| Can Ya Dig It? Still Down With 'Shaft'
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| by Karen Michel, December 21, 2000 | |
| View and comment on NPR.org | |
| Today, Aug. 20, 2012, would have been Isaac Hayes' 70th birthday. We celebrate the man with the golden voice with the story behind "The Theme from Shaft." In the late 1960s, vocalist and keyboardist Isaac Hayes wrote a series of hit songs for the famed Memphis label, Stax, with his partner Dave Porter. In 1971, Hayes was asked to score the classic movie Shaft, which went on to become famous for its in-your-face protagonist and for the music that punctuated and nearly completed every frame. From the relentless cymbals to the funky "wah-wah," the opening bars of "The Theme from Shaft" speak to the urgency, heat and insistence of the film's hero: John Shaft, private detective. Before there was Shaft, though, there was director Melvin Van Peebles' homage to the macho man in the independent film Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song. The film's success as an indie release made mainstream movie studios take notice. It was 1971 and the Stax house composer and low-down vocalist Isaac Hayes was hot and sought after having sold millions of records. "They wanted to have a black leading man, a black director and a black composer," Hayes recalls. "So since I was Stax's number one artist at the time, they chose me." Hayes Got The Shaft In 1969, his album Hot Buttered Soul went to number one, with stretched-out renditions of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Walk On By." Primarily, Hayes wrote for others or performed other people's songs, but with "Shaft," that all changed. The music was entirely his, and as he told director Gordon Parks, Hayes would have preferred it be his even more. "Well, I wanted to do the acting, so I asked him, 'What about trying out for the leading role?'" Hayes says. "He said, 'OK. But, remember, you've got to do the music.' So, anyway, I came back home. I didn't tell my friends about the movie score. I was telling them about the leading part: 'I'm going to have a shot at the leading part,' you know. And about two weeks had passed, he said, 'Ike, have you gotten a call yet?' I said, 'No, they didn't call me yet.' So I started calling. I asked, 'Whoa, what happened to the leading role?' They said, 'Oh, didn't you know, Mr. Hayes? They just casted a guy by the name of Richard Roundtree for the lead role.' 'What?' 'Oh, but, Mr. Hayes, you promised to do the music.' 'OK, all right.' Well, anyway, I went on and did the music, and, of course, you know how it turned out. It turned out, hey, a big, big plus, big win for me." Not that it was an easy feat. Even though it was Gordon Parks' first feature film, he was already an experienced composer and guided Hayes throughout the process, which was mapped out in a 2000 HBO special about Parks. "Gordon Parks sat down and talked to me about the character, because I'd never scored a movie," Hayes remembers. "He said, 'Isaac, just remember, when you write this music, zero in on the lead character, on his personality. He's a roving kind of character. He's relentless, and your music has to depict that.' So that's when I got the idea for these high hats, you know, and made—the guitar and all that stuff and everything else followed. "The sequence we saw this morning: Times Square panned down off the skyscrapers along 42nd Street of the marquees. And when Shaft pops up out of that subway, that's when this should really come on and carry him all the way through Times Square, right to his first encounter." "If the music follows the action on the screen, you might have to put some funny bars in it and everything," added Mr. Hayes. "That's the way I did it. But everybody thought I was being hip, but I was just following the action of the character." The Impact For some of those flourishes — special touches that made Shaft the music as much a part of the man as his turtlenecks and leather jackets — Hayes recycled material from other successes. He'd worked with Otis Redding on "Try a Little Tenderness," their last session together for Stax. York University music Professor Robert Bowen elaborates on this connection between Stax and Shaft in Isaac's music. "Everybody knows that 16th-note, hi-hat ride pattern that one hears at the beginning of Shaft and throughout Shaft. It becomes one of the cliches of disco music. Don't blame Isaac for that. He actually lifted that from a break in an Otis Redding record from 1966. So that's one little kernel that comes from an earlier source, if you will," Bowen says. It's the rhythm that drives Shaft, which Hayes laid that down first. He then went on to score the rest of the film before coming back to finish the theme. The impact of Shaft extends well beyond the notes to the text. "Yeah, the lyrics was—I was trying to describe this guy," Hayes says. "You know, 'Who's the black private dick, that sex machine to all the chicks?' Or, you know, I was kind of getting away with little sexual connotations, but nobody could rap me for it because it was good. And then I did a self-censoring thing, too. That became the phrase of that decade. 