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I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm now old enough to remember when a pizza was just a pizza, a round crust (though the occasional square-crust party pizza was okay, too) that was always thin, but not too thin (certainly no cracker crusts, and outside of the high-school cafeteria, never thick or bready) topped with an artistic swirl of red, tomato-based sauce, mozzarella shredded off a five-pound brick and pepperoni, sliced thin. Sure, there were a few people who went for the hot Italian sausage, and even some who asked for greasy, salty, tinned anchovies — the nuclear option among pizza eaters, a guarantee that you'd have your pie to yourself. And then there was the odd purist, like me, who wanted nothing but crust, sauce and double cheese.
Going out for a pizza meant you went out, ordered a pizza (and maybe a nice bottle of Lambrusco or a cold Coke in a tall, waxy cup), and what arrived at your table a few minutes later was recognizably a pizza. No surprises, no dithering over whether you wanted the organic spelt-flour crust or pepperoni made from something other than pig and spice and time. No one came to your table and tried to sell you on the remarkable innovation of the chef's special concoction of dandelion greens, Thai purple basil, Styrofoam packing peanuts and recycled crankcase oil.
I remember the first time I saw someone eating a pizza with pineapple on it. My friend Nick was sitting in his living room in Buffalo with a sixer of Molson Export and Beverly Hills 90210 on the TV, eating a Hawaiian pizza from La Nova covered with thin-sliced ham and chunks of wet, yellow pineapple. I was horrified and, to console myself, drank most of his beer and ate all the leftover chicken wings in his fridge, because I sure as hell wasn't going anywhere near that abomination masquerading as a pizza. I remember another place in upstate New York, right across the street from the second-floor apartment of another friend. It was a popular late-night joint for buck-and-a-quarter slices, populated almost exclusively by street-level dealers and shitfaced college types who would stagger in through the front doors, wheeze out an order to the tattooed and multiply-pierced asesinos working behind the counter, go back outside to puke in the gutter, then sit there on the curb waiting for their names to be called. Inside, just over the counter, was a sign that said something along the lines of: NO PINEAPPLE, NO BBQ CHICKEN, NO SPROUTS, JUST PIZZA. That was my kind of joint.
2500 East Orchard Road, Greenwood Village
Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday.
Four-cheese pizza: $6/$9
Pepperoni: $7/$10
BBQ chicken: $8/$11
White: $7/$10
French onion: $8/$11
Purple potato: $9/$12
But that was then — a golden age for pizza purists. Today? I've got to carry a Food Lover's Companion, a copy of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and my Socialist Party membership card with me and have an Italian translator standing by just to negotiate a menu and get an eight-inch margherita with cheese. It's a good thing I stopped doing drugs, because if I was still using, I might starve to death. It's tough enough to say quattro formaggio e la salsiccia con la mozzarella di bufalo locale when sober.
Times change. Tastes change. Pizzas change. By the late '70s and early '80s, pizza pioneer Ed LaDou (who died just recently and is now slinging pies for Jesus) and the crew at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse were already messing with the base genetics of the classic (read: American) pizza. Alice and company were doing wood-oven pizzas with goat cheese, and LaDou (who would later go on to become Wolfgang Puck's original pizza chef at Spago and write the first menu for the California Pizza Kitchen chain) was making ricotta and red-pepper pizzas with pâté and mustard, pizzas with barbecued chicken or duck sausage. By the '90s, California pizza was all the rage. Salmon pizza. Sushi pizza. Mexican pizza. Pizza chains (Papa John's, Pizza Hut) started changing their sauces for franchise operations west of the Mississippi, and Herr Puck was filling the grocery stores with frozen Spago nightmares. The rapid movement toward organic, all-natural and locally sourced ingredients hit the pizza business hard around the turn of the millennium, as did the rush toward authenticity and regional specialization. And while it was certainly still possible to get a normal red-sauce-and-double-cheese pizza or a couple of hot pepperoni slices when the mood struck, there was suddenly a sense of petit bourgeois small-mindedness attached to the notion of eating a plain, old-fashioned pizza.
But that didn't mean the newfangled pizza tasted better. In fact, when I first visited Sazza — the organic, sustainable, earth-friendly pizza joint that Jenni and Jeff Rogoff opened in June 2006 in the back of an enormous strip mall — its pizza was terrible. Dry, dusty crusts, red sauce that fairly sizzled with overburdening and unnecessary herbs, and awful combinations of buzzy ingredients. Duck. Rosemary. Fig. Cilantro, which is like a pizza gateway drug. If you're going to use cilantro — which becomes fiercely bitter and grassy when exposed to the baking heat of a pizza oven and, if put on after baking, simply wilts into a tired, sad little sprig — why stop there? Why not candy corn? Why not melted crayons? There has to be a line drawn somewhere, and for me that line comes long before you start reaching for the cilantro.
My most frightening early experience at Sazza was a night when I stopped in for three or four personal pizzas (a simple four-cheese, probably that one with duck on it, a couple others) and found myself most enjoying the one that tasted like a hot Fig Newton with burnt rosemary needles. It wasn't that I particularly liked the Fig Newton pizza, but that everything else was so much worse.
Still, something about Sazza kept drawing me back. I might be stuck in my own pizza preferences, but I am also respectful (and occasionally envious) of those who are trying to do new things — and Jenni and Jeff were definitely trying. Every time I returned to their small, spare, brightly lit and très moderne, fast-casual-looking pizza joint, I saw that the menu had been changed, tightened. I saw the place when it was furiously busy — all the low, blond, recycled-wood tables and the high counter seats by the window taken by neighbors and families, the register backed up with people getting takeout. I also saw it when it was miserably quiet — just me, a green-chile enchilada pizza with cilantro, a glass of biodynamic wine and Jeff behind the counter, staring forlornly out through the glass. I saw that Jenni and Jeff were cudgeling their dream into a slow-growing maturity that was being dearly purchased, month by month, lesson by lesson.
Once the kitchen got its legs, for example, the crusts were fine — a perfect thickness, a perfect blend of stiff, stone-charred bottom to soft, yielding top. In particular, they were good on the eight-inch personal pizzas, which is tough to pull off because those things burn in half a second if not watched very carefully by someone who knows just when to pull them. Additionally, Sazza kept working until it got the four-cheese mix right. Its blend has mozzarella and provolone as well as romano and parmesan — generally a sin of damning proportion, because those last two cheeses often come together to taste and smell like a foot. But the kitchen uses fresh, real romano and parmesan, not the crap in the little cans, so that rather than add a footy flavor, they merely lend a sting of saltiness and sourness balanced by the mozzarella and provolone. On other pies, the kitchen uses gruyère — an underappreciated pizza cheese (like emmenthaler) that works well as long as it's paired with an equal or greater amount of mozzarella.
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Over the months, I watched Sazza pull other things together. The first time I'd had the French onion pizza, it was terrible. Yes, there was gruyère, but it was smothered with caramelized onions that were barely browned, bitter with the flavor of scorched garlic. A few weeks later, though, the same pizza was excellent — a smart and controlled transposition of flavors from the soup crock to the pie, lightly touched with garlic oil, spread thinly with shaved and properly caramelized onions that'd settled gently into their bed of milky, soft cheese. And all of a sudden, I no longer needed several beers and a side of chicken wings just to be in the same room with a barbecued-chicken pizza dotted with chunks of pineapple. At Sazza, I even kind of liked it — though I justified that by determining that the inclusion of slivered red onion and a light touch of barbecue sauce balanced the slick, wet sweetness of the fruit and made the combination work.
There are still problems: The basil pesto on the white pizza remains inedibly bad (too strong, too punch-in-the-face forward and used in too great a quantity to be balanced by a simple slice of tomato and a jacket of mild cheese); the pepperoni used by the kitchen tastes like fried baloney (not a bad thing, necessarily, but not something I want on my pizza); and I still want to cry a little for my lost youth when I see a menu listing garlic-shot cheeseburger pizza with ketchup and lettuce. But while Sazza is not yet a great pizza joint, it's fought its way through all my prejudices to become a solidly good one.
Last week, I stopped in alone on a quiet night and ordered the winter seasonal special: a purple-potato pizza made with Peruvian purple mountain potatoes, sliced thin as paper, touched with cracked black pepper and laid across a bed of cheese studded with roasted chicken, sliced apples and bacon. I meant to eat one slice, but then had two, then three. There was something about the combination of the potato starch, the sweet apple, the savory chicken and the balance of flavors against the weight of the crust. The bacon didn't hurt, either. But what surprised me most was that, far from raging against this kind of thing — about as far from the pizzas of my childhood as could possibly be imagined — I actually found myself enjoying it.
What's more, I found myself looking forward to the next bite. And the next and the next.


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Archive for Thursday, June 7, 2007
Golf team banking summer work can provide big boost
The most frustrating part of the De Soto golf team's disappointing regional performance, Wildcat coach Chad Brecheisen said, was that it came on a course the team carved up only two days prior.
So it didn't come as much of a surprise when Brecheisen said consistency is one of the traits he most hopes his team picks up this summer.
Brecheisen said his initial season as the team's coach didn't go as well as he would have liked on the course, but with a little more consistency and more focus on preventing a mistake on one hole from carrying to the rest, he's excited about what the future holds.
"Golf's one of those games where you have to be able to do things day in and day out," he said. "The wind was blowing and we hit a couple bad shots here and there and it really changed the round for some kids. We took some big scores, but it was the kids that were able to manage it a little better that qualified for state."
Brecheisen said from his first day of practice that he was more focused on helping his team's mental game than necessarily critiquing a tee-box swing, or a putting stroke.
Though he said he did tamper with a swing when he had to, the situation worked out to his satisfaction. It's during the summer that he hopes to see his kids further refine their strokes, and he said the blueprints for that have already been laid.
While summer jobs keep athletes in other sports from focusing on improving, he's urged all his players to seek out jobs at golf courses. Now that many have them, he's hoping being around the game and racking up the free golf will have an effect come next spring.
"The kids were disappointed at regionals, but they know where we're at right now," Brecheisen said. "They know they need to practice over the summer and many of them have gotten jobs at golf courses where they can play and do some things."
