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John Puhiatau Pule
b. 1962, Liku, Niue
Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand
John Pule was born in the village of Liku in Niue, and immigrated to New Zealand at the age of two in 1964. Pule first visited Niue as an adult in 1991 and has since returned a number of times. This triggered a strong interest in the history and mythology of Niue which continues to inform his work to this day. Pule is an accomplished painter, printmaker, poet and writer. His work is highly inventive, particularly in its adaptation of traditional Pacific art forms. It is also challenging and provocative in content.
Much of Pule's early painting focused on the legacy of Christianity and colonialism in the South Pacific, as well as his personal perceptions of romantic and sexual love. Pule depicts the introduction of Christianity into the Pacific as a tragedy and his frequent inclusion of grief stricken figures represent Pacific Island people grieving from multiple psychological wounds. Images of Christ reflect similar ideas, "I depicted him as a sickly, unhealthy person, being carried by Islanders, and also hanging loosely on the crucifix . . . he's up there for ages . . . no one wants to bring him down. No one wants to have anything to do with darkness. It's a dark subject, even though Jesus is supposed to generate light." (John Pule, artist statement, 2001)
Following in the lead of artists such as Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere, Pule later began to include his poetry on painted canvas. These were political works, written in both English and the Niuean language, allowing Pule to further express his ideas and visual triggers. "They hemmed in and held down a bristling alphabet brittle to the point of fracture." (David Eggleton, 'John Pule: And the Psychic Territory of Polynesia', Art New Zealand, 2001, p.63)
Pule is perhaps most well known for his use of the aesthetics of Hiapo (Niuean tapa cloth). Hiapo is cloth beaten out of paper mulberry bark, felted into rectangular sheets and then painted freehand following a loose grid-like pattern. Traditionally Hiapo imagery depicted narratives of the journeys and history of Niuean people. Pule extends this narrative into contemporary times, expressing his personal experiences as a Niuean living in New Zealand. Pule also contemporises this traditional art form by substituting barkcloth for canvas and adapting its layout, forms and palette of ochres and earthy reds. In 2005 Pule published the book Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth in collaboration with Australian anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, documenting almost all painted Hiapo they located in their ten years of research across the Pacific, North America and Europe.
Over a period of time Pule has developed his own lexicon of geometric motifs and figurative elements. Some of the figures in his work come directly from the Niuean mythology and others from his imagination. They include hybrid creatures incorporating birds, lizards, monsters and humans. Human figures also enact performances that are explicitly sexual, such as the "missionary position", a provocative suggestion of the continuing domination of the church. At other times they enact images of tears or death, suggesting the dislocation, pain and loss caused by migration and amalgamation with Western beliefs and society. "His paintings are miniature museums of ethnology. . . . Now and again, there is rupture and erasure, rubbing, smearing, blotting, but all done with delicacy and finesse-with ironic control." (David Eggleton, ibid. p.65).
Land and identity are key concepts in Pule's work. He paints works that mourn a loss of cultural identity and sense of permanence for both himself and the wider Pacific community. In recent years Pule's style has changed significantly - substituting the Hiapo grid structure and unstretched canvases, for stretched canvas supports, populated by blood-red cloud shapes that carry pockets of visual narrative. Traditional subjects of the hiapo such as fish and landscapes are placed next to ink sketches of aeroplanes (the modern vehicle of migration), churches, St John's ambulances and skulls.
Land is so desirable that it is what many of the figures in Pule's work search for - one man holds a landscape tauntingly out of another's reach, while the temporal and translucent qualities of the drifting island-clouds allude to the lack of permanence. A reoccurring motif is the vines of the ti mata alea (Cordyline tree), which in Niuean culture is believed to be the plant from which human life originated. By depicting this vine motif Pule represents the origin of his people, their foundation. This imagery holds great meaning for Pule, whose family brought native Niuean plants with them to New Zealand to establish in the soil of their new home, a common practice of Pacific cultures. It is this mixing of soils, this attempt to find anchorage, which is visible in his paintings. Pule is also a prolific printmaker - working in lithography, etchings and wood-cuts. Text is often an important consideration in these works that can be both powerful and intimate.
Since 1991 Pule has exhibited extensively throughout New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific and Asia. Pule has held residencies at the Cultural Museum in Rarotonga in 2003, and at Galerie Römerapotheke in Zurich in 2005. Pule's work has been represented in two Asia-Pacific Triennials at the Queensland Art Gallery, and in 2004 he exhibited as part Paradise Now! at the Asia Society in New York - the largest exhibition of New Zealand art held since Te Maori in 1984. A published author, Pule has completed the three novels, including The Shark That Ate the Sun (1992) and Burn My Head in Heaven (1998), as well as being a published poet. In 2000 Pule was the University of Auckland Literary Fellow and in 2002 took up a distinguished-visiting writer residence in the department of English at the University of Hawaii. In 2004 he was honoured with the prestigious Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. In 2010 City Gallery Wellington hosted Hauaga a travelling survey exhibition of his career to date.
To view available works by John Pule please click here.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2012The Blue Plateau of Polynesian Memory, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
Dark Saints, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
I was born with wings in my hands, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch
2011 John Pule: A Survey, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
2010 Hauaga, City Gallery, Wellington
2009 Nothing Must Remain, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
2007 Recent paintings, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
2006 Another Green World, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
2005 John Pule, Galerie Römerapotheke, Zurich, Switzerland
2004 Niniko Lalolagi - Dazzling Worlds, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
2003 Recent Painting, Gow Langsford Gallery, Sydney, Australia
The Wind reminds me how palpable and mythical my life was becoming, Bartley Nees Gallery, Wellington
New Lithographs and Etchings, Paper Graphica Gallery, Christchurch
2002 I had a mind as invisible as light, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
2001 A Sequence of Lyrics Dedicated to the Birth of a Lighthouse, Bartley Nees Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand
2000 Fakaue Kia Koe Maui Pomare (Thanks to you Maui Pomare), Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
People Get Ready, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand
1999 New Works Studio, Wellington, New Zealand
1998-99 Savage Island, Djamu gallery, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia
1998 Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
1996 Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
1995 Malika, New Works Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand
1993 Woodcuts/Lithographs, Lane Gallery, New Zealand
Kokohonea, Judith Anderson Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
1992 Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
1991 Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, New Zealand
Selected Group Exhibitions
2011-2013 Kermadec: Nine Artists explore the South Pacific, Tauranga Art Gallery, Tauranga; Wellington City Art Gallery, Wellington; Voyager New Zealand Maritime Museum, Auckland; New Zealand High COmission, Tonga; Pew Foundation, Easter Island - Rapa Nui; Museo de Atre Contemporaneo, Santiago, Chile
2012 Home AKL, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland
Melbourne Art Fair, Gow Langsford Gallery, Stand D08
2011 Oceania, Wellington Public Art Gallery, Wellington
21st Century: Art in the first Decade, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
2009 John Leech and Gow Langsford Galleries Spring Catalogue Exhibition 2009, Gow Langsford Gallery
2008 Clock the Ton, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
2007 Turbulence: The Third Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland
News From Islands, Campbelltown Gallery, Sydney
Dateline: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin
2006 The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Tribute, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland
2005 FREIZE, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
Scope Miami, Miami
Group Exhibition, Te Tuhi the Mark, Pakuranga, Auckland
Group Exhibition, Corbans Art Gallery, Henderson, Auckland
Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland
Group Exhibition, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch
Future Tense: Security and Human Rights, Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane
John Pule, Sofia Tekela-Smith and John Walsh, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney
2004 Paradise Now! Asia Society Museum, New York
South Pacific Arts Festival, Palau
2003 You are my sunshine, Bartley Nees Gallery, Wellington
Three Significant Paintings and two vintage photographs, Bartley Nees Gallery, Wellington
Iki, and thanks for the ika, Lithuania/Cook Islands/New Zealand
2003 Na, Jonothan Smart Gallery, Christchurch
2001 - 2003 Sea Knowing and Island Looking: Contemporary New Zealand and Pacific Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand
2002 2002: The Year in Art, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Melbourne Art Fair 2002, Gow Langsford Galleries stand, Melbourne, Australia
Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
2001 Catalogue Exhibition, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
Screens, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland
2000 South Pacific Arts Festival, New Caledonia
1999 Wonderlands: views of life at the end of the century, at the end of the world, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth
In other words, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington
Gow Langsford Gallery at Span Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
1998 Wake Naima,Creating Together, Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Noumea
Picturing History, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch
Australian Contemporary Art Fair 6, Melbourne, Australia, c/- Gow Langsford Gallery
1997 Group Show, University of the South Pacific, Fiji
Joint Show, New Zealand Ambassadors' Residence
Vibes: Polynesian Island Group Show, Govett Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand
1996 Asia Pacific Triennale, Brisbane
Seventh Festival of the South Pacific, Samoa
Re- Imaging the Pacific, Australia National University, Canberra
1995 Kwangju Biennale, Korea
Island to Island, Cheju, Korea
Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa
Bottled Ocean: Contemporary Polynesian Artists, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand
1992 Contemporary Niue Artists, Fisher Gallery, Pakuranga