'Yeah, man, he's a bad mother.' 'Shut your mouth.' I heard old people say that, you know. So it was good. It was right on time. Everything was." 'It's Like Foreplay' Then there's that all-girl chorus. Hayes calls it seductive — the sundae on top of the cherry. The oh-so-slow way the song builds has been compared to lovemaking, good lovemaking. "You cannot get there too quickly. You have to — don't be anticlimactic. It's like foreplay. You've got to start off and just — you know, you can't put bread in a cold oven, you know? You got to take your time, you got to heat it up, so that's what I like to do with my music. I like to build it and build it into a maddening, exciting crescendo." There's even some gospel influences in Shaft, too. Hayes started singing in the choir at the age of four. He was brought up by his grandmother in Covington, Tennessee, where he was born on August 20th, 1942. With Shaft, Hayes took everything he had, mixed it up and created a sound for the '70s. "We hear the influence of Shaft in all of the Kenny Gamble-Leon Huff productions at Philly International," Professor Bowen says. "That means The Spinners, The O'Jays, The Trammps, MFSB. We hear it up at Motown. A very, very different use of strings following Shaft. We certainly hear it on Stevie Wonder's recordings. We hear it on Marvin Gaye's recordings. I don't think there's very much black music in the 1970s that wasn't affected by Shaft." The Sex Appeal Never Left Artists not associated with soul or disco appropriated "The Theme from Shaft" as their own — Henry Mancini recorded it; as did The Ventures and Sammy Davis Jr. When John Singleton did his remake of Shaft in 2000, Hayes also did a remake of the old theme changing nothing. Hayes figured the "kids," as he called them, don't know the old version, though what they probably do know about him stems from his role on South Park as the singing advice-giving Chef. Three decades after its release, the song, like the detective, still has sex appeal. Some say Hayes is — or should have been — John Shaft, and that's what made the music so powerful, so certain. "What it did, it made a lot of guys want to be Shaft, and it made the hip person to be Shaft. So it was all about Shaft." In those disco '70s, Shaft was more, way more, than a mirrored ball or the right threads. Shaft had the moves because his music had the grooves, the music of Isaac Hayes. Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.  |
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
News Article
Monday, August 20, 2012
News Article
Pitbulls: Landlord Discounts Rent If You Adopt A Dog
The Huffington Post | By Ann Brenoff
Posted: 08/17/2012 8:54 am
Landlord Sandy Zalagens' ad seeking a tenant for one of her 12 units may be one for the dogs. It read: "Rent is $950; $150 a month discount if you adopt Big Louie."
Big Louie is an 80-pound gray brindle Pitbull.
Jessie McElwee stepped up and now is living quite happily with the big guy -- and a cat -- in the Los Angeles apartment. Zalagens, a realtor with Keller Williams in Los Angeles, calls McElwee her "dream tenant" and acknowledges that her ad may have danced around some fair housing laws. Truth is, she isn't sure and nobody is lining up to tell Big Louie that he has to move on.
"Yeah, it probably wasn't legal and I did catch some flack," Zalagens said, "but dog-rescuing is important to me." She rescued her first dog in 1993 and began doing it in earnest seven years ago. She sponsors a rescue dog every time she sells a house and has rallied the support of her real estate office in fund-raising races for rescues.
Dogs feature prominently in the 47-year-old Zalagens' second act. Selling real estate may still pay the bills, but the passion comes in finding homes for displaced dogs. For the past few years, she's focused her efforts on pets made homeless through foreclosures.