Graduation will deprive De Soto of several of its top players from this season, and Brecheisen said that will no doubt hurt the program. He said he still felt all the pieces were there, maybe not for a single really low-scoring individual, for a tough, low scoring team.
Of those that played at regionals, Scott McKechnie will return as a senior. Alex Crawl will be a sophomore and Charlie Modreger will be a junior. That group, combined with a number of golfers who spent the season on the edge of varsity, could make a single, battle-tested unit, Brecheisen said.
"We're looking ahead to good things next year," he said. "It's always going to be tough to replace seniors, but the younger guys see it as an opportunity. We've got four or five guys that can shot in the 80s, and if we can do that, we'll always have a chance.
"They're excited for next year and we're going to make the most of it."
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Oxford City have been informed by the Conference they will be deducted three points for fielding an ineligible player.
The club confirmed on their Facebook page it had come about due to "an administration error".
It will come as a big blow for City's hopes of avoiding relegation in Skrill North. Already in the drop zone, the deduction would see Mike Ford's side drop to second bottom, seven points from safety.


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Deborah Vasquez recently gave a television reporter the transcripts of a tape recording made during an undercover investigation by the Arizona Attorney General's Office.
Vasquez had quit her position as secretary to first assistant attorney general Rob Carey in a hotly contested dispute last May. Since then, she has been determined in her efforts to nail Carey and his close friend, Attorney General Grant Woods, for a wide variety of purported wrongdoing. William Lajeunesse, from Channel 3, suspected the juicy documents were probably stolen, but what Vasquez told him about the attorney general's sting was even more remarkable.
Lajeunesse says Vasquez claimed the undercover sting was aborted because its target was a friend of Woods.
Vasquez has circulated dirt about Woods and Carey to anyone who would listen.
She took her allegations about Carey to his political rival, Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley, who instituted a grand jury investigation, and to the media.
This week, Romley squeezed a settlement out of the Attorney General's Office in regard to minor bookkeeping problems in a small office trust account.
The momentum for the settlement was made possible by the unending flow of scare stories Vasquez marketed to the press, including her tale of an undercover operation supposedly queered because the attorney general was friends with the target of the investigation.
In the sting that Vasquez recounted for Lajeunesse, state prosecutors sent a woman with a wire into a doctor's office, where she posed as a topless dancer. The woman's cover story was that she had slipped on spilled beer at a nightclub, injuring a knee and a wrist. The attorney general undertook the charade because a former patient of the doctor had come forward with serious charges.
The attorney general's undercover agent gathered suggestive, though not damning, audio tapes of Dr. Mark Goldberg's conversations.
The doctor and the "dancer" waltzed around the notion of committing workers' compensation fraud and raised the possibility that the two of them might rendezvous outside his medical office for drinks. The doctor and the "dancer" made a date.
But before the two could meet at a bar, the sting was called off.
"Vasquez told me the reason the investigation never went anywhere is because Grant [Woods] and Dr. Goldberg are neighbors, friends," says Lajeunesse.
When the reporter checked out this serious charge, he discovered third-party correspondence that proved Goldberg had been tipped to the sting by the bragging of the patient who had originally complained to the attorney general.
The complainant had boasted to friends of the doctor that law enforcement agents had the doctor under surveillance.
The investigation was terminated because Goldberg knew a sting was under way and broke off contact.
"I was satisfied after reviewing the transcripts and talking to the Attorney General's Office that they did not have enough for a criminal indictment," says Lajeunesse, a law school graduate.
Because the operation's cover had been blown, the attorney general referred the matter to the state medical board for disciplinary review.
In reality, Mark Goldberg is neither a friend nor a neighbor of Attorney General Grant Woods. The Woods family pediatrician, however, has a similar name: He is Dr. Arthur Goldberg.
When Deborah Vasquez quit the Attorney General's Office at the end of May 1995, she had many such "stories" to peddle about her former employers. At this late date, nearly a year after Vasquez first talked to the press about the "scandal" at the Attorney General's Office, not a single other Arizona reporter has proven as diligent as William Lajeunesse in checking out her titillating but often baseless claims.
An unquestioning press has repeated Vasquez's charges against the attorney general and his men as fast as Vasquez could level them.
County Attorney Richard Romley has used her allegations to haul witnesses before a grand jury in an effort to indict his political rival, Woods' second-in-command, Rob Carey.
Vasquez's dust devils swirled in newspapers at the very time that journalists were ignoring a far more important story: Romley's malfeasance in the investigation of Project SLIM, Governor Fife Symington's plan to streamline the state bureaucracy.
Romley's halfhearted probe of multimillion-dollar bid-rigging at Project SLIM avoided and ignored incriminating evidence and cleared the governor, his staff and his accountants of any wrongdoing.
Under Rob Carey's direction, the Attorney General's Office opened a second examination of the multimillion-dollar SLIM contracts. This time, prosecutors documented the largest case of white-collar fraud ever perpetrated on state government and Arizona taxpayers.
The very week that Carey and his lawyers announced that they had recovered nearly $800,000 in fines from the governor's accountants and deputy chief of staff for their role in the bid-rigging, Romley held a press conference to declare his intention to investigate Carey, based on Vasquez's scattershot accusations.
And the press bit, playing allegations of two-bit wrongdoing by Carey as though they were every bit as important as the multimillion-dollar bid-rigging Romley had ignored.
The county attorney could never have attempted such a bold, vindictive move if the press had not provided continuous protective cover, printing Vasquez's undocumented and often imaginary allegations without a trace of skepticism, treating her as a credible witness when there were many indications she was not.
The cost of such dilettante journalism has been incalculable.
Romley's staff has roamed the entire state of Arizona, expanding in unimaginable fashion upon Vasquez's flimsy allegations. In fact, Romley was still dragooning witnesses before his grand jury, hoping to find something, anything, that could be pinned upon Carey, when a settlement was announced this week.
In the settlement negotiated with Romley, the Attorney General's Office agreed to repay just over $30,000--including nearly $7,000 in interest and penalties--in trust funds allegedly mismanaged during a four-year period.
The agreement will see $12,000 set aside for minority scholarships; $17,000 reimbursed to the attorney general's Event Fund; and $4,000 paid to cover the expenses of Romley's investigation.
After nearly a year of Romley's top people rooting through the Attorney General's Office, at the same time the auditor general was also crawling all over Woods and Carey, the results are paltry.
Not a penny in taxpayer funds was wasted by the Attorney General's Office, and no evidence of Woods or Carey benefiting individually was uncovered; in fact, neither prosecutor will have to pay back any cash personally.
The worst that can be said is that they were not very diligent recordkeepers for funds that they had gone out and raised themselves.
While the $7,500 yearly average of "wrongdoing" out of the $54 million the Attorney General's Office handles annually might seem to a reasonable person to be a minuscule level of accounting irregularity, it was enough to put Carey's head on the chopping block.
Although Carey admitted no wrongdoing, his resignation was demanded by Romley and expected at press time.
So the Attorney General's Office has been needlessly crippled. Carey's public career has been unfairly vaporized. No significant wrongdoing has been shown.
Yet not a single editorial writer has asked of Mr. Romley: Have you no sense of decency?
When Deborah Vasquez quit her job at the Attorney General's Office, her exit strategy included a plan to destroy Rob Carey and Grant Woods.
As she packed up the personal items from her desk, she told a colleague that she would have her revenge against Carey.
"She kept saying to me as she got her things together that this was not the end of it," secretary Sherri Van Horsen recalls, "that he was going to pay. That she was gonna make him regret this.
"And as I walked her out to her car, she said something to the effect that she was going to embarrass him in front of his friends and family."
Vasquez fled the AG's Office after she was chastised by Carey for handling the kidnaping of a 5-year-old multiple amputee without informing anyone else at the office. Before handing in her resignation, however, Vasquez said she sought advice from Governor Fife Symington's staff. She wanted help finding a job, and she wanted someone to listen to her grievances against Carey.
Vasquez talked to the governor's staff just 48hours after Carey had recommended to Woods that Symington's top lieutenants be prosecuted for their roles in the Project SLIM scandal. The governor's staff knew full well that the investigation was coming to a head.
As Carey and his prosecutors tightened the noose on Symington and his bid-rigging cronies, fate handed the governor's staff a knife with which to cut the rope.
Vasquez said she was promptly hustled off toSymington's ally, County Attorney Richard Romley.
The heart of Vasquez's allegations concerned a trust fund in the Attorney General's Office that had been maintained by Carey.
Beginning in 1992, donations for the fund were solicited from large corporations and major law firms throughout the state. The monies paid for border conference seminars, staff luncheons, employee appreciation awards and civic affairs not included in the Legislature's annual appropriation of tax funds to the office.
At the end of May, Vasquez gave a statement to Romley regarding funding abuses allegedly committed by Carey. After referring her charges to the auditor general for investigation, the prosecutor sat on the case.
Like Symington, Romley knew the terrible judgment of the attorney general's investigation of Project SLIM was about to be announced. The explosion of that announcement would at least embarrass both officials. Symington's closest associates would be implicated in bid-rigging, and Romley's SLIM investigati>>>>>on would be shown as either incompetent or a whitewash.
With Deborah Vasquez, however, the county attorney could fight back; he had a hand grenade and would decide when to pull the pin.
Vasquez's statement was quickly leaked to the Mesa Tribune's Mark Flatten, who ran with the story on June 8 under the headline: "AG Misused Money, Former Aide Claims."
Beginning a pattern that would continue for nine months--until Carey's career was zipped into a body bag--Flatten's story would combine wild distortions and half-truths with good, old-fashioned journalism.
The tone of the media reports was captured in the opening paragraph of Flatten's account.
"A former administrative assistant to Attorney General Grant Woods' chief aide has accused his office of dipping into a Martin Luther King luncheon fund to bankroll an office retreat that included beer and a karaoke machine."
This suggestion--that a party-hearty attorney general was abusing a fund meant to provide minority scholarships--became the popular image of the Vasquez allegations throughout the ensuing coverage. That slant was solidified early on when the Arizona Republic's Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, Steve Benson, depicted the retreat as "Woods' Kegger."