1991 Te Moemoea no lotefa, Traditional and Contemporary Pacific Island Artists. (National Tour)
Lithographs and Woodcuts Selected Exhibitions
1996 Oil and Water, Lane Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
1995 Salamander Gallery, Arts Centre, Christchurch, New Zealand
Marian McGuire Lithoprints Ltd, Christchurch, New Zealand
1993 Series/1995 Series CSA, Christchurch, New Zealand
1994 Pacific Island Group Show, ASA, Ponsonby, New Zealand
1993 Lime Works, Christchurch, New Zealand
Salamander Gallery, Arts Center, Christchurch, New Zealand
Taking Stock of the 90's, Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand
Poetry Tours
2003 The Second International Indigenous Authors Celebration Tour, Brisbane, Sydney, Katoomba, Alice Springs, Auckland
1986 North Island Group Tour
1985 North Island Group Tour
1984 South Island Group Tour
1983 New Zealand Tour with David Eggleton as Two South Auckland Polynesian Poets
1982 New Zealand Tour with Paul Luker
Selected Performance/ Poetry
2005 Strata, Auckland University
Poet's Corner on "Artsville" (director, Ian Mune)
2003 Honouring Words 2003 Australia, Indigenous writers tour
1998 Ocean & Others Symposium, Museum of Sydney, Sydney
Raw Fishes, The Physics Room, Christchurch
The Bond of Time, 2nd edition, PWF, University of the South Pacific
1996 Re- Imaging the Pacific, Australia National University, Canberra
1995 The Post Colonial Body, University of Waikato
Bodies in Question Symposium, University of Auckland
Interdigitate, The Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre
1992 Pacific Impressions, Galaxy Theatre, Auckland
1991 The Grand Opening, Galaxy Theatre, Auckland
1988 The Last Blah Performance, St John Church Hall, Parnell
1985 The World and I, Poets Palace, France Street, Auckland
1984 The Human Cry, Knox Community Hall, Parnell
Twang and Cadence, Kingsland Community Hall, Auckland
1983 Maori Writers Read, The Depot
Workshops / Artists Talks
2005 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
2003 Avaurua Arts Society, Rarotonga
Cook Islands Teachers Training College, Rarotonga
Continuing Education, University of Auckland
1994 Pacific Writers Workshop, Tangata Pacifica, TV 2
1993 Voyages with Island Artists from Tonga, Vanuatu, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, Niue, Tahiti, Cook Islands
1992 Pacific Peoples Workshop in Theatre, Drama, Literature
Art Education in Aotearoa
Awards/ Residencies
2012 ONZM (officer of the said Order) for services as an author, poet and painter in the Queens Birthday Honours
2006 Artist in residence, University of the south Pacific, Fiji
2005 Romerapotheke Art Residency, Basel, Switzerland
2004 New Zealand Art Laureate, Arts Foundation of New Zealand
2003 Artist in Residence, Cultural Museum, Rarotonga
2002 Distinguished-Visiting Writer to Department of English at University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu
2000 Writer in Residence, Auckland University (English Department)
1998 Artist in Residence, Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture, USP, Fiji
Artist in Residence, University of Canterbury, Christchurch
1997 Pacific Writers Fellow, University of the South Pacific
1996 Writer in Residence Fellowship, University of Waikato, Hamilton
Selected Publications
2006 Nicholas Thomas, John Puhiatau Pule; Another Green World, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland (Exhibition Catalogue)
2005 John Pule, Galerie Römerapotheke, Zurich, Switzerland (Exhibition Catalogue)
Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth, Otago University Press, Otago (co-author Nicholas Thomas)
2004 Paradise Now!, Asia Society Museum, New York, USA
Kapakiloi Tagata, Pohutakawa Press, Auckland
Virginia Were, "Pacific Narratives", Art News, Spring, 2004, p48-49
New Lithographs and Etchings, Papergraphica, Christchurch
2003 Michael Dunn, New Zealand Painting, A Concise History, AUP, Auckland
Venture: New Zealand Industry Magazine, June 2003
The Contemporary Pacific, A Journal of Pacific Island Affairs, University of Hawai'I Press, Hawai'I
Whetu Moana, ed. A.Wendt, R. Sullivan, R. Whaitiri, Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, AUP, Auckland
2002 John Pule, When you return…, The 4th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2002, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
2001 David Eggleton, "John Pule and the Psychic Territory of Polynesia", Art New Zealand, #99, Winter 2001, p 62-65
2000 Albert L. Refiti & Nicholas Thomas, People get ready, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (catalogue)
Linda Herrick, "Sticking it to God", NZ Listener, October 28, 2000, p50-51
New Worlds, Old Worlds, Art Museum of Missoula, Montana, USA
1999 Elizabeth Caughey and John Gow, Contemporary New Zealand Art 2, David Bateman, 1999, p. 48-51
1998 Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania, Duke University Press, USA
John Pule, Burn My Head in Heaven, Penguin, Auckland
1997 Nicholas Thomas, "Oceans Apart", Asian Art News, May/June, 1997, p67-70
1996 Christina Thompson, Meanjin, University of Melbourne, Australia
Stephen Zepke, Art New Zealand, No.78, Autumn, Bodies in Question Review
United Nations Year Of Tolerance, Social Policy Department, Victoria University, Wellington
1995 Warwick Brown, 100 New Zealand Paintings, Godwit Press
Wendy Vaigro, Art Asia Pacific, October, Volume 2, No. 4 Bottled Ocean
Art New Zealand, No.77, Summer, (Backcover image)
Wendy Vaigro, Art New Zealand, No. 76, Spring, Interdigitate, Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre
Jane Sayle Art New Zealand, No. 75, Winter, Malika
Nicholas Thomas, Art New Zealand, No. 74, Autumn, Bottled Ocean
Nicholas Thomas, Oceanic Art, Thames and Hudson, Sydney
Printout Issue 9, Press Print, Auckland, Autumn
1994 Nicholas Thomas, The Art of John Pule, Art Asia Pacific, Vol1, No. 4
T. Ryan, Narratives of Encounters, Anthropological History of Niue, Auckland University
Trends Design, Vol 6, No 2, Trends Publishing, Auckland
Robert Beckett, New Zealand Home and Building, April/May, Auckland
Mark Cross, Art New Zealand, No. 66, Autumn, The New Hiapo of John Pule
1993 D. Scott, Would a Good Man Die? The Larsen Murder Case, Southern Cross
1992 Jane Griffin, Art New Zealand, No. 64, Spring, Pacific Islands Artists
New Zealand Books, Vol 2, Issue 7, Reviews by Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera
Stamp Magazine, Issue 33, Base Publications, Auckland
1991 Printout Issue 1, Arts/Literature, Printpress, Auckland
Selected Public Collections
Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand
Auckland University, Auckland, New Zealand
Chartwell Trust Collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Fletcher Trust Challenge, Auckland, New Zealand
Government of Niue, Niue
Wallace Trust Collection, Auckland, New Zealand
National Museum of Scotland, Scotland
Manukau City Council, Auckland, New Zealand
Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand
Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
Wellington High Court, Wellington, New Zealand
Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
Pacific Studies Building, University of Auckland


text:
Every hot mess needs a life coach but Lindsay Lohan won the life coach lottery when Oprah offered to life coach the crap out of her AND pay her a whopping $2Million dollars for the opportunity. That's right, the Big O will help Lilo rebuild her tattered shreds of a career and turn it into an 8-part reality show. So much for the OWN Network taking the high road.
Kanye West thinks of himself as the black Larry David. So much so he shot a pilot for HBO showing off his comedy stylings. The pilot was posted on YouTube and if you check it out you'll realize not only is Kanye a narcissistic rapper and general public jerk, he's also painfully unfunny.
Because you probably have better things to do than troll the internet like we do all day, we bring you pictures of Nic Cage as Disney princesses. That is all.
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Summer Institute
Campus & Facilities
Application Guidelines
Audition Music
My Account
Audition Locations
Orientation & Policies
Summer InstituteContact: Alain G. Declert, Program Director
Email: email@example.com
Cell Phone: 979-250-3815
Dates: Sunday June 1 (arrival) – Sunday July 13, 2014 (departure)
The Round Top Festival Institute offers six weeks (no absence is permitted) of intensive training for young talented musicians (born before December 31, 1996) seeking a transition from conservatories and universities to a future professional career. Symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra, chamber music and solo repertoire are included in this concentrated 6-week program.
The Round Top Festival Institute owns its campus (over 200 acres), its venues (a 1,000-seat concert hall and a 160-seat chapel), its practice rooms, its accommodations, its food services and other amenities (swimming pool, jogging trails…) The whole project has been specifically envisioned and realized by renowned concert pianist James Dick, Founder and Artistic Director, to provide the best environment to implement the program.
The Round Top Festival Institute offers to accepted young artists a full scholarship (worth $5,500) for tuition through The James Dick Foundation for the Performing Arts.
The relatively small number of participants (about 95) whose admission is based on auditions and recommendations and the fact that participants and faculty share the same campus, create a collegial atmosphere through which a constant flow of stimulating exchanges enlightens everyone.
Enrollment includes 28 violins, 10 violas, 10 cellos, 6 basses, 4 flutes, 4 oboes, 4 clarinets, 4 bassoons, 5 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, 6 percussions, 2 harps and 4 pianists.
The Round Top Festival Institute is committed to the principle of equal opportunity for all its applicants for admission. For that reason the Round Top Festival Institute does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin or disability in access to its program.
Symphony Orchestra Training
All accepted participants are enrolled in the Texas Festival Orchestra (TFO) and perform every week after daily rehearsals beginning on Monday and culminating on the Saturday evening performance. Rotation is effective according to abilities. Sectionals are conducted by faculty and/or guest conductor on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Schedule of Orchestra Rehearsals:
Monday 3:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Tuesday 3:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Wednesday 3:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Thursday 3:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Friday 3:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Saturday 9:30 am – 12:00 pm (dress rehearsal)
Concertmaster Position
is available to the best violin applicants.
Chamber Orchestra Training
The Texas Festival Chamber Orchestra (TFCO) offers participants who will opt for this training a wide repertoire of works. The TFCO will perform on weeks 2 through 5 (4 performances) on Saturdays at 7:30 pm. Rehearsals on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday (7:30 pm - 10:00 pm.)
Chamber Music Program: Young Artists are enrolled in chamber music groups with their peers and also with faculty members.
Private Lessons (one hour each week) and Master Classes are included in the scholarship.
At the beginning of each week, available teaching times are posted backstage of the concert hall.
Just sign up!
Master classes are scheduled in the Edythe Bates Old chapel.
Piano program
Accepted pianists receive individual lessons weekly and participate in master classes. Throughout the entire six-week term all pianists are coached to participate in solo, duo piano and chamber ensemble concerts, as well as in the orchestral programs whenever a work requires a pianist. Piano students are given varied opportunities to perform in public with their peers (unscheduled performance dates) and/or faculty members (scheduled performance dates.)