One thing that typically happens when a family loses their home is that they become renters. And landlords, by and large, haven't allowed them to move in with pets, Zalagens said. Shelters confirm this and note that the housing crisis has caused their intake to skyrocket. Pet-adverse landlords have left people with the choice of turning their four-legged friends in to shelters or worse, setting their dogs and cat loose in the neighborhood to fend for themselves.
"Landlords who don't permit pets to move in are a huge part of the homeless pet problem," Zalagens said, when asked what led to her unusual rental offer. "I just felt I had to do something to address that." So she put her money where her mouth is and made Big Louie part of the rental deal. And while the offer was couched in terms of a rental discount, the message was clearly "take him or leave it." Zalagens, who says she hopes to rid the rental market of discrimination against pet owners, is working on compiling a list of pet-friendly landlords.
"Dogs are my big why," Zalagens said. She lives in the West Adams area of Los Angeles, a neighborhood of historic homes. Many of her rescues come from her neighborhood, she says.
While she rescues all breeds, she admits to being a soft touch for a pitbull in need. Why? "They are the underdog of today's dog world." She blames the perception of the breed as vicious and untrustworthy on irresponsible owners and backyard breeders. Insurance companies have been known to charge more for homes with pitbulls. Yet many pitbull owners swear by the gentle nature of their pets.
As for Big Louie, his story is pretty typical. He was abandoned by his family and left to roam the neighborhood. Before Zalagens could get to him, he was picked up by animal control. Zalagens located him in a South L.A. shelter and convinced Downtown Dog Rescue -- one of the rescue groups she regularly works with -- to spring him and foster him until she could find him a permanent home.
Big Louie certainly appears to be a happy camper nowadays. Sharing the couch with his co-tenant cat, "He's just a big mush," Zalagens said.
"Big Louie happened to be a pitbull," she said, "but if he had been a little Yorkie, my ad would have said "$150 discount on rent if you adopt this cute Yorkie" and the apartment probably would have rented in a minute instead of two weeks."
Monday, August 13, 2012
News Article
JASON NARK, Philadelphia Daily News
Updated 10:23 a.m., Monday, August 13, 2012
CHESTER, Pa. (AP) — The little, brown-and-white pit bull can't reach the bucket of water set out for him, so he sits quietly on the front porch of a Chester apartment as flies buzz around his ears on a sweltering Sunday afternoon.
When the doors of a pickup truck slam, and Wolf and Cujo walk toward him, the dog slowly stands, his tail wagging when he hears their voices.
"Hey, pretty boy. Hey there, pretty boy," Wolf says, untangling the dog's leash from a post.
To an abused or neglected animal in the Philly region, Wolf and Cujo are saviors. To everyone else, particularly anyone responsible for an animal's misery, they look like outlaw bikers — burly men with tattooed biceps that knock real hard on a front door when there's a problem. At this house, a little boy sticks his head out of a second-floor window to see what's going on. His parents, he tells Wolf, are sleeping. It's 1 p.m.
"We'll be back," Wolf says as he hops back into Cujo's Dodge Ram, where heavy metal's on the radio. "That dog is really sweet and he should be in a nicer home."
NOT WAITING FOR PERMISSION
A few years ago, the men who make up Justice Rescue — including Wolf, Cujo, Crash, House and Kidd — would have been out on their Harleys on a Sunday, having a blast on the highways like every other biker in the area. But, as they said earlier that Sunday at a McDonald's in Prospect Park, Delaware County, each has his own reason for spending hours in rough neighborhoods every week, walking into abandoned houses, dealing with wasps, snakes, rats, poison ivy and suspicious residents, just to save a cat or dog.
"When you feel there's nothing left in the world, with nothing left to be here for, having a dog can save your life," says Wolf, who speaks for Justice Rescue. "Dogs are really why we're still here."
The other men nod in agreement, staring into their coffee.
None of the men in Justice Rescue wants the Daily News to use his real name, but each insists the group is not a bunch of vigilantes out to harass anyone with a pit bull. They work hand-in-hand with local police departments and animal-welfare agencies and are careful not to step on anyone's toes when it comes to other investigations.