The charge was untrue. No scholarship money had been misappropriated. And there were many reasons to question whether Vasquez was a reliable source for such damaging allegations--reasons the Valley press simply ignored.
Tellingly, reporters never questioned Vasquez's version of how and why she left the Attorney General's Office.
Recapping why Vasquez was unemployed, Flatten explained that she had gotten into trouble at the Attorney General's Office for personally handling a hostage situation.
In his first article, Flatten wrote that Vasquez had taken a note about the abduction of Anna Ott to Carey, while he was in a closed-door meeting with Woods and other top staff to decide whether to pursue Symington's associates in the SLIM case.
Flatten quoted Vasquez as saying the prosecutor "just glared at me like I was totally stupid for interrupting the meeting, and he threw that message down and just looked at me and never stopped."
Which isn't what happened.
In the ensuing months, Vasquez would give two other explanations for her actions in the Anna Ott abduction.
Yet, in the ten months since Vasquez departed the Attorney General's Office, there has not been a single article in the Arizona press reporting on her wildly diverging accounts of her own behavior during the hostage crisis.
This inconsistency, and the failure to report on it, is important.
The Anna Ott abduction is what provided Vasquez such a sympathetic posture from which to launch her allegations against Careyand Woods. As the heroine who saved a 5-year-old tot whose legs and arms had been amputated, Vasquez was above reproach. And the tale of her rescue of the child from drug-abusing kidnapers guaranteed that readers who otherwise might have turned the page would pay attention to small suspected abuses of an internal account in the Attorney General's Office.
The refusal of journalists to look squarely at Vasquez's truthfulness in regard to the kidnaping has proved critical to the humiliation of Carey and Woods.
Much of what Vasquez alleged about the misuse of the AG's trust fund was initially difficult to verify, because witnesses had been summoned into the secrecy of Romley's grand jury (though the truth is that few reporters even bothered to try checking Vasquez's story). There were numerous leaks meant to incriminate Carey in the fund dispute, but a reporter seeking independent corroboration of the attorney general's claims of innocence would have been stymied. The County Attorney's Office was not likely to leak testimony favorable to Woods or Carey, and grand jury witnesses are generally prohibited from repeating their confidential testimony.
Because of this secrecy, Vasquez's version of the kidnaping, which was not part of Romley's investigation of the attorney general's fund, should have served as the first litmus test of her credibility.
Had reporters checked, they would have been astounded at the sheer variety of stories Vasquez offered to explain her actions on May 16, 1995, the day when she, acting entirely on her own, resolved the kidnaping of Anna Ott.
After Flatten wrote his first article, Vasquez changed her story, contending she had not informed Carey about the kidnaping until the situation was resolved.
At that time, Vasquez said the note she had taken in to Carey during the SLIM meeting dealt with another matter entirely, and because her boss had been brusque, she was afraid to interrupt the SLIM meeting a second time. According to Vasquez, Carey was tied up in the SLIM meeting all day and unavailable for consultation.
So when the Oakland police called her about the Ott kidnaping, she said, she had no choice but to handle it herself.
Even this second attempt by Vasquez to correct the record is a distortion.
Nine witnesses who were either in the SLIM meeting or working alongside Vasquez said in interviews for this story that Carey and the others took repeated breaks throughout the day, including a lengthy lunch in which Carey and other supervisors were available to the staff.
For whatever reason, Deborah Vasquez, a mere secretary, simply refused to let anyone know that she was involved in a high-stakes attempt to rescue a kidnap victim.
The criminal prosecutors in the Attorney General's Office and their licensed investigators approach a kidnaping as an extremely volatile situation requiring judgment, not good intentions.
Any cowboy with a badge could have pulled the kidnapers over, resulting in a 5year-old hostage, who was incapable of fleeing, caught in a crossfire.
John D. MacDonald, the director of Intergovernmental Affairs for the office of the attorney general, sits in an office across from where Vasquez was working. On May 16, he was at his desk and not part of the Project SLIM conference. He was available to help.
"Plus, the investigative division is right down the hall," says MacDonald. Many of them are former police officers.
"The first thing I'd have done, the only thing I'd have done, was give it to them."
Nor is this explanation 20-20 hindsight. It was office policy that such cases be routed to the criminal division.
This perspective was never reported in the press.
On September 13, four months after the Ott rescue, Vasquez changed her story a third time during a hearing on whether she would receive unemployment benefits.
Last week, she repeated this new, third version of the kidnap rescue.
Vasquez now claims that she did not act on her own, but sought direction from the top. Vasquez said she asked the advice of the head of the attorney general's criminal division, Michael Cudahy, and he gave her the direction to proceed on May 16.
Cudahy, on the record, denied any such meeting ever occurred, let alone that he had advised such a reckless course of action.
Vasquez will tell you that all the attorney general was actually concerned about was milking the kidnaping for publicity.
MacDonald, who talked to both Carey and Woods when they first learned about the abduction, says just the opposite is true.
"The last thing they wanted was publicity," says MacDonald. "That couple was armed and considered dangerous. What if a cop had been shot? What if the child had been injured? Here was the attorney general with a secretary conducting an investigation.
"Woods and Carey weren't angry, they were incredulous."
Though it pulled on one's heartstrings, the Anna Ott kidnaping was merely the 'Oh my God' background thread from which the other charges in Flatten's first story unspooled.
There were two substantive allegations in Flatten's article that would haunt the ensuing news coverage for months.
The first charge: Rob Carey obstructed a Department of Justice investigation by brazenly withholding, according to Flatten, a "secret cache of files" from an FBI investigation of Grant Woods' father.
The records supposedly involved Joe Woods, a local builder, and Good Samaritan Hospital. The files were stored in a locked filing cabinet of Carey's and discovered by Vasquez.
The second charge was that scholarship funds had been diverted from the Martin Luther King Jr. luncheon to pay for the attorney general's besotted retreat.
Both accusations were wide of the mark.
The first charge was made public after Vasquez told the County Attorney's Office she had discovered a key to Carey's personal filing cabinet when the prosecutor was out of the office. Opening those files, she found folders marked "Joe Woods."
To avoid the appearance of snooping, Vasquez explained that she'd only intended to make sure that the files in that particular cabinet were properly ordered.
This explanation shocked her co-workers.
Reached in Chicago, Michelle DeCosta had vivid memories of what she found when she replaced Vasquez.
"The most basic files weren't there, internal memos, court orders. Nothing. It was all just stuffed inside credenzas and boxes," recalls DeCosta. "From May until September, 90 percent of my time was devoted to creating files out of that mess."
Vasquez stuck with her explanation that she only wanted to create order when she opened Carey's files.
When Vasquez unlocked her boss's personal filing cabinet and saw the label "Joe Woods" on folders, by her own admission, she instantly slammed the drawer shut without looking inside them. Vasquez said she did not examine the folders because she was afraid Carey might return and see what she was doing.
Although she never learned the contents of the files labeled "Joe Woods," Vasquez nonetheless told the County Attorney's Office that there had been a conspiracy to withhold those records from the Department of Justice.
In fact, the folders in Carey's personal filing cabinet stemmed from a civil-court case in which Carey represented Grant Woods' father when Carey was still in private practice. The case was resolved before Grant Woods took public office.
The files had nothing whatsoever to do with the FBI probe, an investigation that, in any case, found no wrongdoing by Woods or his father.
You might think that Vasquez's own admission in her statement to Romley--that she had not seen the contents of the Joe Woods files--would have given pause to a journalist. It did not.
Flatten explained that, substantiated or not, if it was in her statement, it was newsworthy.
Flatten's story went on at great length about the mysterious files and then allowed Carey a one-sentence denial of impropriety.
The second charge of consequence in Flatten's article--that minority scholarship monies were diverted for boozy parties--was no less alarming and just as misleading as the "secret cache of files" allegation.
The funds in question underwrote the costs of an annual luncheon in Tucson that Woods first organized when the state of Arizona refused to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday.
The Attorney General's Office urged business leaders to fund a meal at which minority students would sit down with lawyers, listen toa guest speaker and honor the memory of Dr. King.
Carey maintains--and there are fund-raising letters as well as witnesses to support the contention--that the monies raised were earmarked for the attorney general's trust fund, which included, but was not limited to, supporting the MLK luncheon.
Others disagree, claiming donations should have been limited to the civil rights affair.
Judge Cecil Patterson, a former assistant at the Attorney General's Office and the driving force behind the luncheon, always believed the King funds should have been inviolate.
"Carey and I disagreed about how those funds should have been treated," says Patterson.
But Patterson worked for Carey, who had set up the Event Fund which held the King money and numerous other sources of fund raising.
And Carey was adamant that the donations be accepted for a variety of purposes.
Tom Augherton, chief of administration for the attorney general, says he witnessed Carey instructing fund raisers to solicit for the Event Fund at large, not just one particular function.
The largest contributor associated with the MLK luncheon is David Wright of the Arizona Bank.
The confusion within the Attorney General's Office is reflected in Wright's checks, which are made out to both the luncheon and the Event Fund.
"I am getting old and can't remember everything," explains Wright. "I am unable to remember discussing surpluses in the Martin Luther King account to be transferred to other purposes within the Attorney General's Office. Had I received that request, I would not have had a problem in supporting other good government activities of the Attorney General's Office."
This disagreement, though petty in scope, armed County Attorney Romley with just enough leverage to launch one of his office's longest and most expensive investigations, a probe whose target was the prosecutor's political rival Rob Carey.
Once Arizona belatedly recognized the MLK holiday, the attorney general continued to sponsor the civil rights luncheon, largely because Tucson itself had no official celebration.
Scholarships for minority students were an afterthought, added one year after the luncheons began. They were a minuscule $1,500 of the overall $15,000 budget for the lunch.
In any case, when Deborah Vasquez raised her questions, the scholarships had already been distributed after the 1995 affair.
Vasquez's allegations notwithstanding, not a single penny in scholarship money was diverted to the attorney general's retreat, an event that provides staff with continuing legal education.
In fact, even a skeptical review of spending from the attorney general's trust fund would conclude only that there had been a short-term shift of a small amount of money from one office event to another. Neither the MLK luncheon nor the minority scholarship program was actually shorted of money.