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PrivateBancorp Declares Quarterly Cash Dividend
CHICAGO, Aug. 15, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- PrivateBancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ: PVTB) today announced its board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.01 per share for the third quarter 2014 payable on September 30, 2014, to stockholders of record on September 16, 2014. This dividend is unchanged from the prior quarterly dividend of $0.01 per share.
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PrivateBancorp, Inc., through its subsidiaries, delivers customized business and personal financial services to middle-market companies, as well as business owners, executives, entrepreneurs and families in all of the markets and communities it serves. As of June 30, 2014, the Company had 33 offices in 10 states and $14.6 billion in assets. Our website is www.theprivatebank.com.
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text:
-- One of the banners held by PSV Eindhoven fans protesting the installation of free Wi-Fi in Philips Stadium. (Guardian)
|Recent Soccer America Daily A neat free-kick goal from Down Under Sept. 17, 8:33 p.m.
[VIDEO PICK: Golazo] Choreographed free kicks usually don't work out better than a simple shot on ... Charlotte gains Independence as Eagles' successor Sept. 17, 8:15 p.m.
[USL PRO] The Charlotte Independence will take the place of the Charlotte Eagles in USL PRO ... What They're Saying: Clint Dempsey Sept. 17, 8 p.m.
"We talked about trying to win the U.S. Open Cup, Supporters' Shield and MLS Cup. This ... D.C.'s Espindola shows off stuff, Timbers refuse to wilt Sept. 17, 1:38 a.m.
[CONCACAF CHAMPIONS LEAGUE: Tuesday] D.C. United all but clinched a berth in the quarterfinals of the ... What They're Saying: Johan Cruyff Sept. 17, 1:21 a.m.
"No. Not much. We're both Dutch and that is always a [shared] basis. ... Van Gaal ... Olympiakos does a lot of things right Sept. 17, 1:05 a.m.
[UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE: Tuesday] Making it back to the UEFA Champions League final after coming tantalizingly ... Sounders rally to snatch trophy from Union Sept. 17, 12:33 a.m.
[OPEN CUP: Final] The Philadelphia Union had the home-crowd advantage, and scored first with a goal ... New York City FC faces another tough stadium sell Sept. 17, 12:22 a.m.
[MLS EXPANSION] More than a year after efforts to secure a site for a soccer-specific stadium ... What They're Saying: Don Garber Sept. 16, 11:30 p.m.
"Bruce has the opportunity to be our Tom Landry, our Pat Riley, and he continually puts ... Orlando City keeps just six USL PRO players Sept. 16, 11:14 p.m.
[MLS EXPANSION] Deposed USL PRO champion Orlando City moved quickly to get about the task of ... >> Soccer America Daily Archives


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Might as well wait for iPhone 5 cuz spring won't be that far from it... Or just get a black one and slap on a white case!
That's me laughing at everyone who said "I'll wait for the white iPhone 4"
I would love to have the white iPhone, but it is a no-brainer to just hold out and get the white 5th gen. The problems could/should be worked out by then.
Makes me think that Apple planned this all along so they could sell the black iPhone 4 until sales go lower than a certain percentage then release the white one to boost more iPhone 4 sales until the newer version is released.
Maybe the white iPhone IS the iPhone 5
It's all part of the master plan. ha ha.
I changed my front and back to a white and I dont have any light/camera issues at all, everything is perfect and looks perfect. If third party OEM companies can make it right, then why can't Apple?
You know you'd think all these big corporate companies would have there **** together, but they really don't! I was gonna sell my black ip4 for a white one now it looks like ill just wait for the 5th gen
Seriously...that's so stupid. Why the hell would I buy an iPhone 4 in the spring of 2011 when everybody knows by June or July the next iPhone would be expected. Unless they plan on delaying that one too...
i saw this yesterday on engadget and just rolled my eyes and decided to give up. ive been waiting for the white one for my wife (i got mine the day it was released). i told her and she said "forget it, ill get the black one too." her old 3G looks like its had its day...
of well.
Wait a minute, where exactly did they say spring? All I've read all day is her sayin they're sorry to disappoint us again. Could be that theyre sorry for the mix-up with the apple store app and getting ppls hopes up to soon, holiday season is still little more than a month away..
Well that sucks.
Just buy a black one and but the oem white case from ebay. =)
Thats about as stupid as it gets Apple. It will be out in the spring . You would have to be a complete moron to wait for it when the 5th gen would be out a couple months later. 8 more months till iphone 5 , looks like my 3G will have to hold up until then.
I laughed at those who waited for the white iPhone. You'd be stupid to buy it since the iPhone 5 will be out a month after.
Let me guess… Spring 2011: "The white iPhone will be delayed until June 24th."
Apple talks about how the iPhone4 prematurely surfacing after the whole "bar" incident costing them sales of the 3G and 3GS and now they go and shoot themselves in the foot.
FWIW I really don't see the iPhone 5 being much of an update at all. Personally I am stumped about what they will add. MAYBE 1080p recording and a better front facing camera? Doubt the processor will get an overhaul just a year into the game. I can almost guarantee they will keep the body the same, or very similar as they did with 3G-3GS. I personally don't think it is worth waiting at all, but that's just me.


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[NYCC 2012] Interview: Lost Planet 3 will be a narrative-driven experience
[Continued] Page 2
GameZone: We noticed that the grappling hook has returned in Lost Planet 3, could you go a bit into how it's used this time around?
Andrew Szymanski: The grappling hook is used a fair amount in single player. Unlike in previous games in the series you won't be able to use the grappling hook on any surface. That was a calculated decision that we made. We wanted to, in a certain sense, make the world less convenient and have the player and the other characters have to struggle. That influenced the design of not only the grappling hook but the other weapons and abilities.
The tone of our game is a bit more cinematic, a bit more realistic. There's definitely still a lot of Sci-Fi and over-the-top elements but we didn't want to have people jumping and flying all around. We felt the pacing in Lost Planet 3 would be a little more deliberate in order to play into the story and the characters that we were making.
We also have the multiplayer, where we aren't getting into the modes or anything just yet, but I will tell you that the grappling hook will play a larger part because it's part of the strategy in the multiplayer.
GameZone: So you aren't saying anything about the multiplayer yet?
Andrew Szymanski: All we are saying is that multiplayer is very important and that it's been a key part of the franchise since day one. We're going to continue to honor that and respect that by providing a robust suite of different multiplayer modes.
GameZone: Lost Planet 2 was a very different type of game. It was very divisive, but loved by some players. How would you pitch Lost Planet 3 to that audience?
Andrew Szymanski: Well Lost Planet 2, I think, had a specific goal in mind and it did that very well. It created a sort of party game with guns, if you will. It's about getting people together and having these very rambunctious sessions that are full of different enemy types and different mecha types and all sorts of weapons and content that you unlock. There's a slot machine. It's just really over-the-top. It's that party game atmosphere, where it's totally predicated on getting other players together to have that experience.
We are veering in a much different direction for Lost Planet 3 but what I would tell the fans of LP2 is, you know, just because we make LP3 and it's a different game, that doesn't mean LP2 goes away. It doesn't mean we're denying that, it just means that when we sat down at Capcom, the franchise creative director Kenji Oguro, who made the first two games, came to me and said, "I want to do a third game and this is how I want to do it." It was his concept to get back to the roots of the franchise.
This isn't a situation where we're going off the rails. The original team behind Lost Planet had a vision for where they wanted it to go. It's been an interesting journey because each Lost Planet game has had a very different feel to it and a different kind of purpose. We think that LP3 is on track and we hope to fulfill the promise we are making which is to create this very strong character-driven and narrative-driven experience.
But, I hope that if you like Lost Planet 2 you'll give Lost Planet 3 a shot. We are focusing on multiplayer and Akrid and mecha and things like that in the game that we feel are core to the franchise values. Lost Planet 2 will always be there and be near and dear to our hearts and we hope that people like Lost Planet 3 as something that is different and equally as compelling.
GameZone: Can we expect any narrative threads between Lost Planet 3 and the first two games?
Andrew Szymanski: There are a lot of ties to the first game. I don't want to go more in depth than that because I want to stay out of spoiler territory, but all I'll say is if you've played the first two games not only will you notice the overt connections like, "Oh, this person is related to that person," but you're also going to notice once you finish the game that there is a thematic thread that ties everything back together. We're really excited with our narrative because it does provide a way to create an overall arc for the whole series.
But, because it's the first story chronologically, if you don't know what happened in the first two games it's not going to negatively affect you.


text:
A pet goldfish is off-the-hook and alive after a micro-surgery removes a tumor from his brain.
Roads are slowly returning to normal in Lake Township.
Wicked winds blew snow off fields and onto roadways. Six plow drivers battled the elements.
By Friday, black ice was the problem. Applying salt was ineffective, but the sunshine did help thaw out trouble spots.
"We had to close some roads periodically to get vehicles off. But all in all, considering the amount of snow that fell and the amount of wind that was whipping it around, we did OK," said Lake Township Police Chief Mark Hummer.
Part #1 of Arctic Blast 2014 is over for Lake Township, but part #2 is coming up on Sunday with predictions of 6-10 inches of snow in the forecast.
"And high winds, which will almost create blizzard conditions and whiteout conditions" said Hummer.
The challenge after that: what to do with all the snow stacked up on roadways after plow drivers do their job. It will be especially difficult in subdivisions.
"We'll do the best we can, but I can envision we'll be out with front end loaders toward the end of mid-week trying to open up the roads" said Hummer.
Then hope we won't see part #3 of Arctic Blast 2014.
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text:
Servings: about 3 dozen
Prep Time: 25 min
Cook Time: 12 min
Difficulty: Moderate
3/4 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
Additional sugar for rolling cookies
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Line the cookie sheets with parchment paper or nonstick baking mats. Using electric mixers, at low speed, cream the shortening and sugar until thoroughly combined. Add the egg and molasses and beat until completely incorporated. Sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon ginger, cloves and salt and add to the mixture. Stir until combined. Roll the dough into balls about 1 inch in diameter. Roll the balls in sugar. Place 1/2 inch apart on the prepared cookie sheets. Flatten the balls slightly with fingertips. Bake for 12 minutes. Cool on wire racks.