Then again, if someone's hiding fighting pit bulls in the basement of an abandoned building or a dog's so weak that it can't stand up to go to the bathroom, Wolf's not waiting for permission to do something about it.
"We will not be intimidated," he says. "It just doesn't happen."
DISLIKE OF DOGFIGHTING
Wolf, 37, owns a motorcycle-and-auto-repair shop. He started the rescue group with fellow member Crash about a year ago. Today, they have dozens of volunteers who help with surveillance. Most of their missions are based on tips supplied to their website, justice-rescue.com, or their Facebook page.
They have a real disike for pit-bull fighting and know all the telltale signs, whether it's a worn-out patch of dirt in a playground or a particular odor rising from a vacant lot. A dog's collar can give it away.
"Is that a pit bull?" Wolf asks a boy walking a pit bull in Chester. "Why do you have that big lock around its neck?"
The boy says the heavy lock's there "to make its neck bigger."
"Oh, yeah? Why do you need to make its neck bigger?" Wolf replies, pretending not to know.
Justice Rescue has worked in Kensington, a hotbed of dogfighting, as well as in Bucks and Delaware counties and in New Jersey. The Delaware County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says Justice Rescue donated reward money that helped locate the former owner of Curious George, an emaciated pit bull found in Lower Chichester last year.
"That was extremely helpful," says Justina Calgiano, director of community relations for the Delco SPCA.
Toward the end of the day, after Wolf and Cujo have collected a half-dozen addresses they want to visit again, they grab a huge sheet of donated plywood and a dog bed and head out to a house in Collingdale, Delaware County, where they've gotten reports that a mixed-breed dog is being left in an outside kennel with no roof.
As they bang on the rowhouse door, the curtains rustle and a neighbor tells the men to leave the family alone. They ignore her.
Ten minutes later, Cujo, Crash, Kidd and Wolf are putting the plywood over the kennel out back, and the family is genuinely grateful, having no idea how hot concrete can get in the sun.
"That's all we wanted," Wolf says. "We're not the police. We're just here to help."
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Online:
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Information from: Philadelphia Daily News, http://www.philly.com
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Burly-bikers-on-a-mission-to-save-dogs-3784539.php#ixzz23SHRBk1H
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
News Article
Ohio teen collapses after 4-day Xbox marathon
WCMH-TV / August 8, 2012
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A four-day Xbox gaming marathon apparently was too much for one 15-year-old Ohio boy.
WCMH-TV (http://bit.ly/N3Ugln ) reports that the Columbus teen collapsed and was hospitalized Tuesday after becoming severely dehydrated. His mother says he emerged from his bedroom during the four days only to pick up snacks or take a quick shower.
The boy was so engrossed in playing Modern Warfare 3 on Xbox that he made himself sick.
He's expected to be OK — but his mom has taken away the Xbox.
Dr. Mike Patrick, an emergency physician at Nationwide Children's Hospital, recommended that gamers use some common sense: Get plenty of food and fluids, take breaks for physical activity and get some sleep.
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Information from: WCMH-TV, http://www.nbc4i.com
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Huffington Post News Article
Deaf Pit Bull Performs Shakespeare In Lake Tahoe, Is Saved From Euthanasia
By MARTIN GRIFFITH 08/05/12 10:10 PM ET 
RENO, Nev. -- This summer's Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival has produced an unlikely star: a deaf pit bull named Michael who narrowly escaped euthanasia.
The 6-year-old American Staffordshire terrier has turned out to be a hoot in his role as Crab the dog in the Bard's comedy, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," festival organizers and audience members said.
Michael plays a miscreant of sorts who doesn't care to please his owner, they said, and his varied spontaneous reactions to his owner's laments on stage frequently prompt laughter.
Among other things, Michael has scratched his head, chewed on a foot or thrown apathetic glances at the audience when Crab's owner, Launce, played by Kevin Crouch, pours his heart out.