Carey explained in the earliest articles on the dispute that the 1995 MLK luncheon had a small carry-forward balance on the books. As in each of the previous years, Carey's people would need to go out and raise more funds for the next luncheon and round of scholarships, but that was almost a year down the road.
In the meantime, part of the balance left from the 1995 MLK luncheon--a balance in the trust fund that supported many sideline activities of the AG's Office--was used to pay a pressing past-due bill from the office retreat.
Despite the steady press references to beer and karaoke, that now-notorious attorney general's retreat bore little resemblance to MTV's Spring Break.
All lawyers in Arizona are required to attend classroom sessions on a yearly basis as part of the State Bar's Continuing Legal Education program.
Rather than leave it to his staffers to attend education classes on their own, Woods put together a yearly program that offered accredited classes during a two-day period. Even lunch breaks were taken up with speakers such as Arizona's Supreme Court justices.
The retreat topics included such toe tappers as "Oral Appellate Advocacy: Practical Learning Experience," with judges Frederick J. Martone, Philip G. Espinosa and Jefferson L. Langford sitting on the panel with two assistant attorneys general.
Yes, some beer was consumed in the evening and, for some inexplicable reason relating to lawyer morale, a $250 karaoke machine was used one night.
But when questioned, the manager at the Tucson hotel where the retreat was held remembered the prosecutors as one of the quietest groups she'd ever hosted.
"I went to all the functions," recalls Pam Traficanti, with Ventana Canyon resort. "I know how hard they worked. It was not a kegger. Nobody got rowdy. And they consumed much less alcohol than most groups. On a scale of one to ten, they were barely a two or a three in terms of partying."
And all of the prosecutors who attended wrote out checks to the attorney general's trust fund, the same account that held the MLK luncheon monies. The checks were meant to cover the entire cost of the retreat.
In 1995, however, two things happened that had never occurred before: The MLK luncheon paid for itself and even had a small surplus for the next year; and, for the first time, the AG's retreat showed a slight deficit.
When unanticipated bills from the retreat came in, Carey authorized their payment from the attorney general's trust fund, which contained both the MLK and the retreat monies.
Despite the impression from news accounts that tens of thousands of dollars were thus squandered, a final accounting showed a total in late bills from the retreat of $2,600.
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After Flatten's first story, others dribbled out in the Tribune during the next month. No one else in the media paid much attention.
Then, on July 11, a bombshell went off in the Arizona press.
The attorney general announced that Governor Symington's accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand, now admitted improper contact with the governor's deputy chief of staff, George Leckie, during the process that awarded Coopers a $1.6 million Project SLIM contract. While denying it had violated the law, the giant accounting firm agreed to pay the state a whopping $725,000 to avoid further civil or criminal prosecution. The Big Six accounting firm also agreed to forgo any work for state government for two years. Leckie later agreed to a similar settlement with the attorney general.
The import of the story was enormous.
The press made little effort to explain just how important it was.


text:
Problem with FrSky DHT DIY and D6FR/D8R-II receiver
I wonder if someone can provide suggestions for Range Check with FrSky D6FR and D8R-II receiver.
I installed a DHT DIY kit to my Turnigy 9X transmitter. The main part of the kit is in the module room on the transmitter.
A Turnigy 12A ESC and a 8g servo were connecting to a D6FR for a range check. They were placed on a wood plate. The D6FR was successfully bind with the DHT a few days before the range check. The servo is connected to channel 1 (Aileron) of the receiver. The transmitter was turned on then the receiver was connected to a battery. The transmitter was changed into range-check mode.I had a friend moving the Aileron stick when I was holding the wood plate and walking away from the transmitter. The servo stopped moving when I was just around 15 to 20 meters (I did it several times) away from the transmitter. I also did the range check with another two D8R-II receivers but got similar result. According to the instruction, the effective distance should be 1/30 of the full range (1.5Km), around 50 meters. The signal was not lost even at 150 meters (that's was the farthest distance that I could be away from the transmitter) in normal mode.
Is it a valid range-check test? If it is, what would be wrong, the Tx or Rx?
Any help is appreciated.
I would let alone the receiver without anything conductive "big as my belly" around, and move the radio. You should get at least 30 meters, I would investigate any closer distance.
What are the antennas position during test ? For Tx and Rx too.
If you get the same result with both receivers, the culprit must be at Tx side, and I would suspect the Tx antenna or maybe cable to DHT board. Can you unscrew and check the central pin if not broken of too short ?
Do you have any other spare antennas to replace ?
I should re-do the range check
The antenna of Tx was almost vierticcally pointing to the sky. Both antennas of Rx were pointing to the Tx. I just recalled they should be 90 degreed to each other and neither should point to Tx.
I also did it inside my house and got better result. But it could because the singals were bouncing from the walls to the Rx.
Double check both Tx and DHT antennas. They looked all right. I will re-do it when it is dry outside.
Re-tested with two D8R-II and two DF6R
I have re-done the range check with two DF6R and two D8R-II and got good result.
The Rx were placed on a wood plate. The wood plate was on top of a foam box about 1 meter high.
A 8g servo was connecting to channel 1 (Aileron) of the Rx and a 2s, 260mAh battery was connecting to a 12A ESC and then to channel 4 (Throttle) of the Rx.
All Rx were bind to Turniby 9X before hand.
The two antennas of the Rx were pointing to different directions, not to the Tx either.Tx antenna was pointing vertically to the sky. Tx and Rx were power on and Tx was changed to Range Check mode.I hold the Tx moving Aileron stick while walking away from the Rx. Clear strait line between Tx and Rx manitained all the time.
And here is the result.
DF6R : The first quick beep started at around 50m distance. Servo arm was still moving with no sign of stopping.
D8R-II : The first quick beep started at around 30m distance. Servo arm was still mvoing. At 50m, same result, quick beep but servo arm was still moving.
I did not go beyond 50m. If the power of Range Check is 1/30 of the normal operation, the Rx would still receive singals at 1.5km distance, which is way behyond my current flying range.
Here is what I have learned.
1. Rx antenna should not point to the Tx. Tx antenna should vertically point to the sky.
2. Walk away with Tx, not Rx.
3. Place the Rx about the same height as your Tx.
4. Even the Tx beep quickly, Rx may still receives the signals. Always test with a servo.
I'm happy now.
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text:
Red Robin Gourmet Burgers Inc. (RRGB - Free Report) , a chain of casual dining restaurants, is set to debut its first unit in Portland area, Maine, shortly. The new restaurant will be at 800 Gallery Blvd. across from the new Walmart, and will offer gourmet burgers served with Bottomless Steak Fries, a variety of salads, entrees, soups and wraps made with the fresh ingredients.
Given customers' inclination toward organic and fresh food these days, we believe integrity in ingredients will be a crucial factor for traffic growth. Apart from this, there will be other sales enhancement initiatives like a guest loyalty program called Red Royalty.
However, Colorado-based Red Robin will likely face stiff competition in that area because of the presence of several renowned eateries including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. (CMG - Free Report) .
Red Robin currently operates 464 restaurants across the United States and Canada. The company is also expanding through its franchise strategy, as it reduces capital requirement and ensures a stable growth profile. Currently, the restaurant base is 70% company operated and 30% franchised. To further encourage franchising, the company will also charge less franchisee fees from existing franchisees if they build new restaurants.
The company expects to roll out 13 to 15 restaurants in 2012, including both full-sized restaurants and smaller prototype units. Small-size restaurants will likely drive growth in non-traditional locations and also improve return on invested capital.
Red Robin targets investment in the range of $50–$60 million in 2012 toward unit development. It also plans to increase investments in equipment and in store remodeling.
Red Robin currently has a Zacks #2 Rank, which implies a Buy rating over the short term. We reiterate our long-term Outperform recommendation on the stock.
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text:
A question and answer session with hedge fund manager Eric Sprott:
Are we near the bottom of the decline in gold and what timeframe do you see for its appreciation to reach the old highs and possibly push through to new highs? Craig
Craig, I firmly believe that we reached the bottom on June 28th and that gold should double from that bottom within the next 12 months. So by next summer, I think that the price of gold will have made new highs and stand around $2,400 per ounce.
What is your view on the junior mining and exploration space? What has to occur in the mining sector to see a turn-around in the junior space? Anonymous
Given my outlook on gold prices, this sector will be explosive. The continuation of the gold bull market will lead the junior gold mining stocks higher by many hundreds of per cents, just like it did during the 2008 recovery. By the way, since hitting the bottom on June 28, gold has rebounded by 12 per cent while gold miners have gone up by about 25 per cent.
Hello Mr. Sprott, I think your analysis of what is happening with fiat currency is bang on. I am wondering how do you think the U.S. Government can ever get out of this catch-22 they are in with their debt? If they let the interest rate rise by stopping QE (quantitative easing) then they will pay more interest on their debt. If the pay more interest on their debt, they will have a bigger deficit. Will they print money until the reset button is pressed? When? What will that mean for the average Joe? Kyle Brown
Mr. Brown, you are exactly right, and this is why I think that the Fed will remain accommodative for a very long period of time. However, the official debt is only the tip of the iceberg and, as we discussed in the most recent Markets at a Glance, longer-term benefits such as social security and medical care will have to be cut as well. The promises made by governments are too generous and cannot be kept. Not just for the average Joe but for everyone, I think we should expect less from the government and prepare to fend more for ourselves. Money printing can hide financial problems for a while, but it can't provide tangible services to citizens.
Why do you think the bullion banks have so consistently shorted the gold market? Were one or more, in your view, acting as agents for the Fed to prevent gold from being seen as a secure store of value and a preferred alternative to the U.S. dollar? Do you have conclusive evidence to back your opinion? Derek White
Mr. White, there is strong evidence that Central Banks have surreptitiously colluded with bullion banks (see our Sprott Thoughts article on the topic here) and sold their gold in the market. This is further evidenced by recent comments at the Bank of England and the ridiculously long delays to repatriate German gold from the U.S. Furthermore, I would refer you to the Gold Anti-trust Action Committeewebsite, which discusses those issues at length, and our Markets at a Glance article series "Do Western Central Banks Have Any Gold Left???". (Part 3 can be seen here.)