What molasses would you recommend using for cookies? I have yet to find one that I like. Thanks, Deb
By Deb on December 31, 2012
I am a cake decrator and baker at home, I love your pound cakes.The chocolate sour cream is to die forI would like to learn how to make cakes with out so much butter oil and suger.
By Janice Haskins on November 04, 2012
ilove this my parents nevered tried it but today i wil make it for them for a surprize yeahhhhhhhhhhhh
By brooklyn on September 23, 2012
my frist and never gonna be the last of paula and my mothers name is paula too!
By Anonymous on September 23, 2012
Made these cookies for my husband and he LOVED them. They are delicious and so quick and easy to make. My first Paula Dean recipe, but definitely not my last!
By Jazmin on January 02, 2012
Paula, I attempted to make your lemon drop mini cupcakes, and failed. Can you please tell me what I did wrong? They came out hallow in the middle. The only thing I can think of is that I didn't mix the batter well enough.Could that be what went wrong?
By Lucy on December 15, 2011
My teenage daughter and I made these cookies together for Thanksgiving. They were simple to make and absolutely delicious! I have always wanted to bake something that involved molasses. Thank you Paula, we love you!!!
By Angela Byous on November 24, 2011
Hey, paula my name is chaity in i just want, to say that me and my sisters and my mom. Love your show and i love your cookies I'am in a culb call key culb it is to help poeple and other who need it. In we was make some of your cookies and give them to poeple and they love it too.In just to let you know you have alot of friend down here Texas love Chasity
By Chasity Bell on November 20, 2011
I wish I had what ever cookie sandwhitch she ever made well not all of them but they still look good you probaly want to try one of those cookies I want to have one right now!
By Anonymous on September 29, 2011
YUM loved them, shared with the library staff and my W W leaders, they are not really Weight Watcher cookies but we surely enjoyed them. Thank you Paula for sharing. Think I have all your cookbooks.
By Barbara on January 10, 2011
This is my son's favorite cookie--he shares them with everyone he knows when I make them. However, if the oven isn't quite hot enough, you will get a very puffy cookie--this is how he likes them best!
By Anonymous on December 10, 2010
By Anonymous on November 19, 2010
This is a great cookie! we had to go back and make another batch. One batch was not enough.
By Anonymous on December 25, 2009
I have numerous recipes from great aunts and grandmothers for delicious chocolate chip, and peanut butter and etc etc cookies. I have never been able to find a good recipe for ginger cookies which are my favorites. This is by far the tastiest and easiest to make. Paula Deen, you rock.
By Anonymous on December 20, 2009
wonderful cookies, Thanks Paula Edna
By Anonymous on November 05, 2009
Try substituting molasses with sorgum, which you can find in many specialty stores and Amish restaurants and gift stores. Many people argue that molasses and sorgum are the same thing, but I think there is a BIG difference. To each his own taste bud! YUUUUMMMMYYY!
By Anonymous on November 03, 2009
These cookies are delicious, I just made them this morning! Thanks, Paula!
By Aubrey on July 07, 2009
By ilikebuttertoo on May 10, 2009
These are the best ginger cookies. Everone at my house loves them!
By ilikebuttertoo on May 10, 2009
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Join Paula at DuBois Furniture in Waco, TX for a book signing and meet and greet from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm.
Come see Paula's live show at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center in Charlotte, NC and get a heaping helping of Paula's recipes, and some good old-fashioned fun and laughter!
Tickets available from Blumenthal Performing Arts Center here!
Starts at 5:30 PM. Light hors d'oeuvres and beer & wine will be served, including a meet and greet with Paula Deen!
Sponsored by Springer Mountain Farms.
Join the Deen Family for a Book Signing at The Lady & Sons from 10 am to 12 pm.
The event is free; 350 wristbands to be distributed starting at 9 am.


text:
The Time Is Out of Joint: Notes on D'Angelo's Voodoo
by Jason King. Copyright © 2012. Do not distribute or reproduce without explicit permission.
I was commissioned to write these liner notes for vinyl re-release of D'angelo's Voodoo, released by Light in the Attic Records, December 2012.
I've faithfully reproduced the notes here for you to read. Go to Light in the Attic Records to purchase the vinyl version; visit them on the web: http:lightintheattic.net
The Time Is Out of Joint: Notes on D'Angelo's Voodoo
Voodoo hit store shelves on January 25th 2000, just a few weeks after New Year celebrations, so you could argue that it was the first great album of the new millennium. But Voodoo also belongs squarely in the 1990s. Its thirteen tracks were all produced in the late '90s. And Voodoo's muggy grooves capture the sound of premillennial anxiety as captivatingly as anything Tricky or Radiohead or Missy Elliot released during those paranoid years when we somehow convinced ourselves the Y2K bug would smite us with meltdown and global catastrophe.
Holdups and false starts kept Voodoo from a '90s release. Perfectionist D'Angelo had become distracted by weed and weightlifting, and debilitated by sophomore pressure to follow up his groundbreaking 1995 debut Brown Sugar. In the interim he'd fathered two children, switched managers, jumped to a new record label, and made cameos on scattershot soundtracks. Two promo singles dropped: murky, sample-heavy "Devil's Pie" in October 1998 and Redman/Method Man-assisted toe-tapper "Left and Right" a year later. But promises of a full-length studio album evaporated into the ether. Voodoo might have seen its commercial release in November 1999 but a planned duet with Lauryn Hill on a lurching cover of Roberta Flack's 1975 "Feel Like Making Love" remained unfinished and the album was pushed back until just after the New Year. (The rendition would ultimately wind up on Voodoo as a solo D'Angelo record without Hill.)
Even if we wanted to claim Voodoo as a 1990s record, rather than one belonging to the 2000s, it was still a project obsessed with 1960s, '70s and '80s funk and soul—a nostalgic nod to the ideas and inventions of black music trailblazers like Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Kool and the Gang, Al Green, and Prince, powered by avant-garde hip-hop-influenced rhythms. As such, Voodoo is decidedly postmodern, bopping in and out of and between eras without necessarily belonging to any singular era in particular. And perhaps the delayed, dislocated timing of Voodoo's commercial release suggests a truism about D'Angelo himself: wherever he seems to go, the time is, as Hamlet once said, out of joint.
A lesser recording artist would have permanently scared off his audience by making it wait in anticipation for new work so long. But when Voodoo finally dropped, the lost time didn't seem to matter. That's because Voodoo mattered. And Voodoo mattered because D'Angelo mattered. 1995's Brown Sugar had already strategically positioned D'Angelo—born Michael Eugene Archer and Virginia-reared to a Pentecostal preacher father—as the next Hendrix-like deity in black music, after Prince and maybe Lenny Kravitz. (Kravitz's revivalist 1991 LP Mama Said is in some ways an underappreciated stylistic pre-cursor to Brown Sugar and Voodoo.)
In 1995 D'Angelo wasn't just making soul music—he was making Hip-Hop Soul, reinventing R&B for audiences acculturated to hip-hop. He certainly wasn't the first to do so: Teddy Riley, Mary J. Blige and others had been applying hip-hop aesthetics to soul in prior years. And both R. Kelly and DeVante Swing of Jodeci had already added hip-hop swagger to their respective soul crooner visual images; D'Angelo would take the 'Ruffneck Romeo' concept to even more seductive heights.
But D'Angelo brought something to hip-hop soul those artists did not: a bohemian passion for classic jazz. He'd been turned on to jazz by way of the shards and snippets he'd heard in hip-hop samples (particularly those of Native Tongue stalwarts A Tribe Called Quest), and via the dusty records he'd discovered in his DJ uncle's vinyl collection. D'Angelo's confluence of jazz, hip-hop and R&B proved irresistible, especially after the early success of artists like Tony! Toni! Toné! and Meshell Ndegeocello had already proven that the merger of those styles could have commercial legs). And so the genre neo-soul—with its retro emphasis on 'real' instruments, sophisticated musicianship and hip Afrocentricity—was officially born. Charismatic D'Angelo became its de facto, galvanizing superstar. Then, just as quickly, time fell out of joint: D'Angelo didn't make another album for five years.
Brown Sugar relied on programming, with many of the songs pre-written and arranged before D'Angelo recorded them. Voodoo, on the other hand, was a more organic, improvisatory and experimental affair. Much of the songwriting occurred in the studio. The innovation kicked off, it seems, with Jimi Hendrix. In a recent interview, Voodoo's mix engineer Russ Elevado recounted to me how he helped turn D'Angelo onto Hendrix in the mid '90s. "All D'Angelo had heard of Jimi at that time were songs like Purple Haze and albums like Are You Experienced," he said. "I had been hired to mix a few songs on Brown Sugar; and, around '94 or '95, I kept trying to play Jimi for D'Angelo but at the time he wasn't really open to it. Finally when I went down to Virginia to talk about the concept for what was to become Voodoo, D'Angelo and I went out for breakfast, and in the car I popped in Electric Ladyland. He looked at me as if to say: 'Who is this?' We got back to his apartment and listened to the whole Electric Ladyland album, and I think for the first time he saw how Stevie Wonder and all these artists he admired had been originally influenced by Hendrix."
No surprise, then, that they chose downtown New York's Electric Lady, the famed studio Hendrix built before he died, as the venue for recording the album. "We scheduled a meeting with the studio manager," Elevado recalls, "and as soon as we walked into the main room, which for the most part was still as Hendrix left it when he passed, D'Angelo said: 'This is it. We have to do Voodoo here.' And there we were, blowing the dust off the original Rhodes [electric piano] that Stevie [Wonder] supposedly recorded with in the early 1970s, and blowing dust off some of the microphones. You have to remember that at that time in the mid 1990s, hardly anybody in soul music was doing any recordings with vintage equipment like that. Nobody was really tracking bands anymore except for some of the rock guys. And so we really felt like we were bringing something back." Electric Lady's Studio C became D'Angelo's brand new creative laboratory.
