Mr. Allen tries to clear up the confusion, insisting, sometimes elegantly and sometimes a little too baldly, that his view of the world is essentially nihilistic. He has announced, in movie after movie, an absolute lack of faith in any ordering moral principle in the universe - and still, people think he's joking.
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DreamWorks
Cipher or sociopath? Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as a former tennis pro with Scarlett Johansson as an American actress in "Match Point."
In "Match Point," his most satisfying film in more than a decade, the director once again brings the bad news, delivering it with a light, sure touch. This is a Champagne cocktail laced with strychnine. You would have to go back to the heady, amoral heyday of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder to find cynicism so deftly turned into superior entertainment. At the very beginning, Mr. Allen's hero, a young tennis player recently retired from the professional tour, explains that the role of luck in human affairs is often underestimated. Later, the harsh implications of this idea will be evident, but at first it seems as whimsical as what Fred Astaire said in "The Gay Divorcée": that "chance is the fool's name for fate."
Mr. Allen's accomplishment here is to fool his audience, or at least to misdirect us, with a tale whose gilded surface disguises the darkness beneath. His guile - another name for it is art - keeps the story moving with the fleet momentum of a well-made play. Comparisons to "Crimes and Misdemeanors" are inevitable, since the themes and some elements of plot are similar, but the philosophical baggage in "Match Point" is more tightly and discreetly packed. There are few occasions for speech-making, and none of the desperate, self-conscious one-liners that have become, in Mr. Allen's recent movies, more tics than shtick. Nor is there an obvious surrogate for the director among the youthful, mostly British and altogether splendid cast. If you walked in after the opening titles, it might take you a while to guess who made this picture.
After a while you would, of course. The usual literary signposts are in place: surely no other screenwriter could write a line like "darling, have you seen my copy of Strindberg?" or send his protagonist to bed with a paperback Dostoyevsky. But while a whiff of Russian fatalism lingers in the air - and more than a whiff of Strindbergian misogyny - these don't seem to be the most salient influences. The film's setting is modified Henry James (wealthy London, with a few social and cultural outsiders buzzing around the hives of privilege); the conceit owes something to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books; and the narrative engine is pure Theodore Dreiser - hunger, lust, ambition, greed.
Not that the tennis player, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), seems at first to be consumed by such appetites. An Irishman of modest background, he takes a job at an exclusive London club, helping its rich members polish their ground strokes. He seems both easygoing and slightly ill at ease, ingratiating and diffident. Before long, he befriends Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), the amiable, unserious heir to a business fortune, who invites Chris to the family box at the opera. From there, it is a short trip to an affair with Tom's sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), a job in the family firm and the intermittently awkward but materially rewarding position of son-in-law to parents played by Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton.
When "Match Point" was shown in Cannes last spring, some British critics objected that its depiction of London was inaccurate, a demurral that New Yorkers, accustomed to visiting Mr. Allen's fantasy Manhattan, could only greet with weary shrugs and sighs. Uprooting a script originally set in the Hamptons and repotting it in British soil has refreshed and sharpened the story, which depends not on insight into a particular social situation, but rather on a general theory of human behavior. London is Manhattan seen through a glass, brightly: Tate Modern stands in for the Museum of Modern Art; Covent Garden takes the place of Lincoln Center. As for the breathtaking South Bank loft into which Chris and Chloe move, it will satisfy the lust for high-end real estate that has kept the diehards in their seats during Mr. Allen's long creative malaise.
In this case, though, what happens in the well-appointed rooms and fashionable restaurants is more interesting than the architecture or the décor. Mr. Rhys-Meyers has an unusual ability to keep the audience guessing, to draw us into sympathetic concord even as we're trying to figure him out. Is he a cipher or a sociopath? A careful social climber or a reckless rake? The first clue that he may be something other than a mild, well-mannered sidekick comes when Chris meets Tom's fiancée, an American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), in a scene that raises the movie's temperature from a polite simmer to a full sexual boil. (The scene also quietly acknowledges a debt to "A Place in the Sun," George Stevens's adaptation of Dreiser's "American Tragedy." The parallels don't stop there. Mr. Rhys-Meyers's hollow-cheeked watchfulness recalls Montgomery Clift. Which makes Ms. Johansson either the next Elizabeth Taylor or the new Shelley Winters. Hmm).
What passes between Chris and Nola is not only desire, but also recognition, which makes their connection especially volatile. As their affair advances, Ms. Johansson and Mr. Rhys-Meyers manage some of the best acting seen in a Woody Allen movie in a long time, escaping the archness and emotional disconnection that his writing often imposes. It is possible to identify with both of them - and to feel an empathetic twinge as they are ensnared in the consequences of their own heedlessness - without entirely liking either one.
But it is the film's brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen's bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.
"Match Point" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some steamy (though not explicit) sex scenes and a few moments of shocking violence.
Match Point
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Woody Allen; director of photography, Remi Adefarasin; edited by Alisa Lepselter; production designer, Jim Clay; produced by Letty Aronson, Gareth Wiley and Lucy Darwin; released by DreamWorks Pictures. Running time: 124 minutes.
WITH: Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (Chris Wilton), Scarlett Johansson (Nola Rice), Emily Mortimer (Chloe Wilton), Matthew Goode (Tom Hewett), Brian Cox (Alec Hewett) and Penelope Wilton (Eleanor Hewett).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/movies/28matc.html?th&emc=th
Posted at 09:53 am by R7fel
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