Some prominent analysts claim that the Commitment of Traders reports from the U.S. CFTC are giving very bullish signals concerning the future direction of gold and silver prices. Do you agree– and why or why not? Andrew
Yes, I agree with this analysis and further details can be found in my recent article here. Basically, we have seen a complete reversal of the situation in the futures market: commercial dealers covering their shorts, speculators selling (going short), and most importantly, COMEX inventories declining. The most important part of the equation is the covering of shorts by commercial dealers. That means they are no longer supplying (paper) gold to the market, which was depressing the price.
Continue reading the Q&A.
A question and answer session with hedge fund manager Eric Sprott:


text:
Mohamed Adam and Leyla Mire would have been the first Somali students at Augsburg College to study abroad. The school even secured scholarship money to help pay for their trips.
But their visa applications hit a snag last week when the documents didn't arrive. Augsburg officials called the Egyptian consulate in Chicago to speed up the process.
On Sunday, Adam and Mire went to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport with the rest of their class, hoping they could fly to Cairo and receive a special visa after arriving. They're not U.S. citizens, so they rely on refugee travel documents that are similar to passports.
At the ticket counter, Delta-Northwest employees told the two students that they couldn't board the plane without the visas.
Neither student wanted to talk on tape for this story.
Mohamed Adam said he's still trying to figure out why the Egyptian government doesn't want him in the country. He said he would like to think it has nothing to do with the ongoing U.S. investigation into a possible terror link between the Twin Cities and his home country, but he's still grasping for answers. The FBI is investigating whether about a dozen young men from Minnesota are fighting with an extremist group in Somalia.
Leah Spinosa de Vega runs Augsburg's study-abroad program. She says she feels heartbroken.
"We're really disappointed, saddened -- and angered, too," Spinosa de Vega said. "It's not fair they didn't get to go. They're not a threat to security for anyone. They deserve to have this opportunity. They did everything they could to make it happen, and so did we. [But] Egypt said, 'No.'"
Spinosa de Vega said the Egyptian consul in Chicago personally called her Monday to apologize and deliver the news. He didn't offer a reason for the rejection, but said that officials in Cairo needed to do a security clearance before approving the students' visas.
The consulate in Chicago did not return a message requesting an interview for this story.
But a third Somali Augsburg College student, who recently became a U.S. citizen, was able to travel to Cairo for the study-abroad program. In all, about two dozen students and faculty members signed up for the three-week trip, which overlaps with President Obama's visit in early June. The students who made it to Egypt will receive two class credits for their trip.
This week, Mohamed Adam would have given a presentation to his peers on an Egyptian synagogue that he researched in depth ahead of time. Instead, the college senior said he'll try to find a job, save money, and maybe plan a trip somewhere else.


text:
|2004-09-08, 14:52
|Link #1
Junior Member
Join Date: Sep 2004
Latest Episode : Episode 100 [ Containing Spoilers ]
So im sitting here watching the 100th episode of the Naruto series wich haven't been very good compared to the manga at this point, alot of new episode additions wich is just totaly stupid and they are drawn very badly for some reason.
But now to the point : WHY THE !"#/%&#"¤/%&&/ did you see Sasuke standing in the end next to Kakashi with a big smile on his face, cheering for Tsunade beeing the 5th hokage. As I know in the manga Naruto and Sasuke was supposed to have a minor battle wich Kakashi broke up. But instead they made all this BS about Lee wich should come AFTER Naruto and Sasuke having a fight, more towards the time when Sasuke takes of with the 4 Sand's. And the next episode wont contain anything near the Naruto vs. Sasuke battle, no, no, now they are going on a mission? I mean, what the hell, I've read quite many mangas wich then have become anime's, such as Love Hina, GTO, etc etc, and they have NEVER, not EVER strayed this much from the main dish. What the hell are they thinking the ones who make the anime, will the anime become more popular when they remove great battles wich people have been looking forward to after reading the manga chapters. Don't know if its got anything to do with the Naruto movie beeing in theaters, but honestly, this is fkd up
|2004-09-08, 14:58
|Link #2
Senior Member
Episode's topics are usually made by Vicious... and you should know about the upcoming filler arc to put some more distance between the manga and anime. Sasuke wasn't cheering either, he was leaning against a post watching. Being Sasuke.
And the build up for Lee is good actully, it's nice to see some more indepth views on his choice of weather to do it or not... and in the manga its stupid he's up and running as soon as the operation is over.
And there have been many filler arcs in on going series... One Piece is going through one right now (although the subbers havn't caught up). Everything in the manga is still coming, just not for a while.
|2004-09-08, 15:36
|Link #3
Destroyer of Dreams
|2004-09-08, 15:56
|Link #5
Senior Member
Fortunatly some guest writer has been brung in for the filler arc aparenlty... if memeory serves its the guy who wrote for cowboy bebop or something similar.
But this could still work... Naruto could save Sasuke and again show his true powers and make Sasuke feel even more inferior or something forcing him to go off on the current manga arc.
But dont get pissed of about something you havn't even watched yet, for all we know the filler arc could be really good, just because it's a filler doesn't mean shit, it could still be good. The Manga is what the Naruto series has gone by very well, the filler arc isn't going to kill it... One piece went through one already and is on one now again.
|2004-09-08, 16:35
|Link #8
Junior Member
Join Date: Sep 2004
"Its not going to stop anytime so DEAL with it. You think this is bad, talk to any die hard Rurouni Kenshin fan, they will laugh in your face and smack you to the ground. As far as animes straying from the manga, read Full Metal Alchemist then watch the anime. The stories are different, and they are both very good. However the Naruto anime writers aren't that good, so don't expect the same."
I don't care if a RK fan would smack me to the ground and call me an idiot or whatever. I just think that Naruto, wich USED to be a very entertaining anime and manga (manga is still very entertaining) The Naruto serie as it is now, have aired 4 filler-episodes (including the one next week) and possibly another after next week. Naruto was great from episode #1 - 87 or something like that, but then the wierd drawing suddenly started, the characters eyes pointing everywhere and they look all round in their faces and make strange gestures. The anime started to get strange around episode 90 or something like that, then they started looking all deformed.
Why do I care? I love the Naruto anime, not at the moment because they are not going along with the manga, and putting in fillers to make the anime 'last longer' or whatever. Adding episodes and making up stupid stuff wont please anyone, besides, the filler episodes so far have just been crap, nothing entertaining about them at all (not that a persons life on the line should be entertaining (Lee)).
Anyway, thats my 2 cents.l
|2004-09-08, 16:36
|Link #9
Join Date: May 2004
Age: 30
"Rasegan," the only anime series that follow a manga but don't indulge in filler episodes/arcs are ones that have a defined end, which Naruto definitely does not. Surely you understand that the anime team would catch up to the manga rather quickly if they only covered manga content. Hell, filling an episode with even 2 chapters would be difficult in many cases without filler(they already pointlessly prolong fight scenes with dialogue just to take up more time). Go look up how Rurouni Kenshin met its end, and you'll know what happens to a series that catches up to the manga. Either the filler goes in now, or it goes in after the next manga arc and it will have to be much longer. There's no point complaining about it.
Last edited by Zek; 2004-09-08 at 17:44.
|2004-09-08, 17:05
|Link #10
Destroyer of Dreams
|2004-09-08, 17:18
|Link #12
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2004
Seriously though, filler is filler. Naruto's filler hasn't been god-awful (sometimes it left much to be desired, but let's look at this; Naruto's filler hasn't become RK-ish yet) and at many times, has actually been pretty good. Even at times when it went against the manga (filler ep before this one, Tsunade punching Oro, and filler during the Neji fight), it was interesting to debate which scenario was better. It'd be best if you calmed down and just numbed your brain for a bit during the upcoming filler or you may rage yourself into a psychiatric ward.
Btw, I thought this was a discussion on episode 100? Who said you guys could get off-topic? *claps hands* Back to work, people!
-Yusef "The B.A.T." Pittman
|2004-09-08, 18:10
|Link #14
Join Date: Jun 2004
|2004-09-08, 19:10
|Link #16
Senior Member
|2004-09-08, 19:22
|Link #17
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2004
Age: 39
As for this episode, I thought it was pretty good. But I agree with others that some stuff will need to occur after this filler arc to get the character back to where they were originally in the manga for the next arc to get off on the right foot.
|2004-09-08, 19:36
|Link #18
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2004
About the topic, manga readers should have a thread to discuss about the anime. Since they can't really discuss it in 'greater detail' in the episode thread. So a episode discussion for manga readers won't be a bad idea. That would also clean up the regular episode thread.
Yes. The more and more fillers Naruto has... the worse and worse the series gets... So the filler seemed to have screwed things up. I won't be surprised if it diverts from the manga and even if it finishes before the manga itself ends.
|2004-09-08, 19:55
|Link #19
Senior Member
There has only been one bad filler episode so far... #97 i believe, the "misunderstanding" was lame, yeah. But everyone seems to have enjoyed 99 and this 100. If you don't like it then you can just stop watching Naruto till its over like some people have said they'll be doing. Just because it's a filler doesn't make it worse than a manga storyline, just makes it different. And I'm sure they can get i back on track, maybe even send Sasuke to the hospital again once it draws to an end.
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text:
A Fragile Trust
This film reveals the shocking story of Jayson Blair, the most infamous serial plagiarist of our time, and how he unleashed the massive scandal that rocked The New York Times and the entire world of journalism. As an important chapter in the history of journalism, the Jayson Blair scandal is also a complex story about power, ethics, representation, race, and accountability in the mainstream media.
Aired: 05/06/14
Expired: 05/13/14Video has closed captioning.


text:
Director Quentin Tarantino has said that his Oscar-winning film Django Unchained could have a new life on the small screen as a miniseries.
USA Today reports that Tarantino told reporters at a Cannes Film Festival press conference: "I have about 90 minutes' worth of material with Django [that] hasn't been seen."
He continued: "My idea, frankly, is to cut together a four-hour version of Django Unchained... But I wouldn't show it like a four-hour movie.