The concept behind Voodoo was simple. Put together a kick-ass ensemble of R&B musicians bent on grooving together. Record them live, in real-time, jamming face-to-face in an effort to capture their conviviality and chemistry. This was the way funk records used to be made in the pre-digital era when people who knew what they were doing were actually making them. For Voodoo's core rhythm trio, D'Angelo recruited his friend and colleague, The Roots' Afroed visionary Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson to play drums, and Welsh journeyman Pino Palladino to hold down the bass. Additional collaborators included guitar mavens Charlie Hunter, Spanky Alford and Mike Campbell, neo-soul stalwart James Poyser on keys, and jazz prodigy Roy Hargrove on horns.
These handpicked, impeccably-curated musicians were of the highest caliber. They were the kind of musicians that would probably be making music together even if they didn't collect a check at the end of the session. The kind of musicians that play better together because of their mutual respect for each other as individual talents. It's hard, in fact, to think of a better instrumentally-performed R&B album of the late 1990s/early 2000s than Voodoo. It's an album of uncommon musical virtuosity—even just listening to co-writer Charlie Hunter deploying his custom-crafted eight-string guitar bass to play guitar and bass at the same time on three of Voodoo's most melodious tracks seems like a profound intervention in the context of contemporary mainstream soul. Each of the core musicians seems irreplaceable and indispensable to the project as a whole, in direct contrast to so many digital-era soul records where the instrumentalists, and even the producers themselves, often seem haphazard and interchangeable.
Pino Palladino told me in a recent interview: "The first time we played together for the Voodoo sessions, the chemistry was evident immediately. I felt completely at home and I was smiling. And when we went into the control room to listen back to what we'd done it sounded evenbetter." D'Angelo's tour manager Alan Leeds, famous for his decades of behind-the-scenes work with the likes of James Brown and Prince, told me: "D'Angelo's always surrounded himself with great musicians. But most importantly he gives them space. I don't think I've ever worked with a frontman artist that's as unselfish musically and on stage as D'Angelo is. He's like a jazz guy doing funk. I think he intrinsically gets the idea that's foreign to so many musicians today that the beauty of the musical artform is the interplay. It's one thing to sit at a computer and make a record, but the magic comes from the intercourse between the musicians and that's a very jazz mentality. Everything about popular music is in the opposite direction for the last generation or two."
In retrospect, Voodoo's jazz-inspired ensemble playing and fetish for vintage analog sounds seems to have been about manufacturing an alternate musical universe as far removed as possible from the Styrofoam-thin synthetic urban beats and formulaic girl-power and boyband pop that ruled the late 1990s charts. Fans crowned D'Angelo the 'Prince of Soul', exalting him as a hero and musical savior, positioning him as the most viable solution to the problem of ever-diminishing returns in commercial music. Charlie Hunter told me in a recent interview: "When Voodoo came out there was very little music happening out there. It didn't have much competition. And the reason people like the album so much is because it's human. It's humans playing instruments with each other, and there's a certain kind of magic that you can only achieve when you do that. You can get an interesting sound from programming music, but it's not magic; it's science."
Conscious heads have always despised pop music's willfulness to be vapid, banal, frivolous and inauthentic. Voodoo was like crack for purists—this was Real Music, serious as a heart attack, deeply reverent and worshipful of the past. It earned realness points for its anti-materialist stance, reflected in the sermonizing screed of "Devil's Pie" and in D'Angelo and Saul Williams' original CD liner notes. Voodoo earned even more realness points in its unabashed and unapologetic celebration of everyday black culture and intra-community rituals. D'Angelo admitted that his objective on Voodoo was to "make strong, artistic Black music." During the album's long-gestating pre-production and production phases, D'Angelo, ?uestlove and Russ Elevado deliberately studied classic black music albums—D'Angelo and ?uestlove affectionately call soul masters like Al Green, George Clinton and Prince their "Yodas," in reference to the sage Star Wars films' puppet—and found creative ways to draw on their techniques and ideas. "It was a love for the dead state of black music," ?uestlove once stated, "a love to show our idols how much they taught us. This was the love movement." D'Angelo told Ebony magazine: "I consider myself very respectful of the masters who came before…In some ways, I feel a responsibility to continue and take the cue from what they were doing musically and vibe on it."
The album title (evocative of Hendrix's Electric Ladyland gem "Voodoo Child") obviously refers to the Haitian religion, a point that's driven home by the arresting black & white album photo art by French visionary Thierry LeGouès that depicts a stylish D'Angelo in the midst of a Voodoo ritual, shot in Havana. Trippy closer "Africa" is the album's most profoundly Afrocentric moment, just narrowly beating out the call-and-response, old-school black-power-era funk workout "Chicken Grease" where D'Angelo spits a lyric that many brothas and sistas and the friends who love them will recognize as a decidedly black thang: "I'm like that old bucket of Crisco that's sitting on top of the stove." If Voodoo's realness and authenticity is wrapped up in its celebration of African-American music and cultural rituals, those claims get even more complex when you consider that at least three of the album's key contributors are neither of African descent nor American-born: Pino Palladino is white and Welsh, Charlie Hunter is white, Russ Elevado is a Filipino immigrant raised but not born in the US. Not unlike the deep funk records cut at Muscle Shoals in the '60s, Voodoo is black music that was created and formatted by a multicultural ensemble.
The result of years of study and research into the micro- and macro-details of soulful funk, Voodoo is a form of recorded music as creative scholarship. A thirteen-song dissertation on the craft of black music itself. Soul music as a higher-level science. In a recent interview on his way to London, ?uestlove told me: "I consider Voodoo the diploma that me and D'Angelo received from our twelve years of 'college.' For me and D'Angelo and our generation, our entry into the so-called 'alternative hip hop sphere' started with The Jungle Brothers' Straight Out the Jungle in 1988. That was like our 'first grade' in 1988. Voodoo was about taking all the knowledge we had gained since Straight Out the Jungle all the way up to twelve years later, in 2000, and ending it."
He continues: "I consider Voodoo more than just an education, it was a real discovery period. By '96, '97, '98, I'd done a lot of tours with The Roots, you could say that I'd made 15 laps around the world, so to speak. I'd established a certain reputation not just as a drummer but as the student that wants to learn and was trustworthy. So people felt comfortable to share archives with me and trusted that I wouldn't go out and exploit them. So I would get what I would call 'treats:' you know, an old promoter that might have worked for Bill Graham back in the day… would hand me a manila envelope and it would be, say, a rare copy of Sly and the Family Stone's four shows at the Fillmore. I'd take it back to Electric Lady Studios and make copies of it and we'd just study it and then a week later we'd start working on it. That was the process. I was a kind of a walking YouTube before YouTube existed. I really consider that my contribution to D'Angelo's record…. and to his creativity period. My job was as his co-pilot and that meant I was always providing him with information and treats. Album treats. You know, if we'd be low on energy trying to figure out ideas, I would take him information and that would get us going creatively. Now we had to consider what do we do with the information that we've got and how do we turn it into an album. We'd spent all of 1996 and most of 1997 just watching treats and jamming. I have to say we really hit our stride in late 1997 when I went to Japan and unearthed about 4000 video episodes of Soul Train. Then we really got down to business and started recording the album…In the five years it took to make Voodoo we'd taken every ounce of information we could and put it in a juicer and blended it up. We had to put the blender inside of a blender!"
Voodoo's title also describes the album's magical effect: you can get spellbound, hypnotized, listening to its minimalist funk grooves. They're eccentric grooves—for some, they make immediate sense; for others, they're an acquired taste. Grimy, dark, and austere, the album features no lush orchestral strings to make the production feel more classically sumptuous. Instead, Voodoo emphasizes a moody and fetid low end, bass that you can feel in your rump and up through your nervous system. You can't really grasp Voodoo's idiosyncratic sound concept unless you pay attention to what the bass is doing. Pino Palladino, who plays bass on many of the songs, sources his unique style on the album to three main iconic influences: Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone, James Jamerson of Motown fame, and Aston "Family Man" Barrett Bob Marley and the Wailers).
"There's a looseness to Larry's playing," Pino told me in a recent interview. "His timing is so impeccable, he has this loose, rough quality—it doesn't sound like he's trying to play tight. It's very natural sounding." On Jamerson: "I've always been attracted to the way he naturally constructs his bass line with the vocal. With most of Motown, the vocals are featured and the bass is featured, and everything else is structured. The bass is free. Jamerson had such skill and dexterity and was allowed to run free through those songs pretty much. What I love is the way he would react to a vocal, or make a vocal melody work by changing some of the root notes." On Family Man: "With him it's all about the space. I grew up playing reggae even though I grew up in Wales. When I first heard hip-hop and listened to the role of the bass playing I realized the role of the bass was coming from reggae. There are so many interesting links between hip-hop and reggae and dub music."
On Voodoo, you can feel the weightiness and the density of the grooves: lean and sinewy, these grooves are literally and figuratively heavy. Indeed, Voodoo is a feeling. Its sonics are palpable. Pino's edgy tone is the result of his unique approach to playing his 1963 Fender Precision Bass with heavy La Bella flatwound strings. It's also the result of engineer Russ Elevado driving the bass sound through vintage amplifiers. But it's the off-kilter way the bass moves on Voodoo—most of the bass parts were pre-written and structured by D'Angelo himself and delivered to Pino who would then be expected to work his magic on the parts—that truly makes the sound unique. Pino notes: "When my musician friends first heard the album, they were confused. They thought: 'it sounds kinda weird, the timing's kinda weird on it.'D'Angelo explained the concept of how he wanted the bass to sound to me before we started playing. I attempted to put the bassline where I thought he wanted it. I would never have thought of putting it so far back behind the beat. But it becomes a different feeling: it stretches in and out of different accents."
The heavy backphrasing is what D'Angelo collaborator Raphael Saadiq once referred to as performing with "the grease," in the effort to achieve a "loose, way back in the pocket feel" or a "rubber band feeling." The backphrasing means that the bass is constantly changing its location in relation to ?uestlove's straight-ahead, heavy time, impeccable drumming. The effect is a jumpy, unsettling pulse. The bass seems out of joint, never quite landing where you'd expect. Pino continues: "That sort of backphrasing has been going on in jazz for a long time. D'Angelo honed in on that and used the rhythm section to backphrase as opposed to using solo instruments to backphrase. That was a huge jump forward there in my opinion."
The out-of-joint placement of bass on Voodoo also has something to do with hip-hop aesthetics. Pino theorizes that D'Angelo likely takes his clues from hip-hop's "deconstructed approach to music." He explains: "hip-hop is music that's been deconstructed, it's made up of bits of samples arranged in different places and often placed behind the beat. The way people sampled stuff influenced D in terms of the way he would write his music. When I first heard the backing tracks for Voodoo, it struck me as the kind of thing J Dilla would do, how he would deconstruct and reconstruct rhythms and just kinda deliberately mess things up. So you get these messed-up wobbly rhythms. You know, Dilla might take a four-chord pattern and start it on the second chord. D does that kinda thing too in his writing. It's very subtle."
Keyboardist James Poyser (co-writer of "Chicken Grease" and member of the Soulquarian collective) confirmed this interpretation in a recent interview: "The sound on Voodoo was very influenced by the early hip-hop samples where you couldn't get stuff perfectly in time. So the musicians started to play like that—with the timing off, not quantized or perfect, a bit wrong and messy. That sound appeals to people, not when it's so perfect that it's absolutely correct, but when it's wrong and a little bit messy. That gives the sound a little character."
?uestlove echoes his colleagues when he discusses his drumming on Voodoo. "The thing that really attracted me to D'Angelo's music was this inebriated execution thing that he had, which we both got from J. Dilla. Dilla would program his drums non-quantized: in layman's speak, it's the equivalent of having a five-year old play drums. It sounds sloppy, but there's a human quality there. Playing drums the way I did for the Voodoo sessions was necessary for me because I had been playing differently before we started recording. There was a time in the 1990s where there was resistance to The Roots' presentation: there were hip-hoppers who felt like we were doing a disservice to the culture because we weren't real enough for the street. In a culture of samples, I had been told I sound too much like a drummer. So prior to Voodoo, I had been going through a period where I felt I had to prove to people that I was a machine: I had decided that my playing was going to be cold, you wouldn't be able to tell if I was a sample or not. I spent three years of just icing my presentation to a science where I was just a kind of super-metronome; I spent three years of trying to hide myself. Then, in walks D'Angelo, and he basically tells me: 'Yo, I need you to strip yourself of all that coldness and play human. I need you to play fucked up!' He wanted me to play as drunk and as slow and as dusted as I've ever played in my life. I don't smoke or drink, so he really guided me to a level of creativity I wouldn't normally reach without some sort of stimulant. The first year of recording he would say: 'I need you to keep the pocket but don't drag behind me, but play a little crooked,' if that makes any sense whatsoever."
Dislocated and backphrased bass also helps Voodoo's retro funk come across as avant-garde and futuristic. James Poyser draws an analogy: "it's like the movie Mad Max, how it's set in the future but (the) way they're dressed it's like from the past…you go so far in the future that it went back." Sometimes the bass is sometimes placed so far back in the groove, it almost seems like it's forward again. Pino says something similar about Voodoo's offbeat timing in his assessment: "I think that whole style on Voodoo was rhythmically ahead of its time…it looks forward using many influences from the past. But it was a very forward-thinking album sonically and rhythmically. People are still just getting hip to the feeling."
Voodoo's retro-futuristic grooves are also spacious: they breathe. Beyond the mix itself, the sense of airiness and roominess on the album is partly an effect of the instrumental performances and the arrangement of the vocals, which leave room and space for vibe to occur, making the songs sound full yet spare and minimalist. Pino told me: "I've always been working on the space in between the notes…with Voodoo I felt like I was home, able to put into effect all the concepts that I'd been working on over the years. Space goes back to my influence with reggae music: Marley and the Wailers, old soul records, Stax. There has to be a tension created by the rhythmic section. Luckily, there was just a natural chemistry between D and Ahmir that enabled us to leave space in the music."
Voodoo not only plays with notions of space but also with time. Most of the songs are six minutes or more (lengthy for pop).and almost all the intoxicating, druggy tempos (with the exception of the driving "Spanish Joint") check in far below 100 bpms. Those molasses tempos are extremely unusual for commercial R&B, which often clocks in at 120 bpms or higher. The resulting feeling on Voodoo is chilled out, unhurried. It's an album that takes its sweet time. Rolling Stone critic James Hunter once deftly described the sound of Voodoo as "loose grooves and lazy-smoke," calling it "soul music that moves like smoke easing from a blunt."
The mix (the postproduction balance of levels and sounds) is another key element responsible for the magic of Voodoo. The artisanal handiwork of Russ Elevado working in tandem with D'Angelo, Voodoo's mix takes on a personality unto itself, similar to how the acid and PCP-influenced mixes of Sly's 1971 There's a Riot Going On and 1973 Fresh emerged as indispensable features of those classic albums. While so much 1990s hip-hop and R&B is mixed to a glossy bling-bling sheen, Elevado (who won a Grammy for his work on Voodoo) instead went after the blunted vibe of '60s and '70s psychedelia for Voodoo. "I grew up on soul and rock," Russ told me in his interview. "My influences [he cites Zeppelin, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Miles Davis as some of his primary ones] were all soul and rock based… I wanted to make records that sounded like that."
He continues: "Before I met D'Angelo I was working in New York doing the whole R&B sound with groups like Groove Theory and Dru Hill. Everything I was working on was sequenced and processed and the drum machine sounds were limiting. I was very disillusioned because I wanted to do more organic music with organic instruments. I was about to take a step back and see what else I could do with my career. Then I worked with Roberta Flack [on her 1994 Roberta album,] and I thought it would be great if I could do more of this live music. D'Angelo kinda saved my career and gave me hope that there's another way to do music."
"With Voodoo," he notes, "I just wanted to show people that you could make an album that sounds better than anyone's heard…with real instruments, real musicians, miking a kick drum, making it sound huge, but done in an organic way. I was on a mission to prove to everyone, you can still make a record that sounds like a Sly record but with the fidelity that we have with the CD technology. Voodoo was the vehicle for me to show him what I could do." Elevado's psychedelic rock influences are most evident on the trippy album interludes, in his George Martin-esque use of flanging and panning, and especially through his deployment of reverse backward guitars on "Africa" and "The Root"—but the effect of his inspirations runs throughout the entire record in subtle ways.
Voodoo sounds like the quietest and most rapturous of storms. The dynamics are hushed and mellow, and the audio levels are kept consistent (even in the presence of automation) so nothing jumps out at you to disturb your mood, nothing's in-your-face. There are no anthems here, and no instrument ever sounds abused. Like the best ambient music, Voodoo can float out of the speakers, and waft in the background, tinting the atmosphere without you even knowing it. It's drift music. Dulcet elements in the production help balance out the jerky grooves. D'Angelo's flapjack-stacked falsetto vocals, sounding like an impossible collaboration between the Golden Gate Quartet and P-Funk, are lithe, quilted, manicured to perfection. On songs like "Spanish Joint" and "Chicken Grease" his angular and slightly nasal tenor is curbed by a flanging effect, which makes it sound like he's singing through a screen. The prettified electric keyboards and patches further blanket the mix in soothing delicacy.
What's more, Elevado tracked and mixed Voodoo entirely on analog tape (it was also mastered on tape) using vintage gear, even though digital technologies were widely available. Analog bathes the album in a tangible warmth and clarity, perhaps best evidenced on arch-romantic "Send It On," supposedly the first song written for the album and composed after the birth of D'Angelo's son: it's all mirth and light, like the opening of a carnation. In terms of sensuality and intimacy, Voodoo is very much in league with other classic boudoir concept albums like Marvin Gaye's 1976 I Want You or side 2 of The Isley Brothers' 1975 The Heat is On.
Roy Hargrove's nimble, quicksilver horns—performed in a compacted and brisk style reminiscent of Fela Kuti's 1970s brass—are yet another intriguing element in the production. His horn sounds both retro and warm, and is stunningly folded into the mix, providing accents and stabs without ever seeming obtrusive. Russ told me the following about recording Hargrove: "I always heard him on a subliminal context on the album. I wanted to just make the horns tuck in the mix like D'Angelo vocals…Roy's presence is so strong that if it's too loud it takes away from what Roy's actually playing. So we were really careful about how we placed him in the mix. I used a lot of ribbon mikes, old RCA mikes that weren't in the best condition. There was one of them that I had refurbished before I used it. It sounded perfect for his style. I tried to boost him when I felt like it was right to highlight him. Most times he played right underneath the mix."
If Voodoo were strictly an instrumental groove album, it would still be considered a work of art, albeit a minimalist one. But D'Angelo's lyrics—sometimes hard to decipher because of his frustratingly muffled articulation—have a special significance. Often written by D'Angelo in collaboration with partners like Raphael Saadiq, James Poyser, ex-girlfriend Angie Stone, and his brother Luther, Voodoo's lyrics are introspective ruminations on a variety of topics. "Playa Playa" is an ode to basketball and street corner one-upmanship. On it D'Angelo sneers "bring the drama playa / give me all you got / make your move / shoot your best shot." "Greatdayndamornin'/Booty" delivers a series of disconnected thoughts about the everyday courage it takes to wake from sleep: "I search for answers often, I paid the price for many / still long for happiness / not promised to the plenty." Haunting "The Line" seems to be a dark, direct response to the claustrophobic pressure of fame: "I am goin' to hold, hold on to my pride / I'm gonna stick, I'm gonna stick to my guns / I'm gonna put my finger on the trigger I'm gonna pull it and we gon see what the deal."
D'Angelo once said about the content of Voodoo: "This album is a personal testimony about my life and my emotions. My life kinda changed overnight when Brown Sugar came out. It took me a while just to get used to that – the attention, the money, and everything that comes along with that…At times I felt like I wanted to run away from it. I still reject a lot of shit. A lot of people say, "Well you're a superstar now." If I start to look at it like that, then something's wrong. I have to continue to remind myself why I'm doing this and the things that inspired or motivated me way back before Brown Sugar ever happened and before I ever got into this business – just my love for the music and wanting to reach the people."