"I would cut it up into hour chapters. Like a four-part miniseries. And show it on cable television. Show it like an hour at a time, each chapter."
Tarantino added: "We'd use all the material I have and it wouldn't be an endurance test. It would be a miniseries. And people love those."


text:
This Is One Powerful Card
This is the card to carry. It has all the great features of a credit card- flexibility, worldwide acceptance, safety. Yet it acts as a check, with purchases or ATM withdrawals taken directly from your checking account.
It's easy to use
To make a purchase, just present your LSB CheckCard card from
La Salle State Bank. Your purchase amount will automatically be deducted from your checking account. Every transaction will appear on your monthly statement with the detailed information you need: amounts, dates and locations.
It's convenient
It's accepted the world over- anywhere you spot the familiar MasterCard logo. And if you ever need quick cash, you can visit any one of the 368,000 financial institutions or ATMs worldwide. It's that easy. The LSB CheckCard is also ideal for hotel reservations, car rental, and even grocery store and department store purchases.
It's safe
The LSB CheckCard is safer than carrying cash, easier than carrying a checkbook. And if your card is lost or stolen, you aren't liable for unauthorized purchases. Just call 1-815-223-8800 as soon as you realize your card is missing.
It's a great concept!
Take advantage of a whole new approach to checking.


text:
Ever heard of Ngurah Rai? I bet not. How about Denpasar? Maybe heard it once before? Where do you think it is? Alright, it's in the title of the post, so let's not play games. But seriously, why don't they just call the airport Bali International? At least certain flight booking sites like Kayak allow you to search for "Bali". But then, there are no other commercial airports on this island of the Indonesian archipelago anyway.
But since I'm supposed to write a review of an airport I shouldn't muck around with naming conventions too much I guess. So, let's look closely at Denpasar International airport (IATA: DPS). In fact it's nowhere near Denpasar either. Alright, alright. I'll stop it. Hmm, what can I say? The airport doesn't offer too much actually. Bali, after all, isn't particularly on the cutting edge of economic development. Don't get me wrong, the charming island is doing fine but it still has that "2nd world" feel about it. Maybe that's exactly why it attracts Millions of tourists each year.
Most of us would probably first arrive in Bali before we depart. What I mean is, the arrival procedure is probably the thing that's going to be of interest to you first. And what a procedure it is! Fresh off the plane and bursting with holiday energy you first need to join the queue to pay the entry visa (make sure you bring US$ 25 in cash per person). With the visa voucher you then queue for the actual immigration officer. Check which line is the quickest before you spend 15 minutes looking at the queue next to you moving past swiftly. After that it's straight forward: find the luggage carousel, pick up your luggage and head towards the taxi counter outside the terminal building and off you go on your Balinese holiday.
Leaving the country requires, you guessed it, another queue and more cash payments. They call it "airport service fee" and it comes in the amount of Rp 150,000 per person (about US$ 16). So don't spend all your Rupiahs before you head back to the airport or you will have to pay a penalty exchange rate at one of the conveniently located little exchange stalls right in front of the service fee counter.
Once you're in the inside of the terminal, you will probably still have some time to kill as most airlines require you to check-in 2 hours prior to your departure time. So, let's look at my list of things to do:
- Check out the funniest McDonald's outlet ever (a tiny pushcart with a menu)
- Visit the toilets (well you probably are going to do that anyway) but if you can, err if you're a man that is, check out the fish tanks above the urinals
- Get a shot of Illy coffee close to gates 5 and 6
- You MUST finish you heavenly holiday with a final and oh so affordable Balinese massage at one of several massage outlets (e.g. the one towards gate 7,8,9)
- Why not buy yourself access to the Garuda Indonesia airline lounge for Rp. 100,000 (about US$ 11)
- Grab a Ku De Ta CD to remind you of your partying at Bali's most famous beach club
|Airport Name
|Denpasar Ngurah Rai International Airport
|IATA Code
[Picture from Flickr – some rights reserved]


text:
Mercedes-Benz Pays Homage to the E-Class
Mercedes-Benz recently paraded some of its classic and existing cars to pay tribute to the rich and colorful history of the E-Class. The event was held at the Sindelfingen plant of Mercedes in Germany where the E-Class models are produced. The "Mercedes-Benz E-Class" range name only officially surfaced in 1993. The E-Class badge was used in the facelifted version of the W124. However, the DNA of the car goes way back to 1953. In that era existed the Mercedes-Benz (W120) Ponton 180. It was a midsize sedan carrying a 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine. The car is characterized by its exotic look and a bit rounded frame as most of the ponton cars… Continue Reading »


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Flash Draw Created Dec 26, 2008 470 x 338px Unless noted Copyright 2008 SPIDER 08.
We encourage you to submit a comment and let the artist know what you think of this drawing. Please log in or join to post a comment.
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mingu Dec 27, 2008
nice colors and design! :)
blackbird666999 Dec 27, 2008
so cool logo , nice work 5/5
tishypoo Dec 26, 2008
yeah!!! RMD!!!
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Curvy Kate Moonlight Tankini Swim Top CS8006
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Lucky Star: Madonna's Debut Album, 30 Years On
Matthew Lindsay
, June 13th, 2013 03:13
Matthew Lindsay studies the blonde's ambition to become one of the biggest stars of the 80s with her self-titled album of 1983
Blane [Andrew McArthy]: "I dunno, Madonna's pretty deep..."
Andie [Molly Ringwald]: "I know but she has such great style"
(A Record store exchange in John Hughes' Pretty In Pink)
Disco didn't die with the mass record burning at Chicago's Comiskey Park in 1979. Its glitterball merely splintered into myriad directions. It was incorporated once more by soul/R&B (the Chic-produced Ross album Diana, Michael Jackson's Thriller). It rubbed shoulders with its supposed arch nemesis, punk (Blondie, Donna Summer-fans PiL). In the UK, its fingerprints were all over the synth pop boom (Mark II Human League went further than PiL, they wanted to be Donna Summer). In New York, a city so integral to disco's evolution, the emerging hip-hop scene adapted its grooves (the Chic-referencing Sugarhill Gang).
The decade's hyperactive mingling of styles even produced a Quasimodo variant, known as Mutant (Quango Quango, ESG, The Contortions). Larry Levan was one of New York's most committed disco descendants, both as a DJ at The Paradise Garage and as part of proto-house combo, The Peech Boys. Far from being merely the 4/4 'one stroke' caress George Clinton reduced it to, disco had, from its very inception, contained multitudes. But by the late 70s everything from weddings and soundtracks to Ethel Merman was getting discofied. Despite a possible racist/homophobic streak to the 'disco sucks' movement, it needed a reality check. Nobody revived disco and guaranteed its survival more than Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone. Her self-titled debut, released in the US in July 1983, distilled many of the genre's disparate strands into one, seamless, fizz-pop package.
Madonna came to New York in the late 70s from Rochester, Michigan. Initially she was to be a dancer, studying under the tutelage of Pearl Lang, "New York's Martha Graham". Her new instructor had got Madonna a coat check job at The Russian Tea Rooms (across the pond, fellow 80s icon-to-be Boy George was doing the same at Blitz). Dance provided Madonna with a sense of discipline and expression, and back in Michigan, her original teacher/mentor Christopher Flynn had taken her to her first gay club. It showed her "another side of life", and both the gay subculture and club-life would prove vital to her later success.
Music soon replaced dance and she quit Lang's classes. She met two brothers, Dan and Ed Gilroy, and became the drummer in their band, the Ska/Two Tone-influenced, The Breakfast Club. She moved into a disused synagogue in Queens with then boyfriend Dan, who showed her the open E tuning on a guitar. She began song-writing and grew increasingly eager to move away from the drum kit to head centre stage. During the next couple of years, she underwent a fitful pre-fame apprenticeship, a little like Bowie's 60s in London - indeed, Ziggy Stardust had been a favourite of the teenage Madonna. Any avenue was explored in pursuit of the big time.
Ciccone went to Paris as a back-up dancer for Patrick Hernandez. There were movie roles, among them the pseudo-arthouse skin flick A Certain Sacrifice and Artificial Light. The latter saw her 'rapping' a la Blondie's 'Rapture'. The dialogue laid her world-view bare: "I'll do anything for money", an early glimpse of the future Material Girl devoid of all vestige of irony.
Soon, Madonna became a permanent fixture at the city's Midtown Music Building, fronting the band, Emmy (her nickname), penning Pretenders-style songs ('Laugh To Keep Myself From Crying') with former Michigan beau, Steve Bray. Before long she caught the attention of Camille Barbone, of Gotham Management, who swiftly sacked her band (Bray was retained) and began grooming her for pop stardom. The results were a mish-mash of then popular female singers.
Her look was a Pat Benatar/Olivia Newton John clone, while songs like 'I Want You' were catchy but unremarkable. What Madonna did learn from this period was how to hone a hook from a variety of styles, a versatility that would serve her well. The lyrics from one Barbone-era song, 'Get Up' evidenced a relentless tenacity and a desire to win at all costs. Not the most gifted singer or musician, she nevertheless possessed astounding drive.
More exciting things were happening away from Barbone's manufactured vision. At the time, New York's fertile club scene thrived on cross-cultural exchange. The worlds of art, fashion & music all collided at places like Danceteria, The Roxy and The Mudd Club. Everything was up for grabs, as disco, punk & hip-hop all merged. Graffiti, the new street pop art, embodied the spirit of the age: DIY, breaking down the barriers between high and low. The downtown elite fraternised with young artists from Harlem and The Bronx. The city's credo, for a time, was a Warhol/Sly Stone amalgam: "Everybody is a star."
"You could wake up one day and say you wanted to be an artist or musician and be one," claimed Fab Five Freddy, the hip-hop polymath immortalized in Blondie's 'Rapture'. While the rest of the States burned under Reagan, New York, forever that island unto itself, merrily fiddled. To quote Tom Tom Club, it was a time of "fun, natural fun".
Disco and punk had made significant advances for women culturally too. Disco may have still been dominated by male master-minds such as Moroder, Cerrone and Tom Moulton but Donna Summer's 'Love To Love You Baby' had aestheticised female desire with its multiple, orgasmic moans (former porn star Andrea True Connection would do likewise with 'More, More, More'). Punk went further, with its surfeit of female-fronted bands and strong female voices.
Madonna was at the epicentre of this new scene, frequenting the clubs (she claimed people threw drinks at her as she danced to the Human League's 'Don't You Want Me' at Danceteria). Yet the arbiters of cool in this demi-monde usually found her a little too pushy, too transparently keen to get ahead, to embrace her fully. She briefly dated artist Basquiat and befriended artist Keith Haring. Soon she realised that this was the pulse where her finger should be. Behind Barbone's back and with Bray in tow, she began recording an alternative four-track demo, full of the sounds she was hearing in the clubs.
Armed with a Dr. Boss drum machine and banks of synthesizers, she started writing new songs. Many of the tracks were solo compositions, and all of them were aggressive, exuberant dance-pop. It wasn't just a musical makeover. While at The Roxy, she met designer Maripol, who was scouting for girls for a Fab Five Freddy show. Maripol specialised in accessories and with her help, Madonna began cultivating her eventually notorious bracelet n' crucifix image.
Unbeknown to her then manager, who claims she was securing Madonna a deal with Columbia, the singer was touting a cassette of her songs to DJs all over the city. Eventually her tape fell into the lap of Danceteria's Mark Kamins, who played it to a receptive crowd. Kamins was also an Island A&R man but Chris Blackwell's label passed. Undeterred, he made contact at Sire, the boutique imprint of Warner Bros. Through remixing David Byrne, Kamins had encountered the label's A&R man, Michael Rosenblatt. Seymour Stein, Sire's president, was particularly smitten with two songs, 'Everybody' and 'Ain't No Big Deal' and approved a single (allegedly from his hospital bed).
Bray was temporarily sidelined and Kamins took the production reins at Bob Blank's Blank Tape Studios. There was a false start as Madonna clashed with original arranger Barry Eastmond over 'Everybody'. She felt that his ideas were too slick, lacked the edge of the club-land grooves she was hankering after. Arthur Baker, a helping hand to Kamins, brought in synth maestro Fred Zarr to enliven the sessions.
It was the shot in the arm the song needed. Zarr's rapid-fire electronics chafe at the shuffling beat, creating a pulsating, uptight friction. Most spectacular of all is the song's breakdown, where a funky, Bernard Edwards-style bass comes to the fore as Zarr's synthesisers whir around it. The synth's descending 'bell' preset is a dead ringer for a sound on Freeez's 83 classic, 'IOU', an Arthur Baker production that Zarr played on.
On top of the R&B groove is Madonna herself, full of verve, exhorting the listener to lose their inhibitions on the dance floor. Immediately Madonna was likened to a "Minnie Mouse on helium" for her shrill, limited vocals. But as a pop voice, hers was the perfect instrument; infectious, accessible and untutored. She also knew how to maximise its potential in a studio setting. Just before 'Everybody' hits the chorus, a deft dab of reverb on her vocal sucks the listener into the nursery rhyme-like ode to clubbing. With its breathy spoken word passages and invitation to dance, Madonna's debut single was a template that would be revisited throughout her career. Hers was not a light touch, but at its peak it was one that was hard to resist.
Released in the US in October 1982, the record came with a Lou Beach-designed sleeve depicting a hip hop–style NYC street scene. It was, in retrospect, an ironic way to launch the career of the face of the 80s. But for a moment, like Culture Club's Boy George with the lover's rock of 'Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?', Madonna was widely believed to be a black artist. Michael Jackson's Thriller was about to break down certain racial boundaries, absorbing rock influences and crossing over into the previously white-only MTV with landmark videos - Prince was doing the same. Speaking in 1984, Madonna observed how white artists were breaking down divides too. Even Queen were going disco, releasing Hot Space in May 1982. It wasn't just racial lines that were being eroded either.
Madonna sounded like an R&B singer but her clothing was punk-inspired. It was all part of the new decade's pick and mix approach. It was so far from the purist dogmas of '76 that eventually a recurrent phrase of the era was that it was all "like punk never happened". In Dave Rimmer's book of that name, Culture Club's Mikey Craig observed that when he looked out at the band's early audiences he saw a motley bunch of looks. A few years previously such a diverse crowd would never have existed.
'Ain't No Big Deal', the other song mooted for the single, was shelved in favour of an extended dub version of the main event. A bright Michael Jackson/Donna Summer confection, the rejected song perhaps deserved a place on Madonna's first album.
Madonna heavily promoted the track, performing at Howie Montaug's No Entiendes with back-up dancers. A video of a modest budget ($1,500) was shot by Ed Steinberg at Larry Levan's Paradise Garage. Its pared down simplicity was no indicator of how she would subsequently grasp the medium (she later said that she and MTV "grew up together"). Image-wise, however, it placed her at the heart of club-land.
Danceteria acted effectively as a gateway to the US for many British bands, and this became her route to the UK. The Smiths played early American gigs there (supported by Madonna, according to Marr). New Order finally exorcised Curtis' ghost at the club, discovering Ecstasy, dance music and teaming up with Arthur Baker. Yet the relationship went two ways across the Atlantic - the Hacienda was an attempt to provide Manchester with a similar venue, and many acts from the US (ESG, for example) were brought over to Britain.
Madonna embarked on a disastrous UK mini tour, playing venues like London's Heaven and Camden Palace. Blitz Kid Rusty Egan remixed 'Everybody'. Unimpressed with his delay-heavy take on the song, she also informed a crowd of his deficiency as a DJ. Madonna's ability to be charming and charmless in equal measure would make her a polarising figure, personally and artistically. Kris Needs found her "gorgeously perky" while Peter Hook, recalling her brisk "fuck off" to Rob Gretton at The Hacienda in 1984, dubbed her "a black widow spider sucking the life out of everything".
For her debut album (original title: Lucky Star), Madonna enlisted Warners in-house producer Reggie Lucas. Lucas had been part of Miles Davis' 70s ensemble and in 1980, co-wrote the Grammy award winner, Stephanie Mills' devotional disco classic, 'I Never Knew Love Like This Before'. Again Madonna clashed with him, finding him unresponsive to her ideas and too "busy" with the arrangements. What he did provide Madonna's music with, however, was swing...
Lucas also came up with one of her most enduring songs, 'Borderline', which would go on to be her first US top ten hit. Very much a street smart, star-crossed update of the Mills smash, right down to its sad-sweet Fender Rhodes intro, 'Borderline' was genuinely soulful. And more nuanced than her other tracks (note the dual bass parts by Anthony Jackson/Dean Gant, one a synth, the other real). Throughout Madonna's career, a rogue sensuality/vulnerability would flicker intermittently, punctuating much of her best work but rarely sticking around for too long.
Madonna's first album was augmented by backing vocalists such as Chic chanteuse Norma Jean Wright and R&B soul diva Gwen Guthrie (of future 'Ain't Nothing Going On But The Rent'/'Padlock' fame). It sits happily alongside the post disco crème de la crème: the same year's Evelyn 'Champagne' King album Get Loose , Nona Hendryx' 'B-Boys' and Cheryl Lynn's 'Got To Be Real'. There's even an occasional tenor sax break (courtesy of Bobby Malach), that 80s trademark, recently revived by Lady Gaga/Katy Perry. Here and elsewhere, Zarr's electro-shock synths, full of zest and sparkle, a day-glo approximation of Soft Cell, fuse with these rootsy motifs to create sensuous nu-disco. It's at one with Shannon's 'Let The Music Play' and predicts of Nu Shooz's 1985 masterpiece, 'I Can't Wait'.
But Madonna was dissatisfied. Lucas, again, lacked the edge she was after. The tame proto Debbie Gibson of 'I Know It', the album's only real dud, partly justifies her misgivings. Ever the 'heat-seeking missile' she was looking elsewhere for more street-level collaborators. Funhouse DJ John 'Jellybean' Benitez would be her saving grace, producing and discovering Curtis Hudson/Lisa Steven's song 'Holiday'. He also remixed Lucas' productions, adding a febrile punch to her second single, 'Burning Up'. Another brazen manifesto, 'Burning Up' conflates sex with ambition. Fame is an elusive man to be seduced and conquered at all costs.
Like its flipside, 'Physical Attraction', it throws off the shackles of Catholic guilt: "I'm not the same, I have no shame." Where 'Burning Up' borders on feral, sharpening its claws with new wave guitar, 'Physical Attraction' was a soft-focus slow dance, quoting Olivia Newton John's 'Physical' and the sultry UK soul of Imagination's 'Body Talk' and 'Just An Illusion'). American critic Robert Christgau called the pair of them "electroporn", while 'Burning Up''s predatory prowl would briefly see her being compared to Grace Jones.
'Physical Attraction' was sufficiently fully formed to make it onto 1987's remix album You Can Dance without any tweaking. 'Burning Up', on the other hand, fared better in its 12" remix form, which turned the guitars down and the electro up. The two came housed in a sleeve by friend/de facto manager Martin Burgoyne, an 80s twist on Warhol/Liechtenstein cartoon pop art. Madonna's face was now being fully worked, repeated, like the Warhol silver screens of Marilyn Monroe, the star she would soon start to resemble. 'Burning Up' also featured a video that heralded the arrival of Madonna's brand of sexual table-turning. She writhes around in the middle of the street submissively, road-kill waiting to happen before a yuppie in a convertible runs her over. By the video's final twist, she is in the driving seat, in control. The erotic assertiveness, inextricably linking sex with power, was the epitome of 80s post-feminism (see also Janet Jackson's 'Control'). Like most things Madonna did, it split the jury.
At this point both her singles had scored high in the Billboard Dance charts. But it was third single 'Holiday' that was her crossover in to the mainstream charts. It got her on Dick Clark's American Bandstand for an epochal performance wherein she stated that she intended to "rule the world". 'Holiday' was an irresistible confection, bubbling with joie de vie, emphasised by its cascading synth strings, meaty Moog bass and Nile Rogers-style chicken scratch guitar, and a lyric that neatly paired it with Kool & the Gang's 'Celebration'. In the vocal department, limitation becomes virtue as Madonna imbues the song with nifty touches such as the snatch of ethereal cooing that blows through the song's second refrain.