D'Angelo's most evocative lyrics, however, are about love, sex and relationships. "Left & Right" is the preacher's kid at his most carnal: "Smack your ass, pull your hair / And I even kiss you way down there / You know I will / Think I won't?" Grown-folks' music, Voodoo wore its parental advisory sticker on its CD cover like a fashionable brooch. Other Voodoo tunes are break-up numbers that suggest damaged intimacy; happy feelings pulled down to earth by the gravity of the blues. "One Mo' Gin" is melancholic, full of wistful yearning. So is "The Root," but it adds a dash of paranoia as D'Angelo sings about a former lover who "worked a root" on him "that will not be reversed" and says: "I been feelin' this pain for much too long / I feel like my soul is empty / My blood is cold and I can't feel my legs / I need someone to hold me." And "Feel like Making Love" discards Roberta Flack's original daydreamy production; instead, it goes for a marauding, off-kilter groove that transforms the romantic lyric into disturbed ruminations that could have been lifted from a stalker's diary. Voodoo may be lovemaking music, but it's also disquieting, ominous, full of trouble.
Some fans couldn't quite get into the songwriting on Voodoo. Or maybe they got bored by its sleepiness. Many, however, managed to rediscover the album's songs attending The Voodoo World Tour. While D'Angelo had not consistently toured after Brown Sugar, he hit the road to support Voodoo with an astonishing thirteen-piece band called The Soultronics that included Hargrove and Palladino and others from the album. In the effort to prepare the album tracks for the stage, the band radically revised the album's arrangements, making them decidedly more chipper and raucous. Songs were completely reimagined, turned inside out, until they ended up sounding like hard-driving Kool and the Gang, Bar-Kays or P-Funk uptempos. The tour smoked. Voodoo tour manager Alan Leeds recalls that: "Voodoo wasa dark record. It's not an easily accessible record sonically. Hearing the music live just plain made it more accessible: you could understand the lyrics better, and there were other aspects of the music that came to the forefront instrumentally that weren't as prevalent in the mixes of the record. I think you just got a broader picture of what the songs had in them, the songs were able to grow and blossom, you got more out of an individual song than you did on the record."
D'Angelo had also evolved into a dynamically charismatic live performer in the interim between Brown Sugar and Voodoo." Leeds remarks: "I was surprised. I too had seen him early on—I remember him as a kid with a trenchcoat sitting at a keyboard. The pacing wasn't exciting and he didn't make any real effort to perform center stage without a keyboard for much of the show. But when I saw him in the rehearsals for the Voodoo tour, I was stunned, I had no idea he had this in him." Leeds notes that D'Angelo is an incredibly generous performer. "He wants the musicians to get him off. He comes to the stage for that. As opposed to just coming for the audience, he actually comes for the musicians to get him off."
But let's face it: one of the main reasons certain fans came to see D'Angelo was to hear (and see) him perform Voodoo's only real hit single, "Untitled (How Does it Feel). Co-written by Raphael Saadiq, "Untitled" is a slowburn ballad that borrows chord progressions and production ideas from 1980s Prince ballads —to my ears, it sounds like a lost track that might have been written sometime between 1981's "Do Me Baby" and 1987's "Adore." Given its appearance on an album full of deliberately unfocused and unhurried grooves, Alan Leeds referred to "Untitled" as "the album's anomaly," "a fastball down the middle," "an easily accessible track with the radio hook." The most conventionally arranged album track, it starts off spare and builds to a rousing, uh, climax. It also marks the first time you hear D'Angelo really dramatically build his vocal and sing out (he squalls at the end as Prince memorably does at the end of Purple Rain's "The Beautiful Ones".) It won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for good reason.
But it was the high-concept, simple-execution music video for "Untitled"—in which a shirtless D'Angelo, filmed from just below the waist up, sings to the camera, getting who knows what done to him by an unseen partner—that sent audiences, especially women and gay men, rushing to see D'Angelo live and to purchase the album. The one-step-away-from-soft-porn video, which literally leaves everything to your imagination, entered heavy rotation on media outlets like BET in late December 1999, even before the album dropped, and it became an overnight sensation. In 2000, it was the video you had to see, and the video you had to have an opinion about it. The subject of academic articles and endless on- and offline discussions, the "Untitled" video has become so iconic in terms of the history of black male sexual representation that it's almost impossible to think about the song as an independent entity outside of its visual marketing. The video did its job: it drove sales for both the song and the album (and the tour); "Untitled" ultimately rose to #2 on the R&B charts.
The "Untitled" video was the idea of Dominique Trenier, D'Angelo's savvy manager, who wisely forecast that the key to making D'Angelo's experimental album reach a wider audience was to market him as a sex symbol. He also deftly understood how to exploit D'Angelo's intrinsic shyness and insecurity—his enigma—and turn it into seductive mystique. In preparation for Voodoo, D'Angelo would lose the Brown Sugar era trenchcoat and babyfat, and submit to daily workouts with personal trainer Mark Jenkins.
Proud of his hard-earned new physique, D'Angelo never seemed to have a problem taking his shirt off or flaunting his muscles and tattoos during the Voodoo era. (Yes, he appears shirtless on the album cover.) His attire changed as well: the cornrows remained, but now he wrapped his head in a folded black bandanna, and donned a 'wifebeater' tank-top with leather pants, making him look like something of a cross between Hendrix' rock god and Tupac's thug Adonis. D'Angelo already been praised as 'phyne' during his Brown Sugar days but now he'd become a universally-recognized chiseled hunk, and something of a fashion and visual icon. There he was, promoting Voodoo by appearing in a bikini on the cover Paper magazine, or chatting about his jones for cunnilingus in Essence. He seemed just as absorbed by sexual excess as his predecessor Marvin Gaye before him. A&R vet Gary Harris, who first signed D'Angelo to his EMI record deal that resulted in Brown Sugar, notes: "D'Angelo captured a moment, and he'd released pent up female sexuality in the culture." He'd opened Pandora's box, and there was no way to undo it.
If "Untitled" was the key to Voodoo's success, it was also the key to D'Angelo's ultimate unraveling. Part of the problem was that he'd become recognized in the culture as more of a bachelor stud than a serious musician, and his recognition of that misplaced respect may have been deleterious to his confidence and psychological health. Alan Leeds recalls the first series of shows of the Voodoo tour in which "girls in the audience were shouting 'take it off!'. The look on D's face—I don't even know how to describe. He was stunned. There was a certain percentage of our audience thinking it was Chippendales. I don't think he thought it through to think how the video was going to come back at him when he got on the stage." Not convinced that audiences were necessarily supporting his art, D'Angelo needed a lot of preparatory work just to gain confidence to get on stage. Tour dates even had to be canceled. Leeds notes: "This is a guy who's self-conscious by nature. He really has to do a deep breath in the mirror before he goes on stage. All this did was exacerbate that part of him. It complicated things. It became a distraction for him." D'Angelo had become, for some, a pin-up, a kind of black male version of Marilyn Monroe. When an artist becomes reduced solely to the terms of his or her body, it can stifle a career, or even foreclose it altogether. What makes the story worse is that D'Angelo had willfully participated in his own exploitation.
"Untitled" was the album's third official single but the album's only breakaway hit (the fourth official single "Send It On" only made it to #33 on the R&B and Hot 100 charts). But while "Untitled" went to #2 on the R&B charts, it stalled at #25 on the pop charts. Clearly, the song did not cross over to the same degree that the video did. Virgin Records, co-helmed at the time by executives Ashley Newton and Ray Cooper, had released the record just eight months after Napster emerged, at a time of significant financial turbulence at record labels in general. There was allegedly tension between D'Angelo and the label, and compounding the issue was the tremendous expense incurred in the creation of Voodoo: those why-bother-looking-at-the-clock studio sessions had meant that Voodoo was way too long in the making, way over budget. Budget issues can hurt an artist on the back end when the label ultimately has to recoup the money it's shelled out.
Leeds, who was co-managing D'Angelo at the time, recalls: "Voodoo wasn't a fastball, it wasn't an easy record. It wasn't a record with obvious radio-friendly singles. But I thought the label did an absolutely horrible job in cashing in on the success of the video and the single. They were absolutely incapable of breaking another single off the album. I'm not saying there were easy singles there, but they sure didn't figure it out. More importantly they failed miserably at crossing the single over to pop radio despite the success of the video on MTV, VH1, and mainstream media. Despite the fact that we had a noticeable Caucasian audience element, I don't think they even seriously tried crossing the single over. Simply put, the label failed to exploit the album to the degree that it should have been." Given the fact that "Untitled" drove the success of Voodoo and sealed D'Angelo's iconic status, Leeds asks an important hypothetical question: "what would have happened to D'Angelo in 2000 if "Untitled" hadn't been on the album?" Indeed: you might not be holding this vinyl re-release album in your hands right now.
We'll never know. But we do know the saga after Voodoo went platinum and spent more than thirty weeks on the charts before fading from the marketplace. With the exception of a few scattered musical collaborations here and there, D'Angelo entered into a long exile from the music industry. Brown Sugar and Voodoo were the only two albums he released in the sixteen years between 1995 and 2011. (While his ultra-prolific idol Prince waged wars with Warner Music in the effort to release more material, D'Angelo was just the opposite: aprolific and unproductive. They couldn't be more different in terms of their approach to the business of music.) For some, D'Angelo became more known for his appearance on tabloid websites than for his music: over the years we'd hear about him drunk, on drugs, in rehab, in label turmoil, in a near-fatal car accident, arrested for soliciting an undercover female cop for sex. Our Internet searches would be haunted by a 2005 Virginia mugshot in which D'Angelo looked flat and bloated: the exact inverse of his Voodoo image. Oh, how he'd come undone.