Similarly her dancing seemed lunging and graceless compared to the eye-popping feats of Jackson (surprisingly so for such a gifted student). But like her music, it quickly proved magnetic, life-affirming. Each raised knee to the thwack of Holiday's snare, indicative of a mover as disciplined as a featherweight prize-fighter, utterly at one with their body. Like all the songs on her debut, 'Holiday' is best heard in the original album version rather than the Immaculate Collection edit. The later version omits the climactic release the song has been building towards, Zarr's elated piano break, a last minute addition at Sigma Sound, Manhattan. These originals are 'deep' cuts, full of breaks and space.
'Holiday' put her in the Billboard top twenty. 'Borderline' (No ten) and 'Lucky Star' (No four) would nudge her closer to mega-stardom, the latter beginning a record-breaking sequence of Top five American hits. Crucially, these two songs saw her mastering video. Mary Lambert's mini-movie for 'Borderline' squeezed Diana Ross's 'Mahogany' and John Hughes into a pop video, adding then taboo-busting interracial romance. She even dabbles in a bit of graffiti, a nod to the world she hailed from.
The 'Lucky Star' promo, featuring just two back-up dancers and a blank set, was a showcase for Madonna as auto-erotic magnet. It is full of belly button close-ups and narcissistic strutting, accentuated by the punchy editing. At one point, she appears to be cradled by the pure white backdrop, like Keith Haring's Radiant Baby, both wide-eyed innocent and shrewdly knowing. In the video's opening shot, she lowers her shades, coolly staring back at the viewer, alluring yet impassive. Even feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey would have to concede that the gaze of popular culture, was by now, no longer purely the province of the male spectator.
The album sold steadily, gathering momentum with each successive single and delaying the follow-up, Like A Virgin. The second album would team her with Nile Rogers, a man who had so inspired the grooves of her debut. Not only was she enamoured with his Chic/Sister Sledge work but also more recent pop-oriented triumphs such as Bowie's Lets Dance. Already eager to transcend dance music, she dismissed her first album's "lack of variety", deriding it as "music to do calisthenics to". Funnily enough an elderly Calisthenics class was exactly where original manager Camille Barbone first heard Madonna's new material. By now, Madonna had sought out a new manager, Freddy DeMann, who played her the as yet unreleased promo for 'Beat It' by his current charge, Michael Jackson. Mutually impressed (DeMann saw her perform at a Studio 54 show for Fiorucci), they began working together.
Her first album was both cutting edge and quaint by the time of its release, informed by NYC's club underground but also using technology already employed by MOR artists. Phil Collins was using similar instrumentation as was Stevie Nicks on the exquisite Prince-assisted, 'Little Red Corvette'-influenced 'Stand Back'. Madonna would continue to break ground in the mainstream just as she would always remain slightly one step behind the avant-garde, ever reliant on it for inspiration to take to the masses. Nevertheless, her first album remains one of her best works, the supposed 'lack of variety' actually giving it a consistency and focus that often eludes her later music. Madonna now possesses the crazy will of a late period Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford, all exertion bereft of inspiration. But like those two icons, her best work often transcends the cloying cage of camp. That first album, with its elastic grooves, its joyous calls to "dance and sing" remains free of such excesses. It is that great pop record: a simple soundtrack to complicated times. Hot-housed in a pre-Giulani/Carrie Bradshaw New York City, it is the last gasp of a night-life without AIDS where everyone is a star in the discotheque. Where going out itself was a work of art. Now, as much as back then, Madonna urges you to do just one thing: "Feel the beat and step inside..."
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Jun 13, 2013 9:20am
Just think I dismissed Madonna as a Seymour Stein puppet with no knowledge of her worthy apprenticeship into the realm of Pop Stardom. Great article, again, Mr. Lindsay. This man obviously does his homework on his features!!
Jun 13, 2013 12:40pm
Shite then, shite now, no matter how hard Aidan Moffat dances to it in his underwear. Value judgement aside, a good piece though some mention of Madonna's blithering white Michigander privilege in early interviews wouldn't have been remiss.
Jun 13, 2013 5:43pm
Great stuff! I didn't know Nile Rodgers worked on Rio, thought he came in later on with DD. Borderline is still her best recording. And yea, she's become gruesome in ways this article hints at were there from the start. Ai-yi-yi.
I hope Lindsay writes more often. Quietus has the best writers.
Jun 13, 2013 6:40pm
"Madonna now possesses the crazy will of a late period Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford, all exertion bereft of inspiration"
Late-period Bette/Joan being, of course, ageing women in what was (and still largely is) a young woman's game. Madonna's certainly had a bumpy past decade but she's still made some brilliant music - what's fundamentally changed is her age and that informs responses to her.
Jun 13, 2013 7:43pm
Impressive read, thoroughly enjoyed the ride through her early years. Had my eyes and ears firmly planted on UK alternative acts during her reign but couldn't help but give the Material Girl a nod of respect every now and then. A catchy song's a catchy song regardless of artist and she had her share of 'em - especially on this first album.
Jun 13, 2013 8:04pm
In reply to STEVE:
I agree in part about the last 10 years being bumpy. In terms of albums, the only weak one is 'Hard Candy', as for tours, she has excelled everybody, oddly enough, her most profitable decade is the last one... Her 3rd decade at the top.
Jun 13, 2013 9:04pm
Great article Matthew Lindsay. The last paragraph hit my heart.
I wish Madonna would listening to musicians like Johnny Jewel or House of Blondes and get her music updated. Filling big stadiums is NOT enough.
Jun 13, 2013 9:36pm
In reply to discokid :
We love you too, discokid. Can't imagine what working with her would be like in our Bushwick bunker but we'd certainly clean it up a bit.
Jun 14, 2013 1:38am
Hello Matthew Lindsay I just wanted to say your features are fantastic. Great work! I still remember the Nico article from a while back. Do you have twitter? A website? Anyway thank you for writing the article.
Jun 14, 2013 1:46am
I picked up this album shortly after it was released in a used record store for 50 cents. I thought "it's on Sire… it might be good." I took it home, played in and recorded it onto a normal bias cassette with another album I bought that week [for full price]. Ministry's "With Sympathy." I shelved the records and listened to the cassette. The Madonna was just a mediocre disco record. Only "Borderline" was any damn good. Several months later and "Holiday" finally got traction on the charts, by which time I was over it. By the time "Lucky Star" was her 3rd top 10 single, I traded in the same record at another used record dealer for $6.00; a handy profit! The stuff I heard on MTV from that point on was pretty poor. I still have the Ministry album [on CD now]. That's the only Ministry album I have owned, much like the artist on the other side of that tape.
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®
Jun 14, 2013 1:43pm
Great in-depth, thorough article. As a Madonna fan for all of her 30 years on the scene, I enjoy looking back on these times. I've always said that even if you dislike her, her views, her music, performances, etc, you'd still be hard pressed to deny her focus and drive / work ethic. 30 years in the big game, without much break or leave of absence. No rehab, breakdowns, arrest, getting out of shape. No falling victim to her own fame. Hasn't become a tribute act of old hits, she still puts in the effort to do new things and reinvent, especially on stage. She is fascinating and still has people watching for her next move and talking about her, good or bad. Nice work, Ciccone.
Jun 15, 2013 11:42pm
I think that Lucky Star set the template for all of Madonna's work, past and future. The optimism on display in this first album accurately captures the mood of the mid-80's. I think that the analogy between Donna Summer and Madonna could be explored further. Donna Summer was a pioneer in the sense that she helped erase the line between music and pornaography with "Love to Love You Baby". We would never listen to music the same way ever again. But it was not on a visual level. Donna Summer was neither a dancer nor a provacative dresser; It was hard to pair the voice with Donna Summer the person. But her sexy, remarkable voice broke ground and propelled her to stardom. But it wan't visual because we had not advanced to the music video age yet. Madonna eventually took this a step further; not only would she continue to erase this line, but she did it on a visual level. Donna Summer opened the door; Madonna walked through it and took it to a level that no other artist has been able to match to this day. Madonna is neither a grest singer nor the world's best dancer. But what she was back then and is now is a visionary. And that can take you to places you can't get to on talent alone.
Jun 16, 2013 4:57am
Only Madonna LP I own or want to own. Love It!
Jun 16, 2013 6:26pm
Excellent pop music, still sounds fresh, I lived through this music at the time, and she was something else. File alongside Prince, and Wendy and Lisa, wonderful days.
Jul 11, 2013 11:58am
The point is this article was about the music and how it was created. It is always more interesting to see this rather than talking about her now. Break it down to albums and songs. Tracks from this album get played in the cooler clubs in the uk. 2013.
Sep 12, 2013 6:00pm
The writer of this article is obviously not in the entertainment business and clearly has no creative flare or qualification in order to pass any judgement or opinion on an artist that has forgotten more than Lindsey knows.
Lindsey obviously has his head in reference books for the best part of the day relying on what others have already stated, he seems desperate to make a name for his self-based on the success of others, who cares what you research? Take a tip from your idol, do something new for heaven's sake, you should stop calling yourself a writer, and relinquish this self-indulgent dross that is claimed to be an article.
Sep 15, 2013 8:59am
In reply to Matt:
What a bizarre, hateful response to what is one of the best pieces of music writing I have read in a long time. The editorial staff of this 'zine are lucky to have a writer of this calibre contributing to their website. The sad thing is , this guy you seem to have so much contempt for probably didn't even get paid for his inspired, hard work. I found this piece endlessly engaging, thoroughly researched (yes-why is that a bad thing?) but with a clear, confident voice all of its own. It is neither idolatry or judgemental. If these comments sections initiated a healthy dialogue about the subject or the piece, that would be great. Invariably they don't. They are just a platform for pointless negativity. Maybe you're the one with unrealized ambitions in entertainment or life. Judging from this guy's article, he is a STAR. And if you had read a bit closer, you would have noticed his name is 'LIndsay'.
Oct 1, 2013 8:20am
In reply to Billy Shears:
If you too had looked a little closer at what you put you may have noticed your spelling of Lindsay as LIndsay. But either way, Lindsay is still a bore.


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