And so, in retrospect, Voodoo is something of cautionary tale, another chapter in the depressing story of black male soul geniuses whose careers descend into dysfunction. For all of Voodoo's claims to realness and authenticity, D'Angelo's imaging, while rooted in promise, had been in some ways a charade, an unsustainable performance of black masculinity gone awry. As Charlie Hunter noted: "It was sad to see him become such a superstar: that's not something you would wish on your worst enemy. For someone who is human and who has a real deep love of music and playing music and creating music as D'Angelo did, being a star was (the) worst possible punishment I could imagine. It's the thing that can take you as far away from the root of the music as possible." Gary Harris notes: "D'Angelo unleashed a lot of demons that had been pent up in the culture and in himself. The sexuality and funkiness of Voodoo were a lot to handle. Sly, George Clinton, James Brown were all challenged in some way, and had varying degrees of functionality. D'Angelo was wrestling with questions of responsibility of being a sex symbol. In order to make it work, he had to put his career on pause." D'Angelo would not tour again until 2012, when he returned to the stage in support of an album project that is still in the works as of the writing of these notes.
Another way to look at D'Angelo's career trajectory is that he has always marched to the beat of his own metronome. With the exception of maybe Terrence Malick, no other celebrity of the 1990s or 2000s has fucked with time, and the expectations around time, as much D'Angelo—both in the music and in his career as a whole. He takes his own sweet time. We can name tons of celebrities who seem to be running faster than the speed of light, multitasking and oversharing in a sometimes desperate effort to stay afloat in the marketplace. D'Angelo, on the other hand, is a hermit and a chronic undersharer. He rarely does interviews unless he's got a product to hock, he doesn't have a fashion line and businesses on the side, he doesn't appear on infomercials, he doesn't do films and he doesn't have a TV sitcom in the works. D'Angelo is simply a musician to his core. And that's enough. For reasons that have clearly not always been under his control, D'Angelo's entire career suggests an alternate narrative to the need for speed and immediacy and high visibility that is pop culture in the age of the Internet. Nope, D'Angelo just does his own thang. As a result, it's something of an event when it's time for him to release a new album, even if it's only every five or twelve years. From a branding and marketing perspective, the anticipation leading up to Voodoo, just like the anticipation leading up to his post-Voodoo studio album project, suggests that if your music is of superior quality and speaks for itself, it's possible to cultivate audience anticipation just as much through your absence from public visibility as from your presence.
Whatever the case, time has proven kind to Voodoo, which won the Grammy Award in 2001 for Best R&B album. Ranked #48 in Rolling Stone's list of 100 Best Albums of the Decade, Voodoo has also had significant impact on the sound of artists as diverse as Outkast, The Roots, Slum Village, The RH Factor, Common, Bilal, Erykah Badu, Gnarls Barkley, Van Hunt, and Nikka Costa. Voodoo's dislocated grooves would ripple out across the culture: as early as 2001 you'd start to hear its eccentric approach appear in the broken rhythms of the music of IG Culture, Amp Fiddler, Raphael Saadiq (his solo albums might not have taken the shape they did without Voodoo), Spacek, Sa-Ra, Brandy (particularly her 2001 Rodney Jerkins' produced Full Moon), Jamie Lidell, and James Blake. Hard to imagine the crooner stylings of R&B artists like Robin Thicke, Justin Timberlake, and Frank Ocean had Voodoo not existed. We might not have watched the rise of Anthony Hamilton, who did time in the Voodoo World Tour band as a back up singer before emerging into solo success. And John Mayer, inspired by Voodoo, recruited Pino Palladino to play on his 2005 Continuum album. (Mayer even published an online letter in 2005 begging D'Angelo to release a follow up to Voodoo and volunteering his services to help him do so.)
?uestlove recently shared with me his thoughts on the album: "For some Voodoo was the dawning of a new age. But I think in some ways Voodoo represents the end of it. It's like with Miles' Birth of the Cool: that ended the renaissance of bop and brought a new method in. You can also look at the coming of Miles' Bitches' Brew as the ending for jazz in its creativity period…Part of me gets sad when I hear Prince's Lovesexy. There's a part of me that's sad when I listen to Parliament's Gloryhallastoopid, maybe. I don't know. It's sad when you know that period is over…The same can be said for Saturday Night Fever—people thought it the dawning of disco. But it was really the end. Or the same could be said about Thriller – people said, oh, Michael Jackson's arrival! Or was it his exit?"
Voodoo was a last gasp for sophisticated and mature major label R&B of the CD era, before the iPod, before iTunes, before social networking, before 9/11, before oil wars altered our changed musical and industry and cultural priorities and made us look at the world with a little less innocence. Voodoo also happens to be the most cohesive neo-soul album ever released, and the greatest sonic representation of black intimacy on record since the classic work of artists like Marvin Gaye and Luther Vandross. Voodoo's sublime sensuality offers us a way into the mysteries of great sex and romance without actually having it. It's the next best thing, and in some cases, maybe even better. And now, it's finally on vinyl, where its visionary retro concept feels totally at home, where its mysteries and secrets can get lost in the spaces and crevices between those analog grooves. Let's all get it on.
—- Jason King. Copyright © 2012. Do not distribute or reproduce without explicit permission.
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It's convenient and good for someone who's not over 200 lbs. Otherwise it would be unsteady sitting on the seat.
Deluxe Folding Cane Seat
Item # WX2-171939
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- Details & Specs
Deluxe Folding Cane Seat. Extra support to "lean on" and a guaranteed seat whenever you need it!
- Strong aluminum construction
- Tri-pod design with vinyl contoured tipped legs
- 8" diameter seat, cane measures 34" tall when closed
- Seat to floor height: 20"
- Weighs just over 1 lb.
- 250-lb. capacity.
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For those who missed the first part - Gentlemen of Style (Part 1) (click link)
Featuring :Motofumi Kogi a.k.a. Poggy, Lino Ieluzzi, Luca Rubinacci, Angelo Flaccavento, & Shaka Maidoh
Gentlemen of Style (Part 2) Click Link
Featuring: Matteo Gioli, Nick Wooster, Nicola RIcci, Devon Scott, & Sam Lambert
(Source: Guerreisms.com)
This is one of those chaps that naturally draws attention without having to seek it. Be it his height, or impeccable style Shaka understands not only the art of details, he seems to master it.
Name: Shaka Maidoh (on the right)
Who are you: A nomad from no man's land with a schizophrenic creative mind :)
My passion would be a mix of music and substantial style, So music would serve as a soundtrack that influences or drives my style.
What 3 things bring you peace?
Being active (doing stuff from travelling to just riding a bicycle around my neighbourhood, reading, discovering, etc) Gratitude (Grateful for what i have, friends, family, shelter, food etc) Lone time (Setting aside time for myself once a week, or a month depending on when i need it)
What is a bad day? An unproductive day
What advice would you have for someone who's cultivating their own style? Nothing is really new under the sun, its about moving things forward or adding on, research and find out how it was or used to be done in the past and add on your own take, or twist to it to.
3 Pet Peeves (things you dislike)Eggs,
People sagging excessively below their bottoms with dirty underwear, Slow or computers that freeze up all the time.
Favorite place/location: London / The Grove in West London
What part of the day do you find yourself to be the most creative? (twilight, morning, afternoon, evening, late night)
Late night vampire
What do you have a favorite of? This changes with time and mood, but I will say skinny ties as Mods is one of my strong influences.
What is a daily must (beyond bathing, brushing your teeth, etc )? A Kodak moment of something, anything
What is a special indulgence for you? Daily or nightly bike ride around my neighbourhood
Best advice you've received: The Universe is infinite so the sky can never be the limit.
3 Songs you'd consider would make the up the soundtrack of your life or your daily state of mind:
Nina Simone - "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"
Saul Williams - "Fearless"
Fela Kuti - "Gentleman"
Is there any one person in particular close to you that inspired you? Sam Lambert
Is your style only represented in how you dress? No, it is also represented in other ways that I articulate myself from expressing myself vocally, to even how I sit etc.
3 favorite movies:
The Prestige
The Exorcist
The Talented Mr. Ripley
3 books you'd recommend:The Alchemist, From Babylon To Timbuktu,
War and Peace
5 things every person should do before dying:
Travel / Go places
Learn to speak a foreign language if possible and use it. Create something (a website, painting, shirt, music, food recipe etc)
Mentor someone, Learn to play a musical instrument
What separates a leader from a follower?
The differences between a leader and a follower is down to the process of learning and time required to gain experience in assigned responsibilities. Even the president is a follower to the will of the people of a specific country and a follower has the potential also to become a leader once they demonstrate mastery of self-discipline, motivation, responsibility, and other important traits need to be a leader.
Next lifetime, I'd like to come back…
As a doctor or Voodoo Priest, want the knowledge to help and cure sick people, physically and mentally
During trying times, what brings you peace of mind?
Family and friends
Music Meditation Chocolate
A Bike Ride
Last thing that made you smile? My god-children, nephews and nieces.. .. (I am blessed to have so many of them)
You can find my work / sample of my product here:
My life is… (finish the sentence)
A gift and a blessing.. I know death is more universal that life, as everyone dies but not everyone lives,
(Source: guerreisms.com)


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AIN 2013 Cockpit Avionics: Technology for the pilot's sake
What if technology could help pilots recover an airplane when it is clear (to the software) that the pilot's actions are trending toward an accident?
Consider the Air France 447 and Colgan Air 3407 accidents. In the Air France accident, the Airbus A330 stalled into the ocean from cruise altitude, following icing of the pitot sensors. The consensus is that the pilots just needed to move the control stick forward to unload the wing and the Airbus would have resumed flying. In the Colgan accident, the pilots failed to add power after their Dash 8-400 slowed while leveling off during approach. The Dash 8 was on autopilot, and the autopilot kicked off when it reached a limit, handing the pilots an airplane that was about to go out of control. Investigators concluded that the captain reacted incorrectly, and the Dash 8 stalled and crashed.
In both cases, the pilots were not ready for what happened, and they did not figure out what was wrong in time to prevent an accident. Also, it is assumed that the airplane designers didn't anticipate those occurrences or the way the pilots reacted. No designer can anticipate every way that a system or a pilot can mess up. But what if technology could help the pilot rescue the situation when it is clear (to the software) that the pilot isn't about to resolve the problem? If this is even possible, does it make sense? And, what would something like this look like in practice?
To answer these questions, AIN interviewed avionics manufacturers and asked how their products can help pilots and also what developments in their back-room laboratories are under way to address these problems.
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