Joan O'Lear, of Tahoe Vista, Calif., remembers the night she watched as Michael spotted a tiny service dog in the front row.
"He honed in on her and whined at the perfectly timed monologue that the actor was giving about how even the dog didn't care about his plight," she recalled. "It was so funny. The Shakespeare play was good, but Mike added the crowning touch."
Michael's real owner, Michelle Okashima, of Incline Village, told the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza there's "a great chemistry between Mike and Kevin that makes their stage time together electric and believable."
Not bad for a dog who was scheduled for euthanasia in July 2006 in Reno after he was found running loose and no one claimed him.
Okashima said she's grateful for his last-minute rescue by Nanette Cronk of the Humane Society of Truckee-Tahoe and his selection for the play.
Michael and another dog were chosen to play Crab out of 11 dogs that auditioned. Michael appears in two or three plays a week, performing in three scenes for a total of about 15 minutes each night.
"What are the odds they would pick a pit bull?" Okashima told The Associated Press. "All the time they face rejection in our society. I was shocked he got the part. I really appreciate the fact they gave him a shot."
Michael has posed no problem other than the time he jumped offstage in dress rehearsal because a woman smuggled a Shih Tzu in her purse inside the theater, she added.
Michael also is a registered therapy dog who visits hospitals, schools and veteran's homes. He also has been used to raise money for cancer research.
"He got a second chance, and I believe in giving back," said Okashima, an employee at Scraps Dog Bakery in Kings Beach, Calif.
Unlike his role in the play, Michael aims to please people in real life. "He's a wonderful guy, real sweet. I call him my big lump of brown sugar," she said.
The festival, held on the beach at Sand Harbor near Incline Village, continues through Aug. 26.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/pit-bull-shakespeare_n_1746425.html
Monday, August 6, 2012
Recipes
Strawberry-Chocolate Freezer Pie SELF | August 2012
by Zoe Singer
 (photo by: Con Poulos) Strawberries are full of vitamin C, which does double duty: It helps you burn more fat during exercise and helps build skin-firming collagen, resulting in a slimmer, prettier you! Yield: Makes 8 servings Spread ice cream evenly over crust. Dip a large spoon in hot water and run it over ice cream to smooth the top. Place pie in freezer until solid, 2 hours or up to 3 days. Before serving, spray a border of whipped cream (about 1 cup) around edge of pie. Mound strawberries in center.
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NPR News
August 4, 2012
View and comment on NPR.org
While President Obama and Gov. Romney battle for the hearts and minds of the middle class this election season, there's a huge swath of Americans that are largely ignored. It's the poor, and their ranks are growing.
According to a recent survey by The Associated Press, the number of Americans living at or below the poverty line will reach its highest point since President Johnson made his famous declaration of war on poverty in 1964.
Close to 16 percent of Americans now live at or below the poverty line. For a family of four, that's $23,000 a year. On top of that, 100 million of us — 1 out of 3 Americans — manage to survive on a household income barely twice that amount. How is this poverty crisis happening?
'I've Never Seen Anything As Bad As Now'
Across the nation, food banks are reporting giant spikes in demand. The food pantry in Webster Springs, W.Va., used to serve 30 families a month just three years ago. Today, 150 families in that county — of just 9,000 people — depend on the food pantry run by Catholic Charities.
Webster Springs is a hard-hit area. Two coal mines have closed down there in the past year. The median income is around $20,000. Yet the crisis is also taking place right in our nation's capital.
At the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, D.C., forklifts move huge pallets of food around this giant warehouse. This year, they expect to give out 33 million pounds of food — a record. Close to 700,000 people in the region are now at risk of going hungry.
"In my lifetime, I've never seen anything as bad as now," says Lynn Brantley, who runs the facility. She's been working with food pantries for four decades and describes what's happening today as a hunger crisis. "It's growing into the middle class."
Who Is Poor?
There is increasing overlap between those who used to be firmly in the middle class and those who are poor. Most Americans who are poor are still white, but that's also changing, says Angela Blackwell, who runs PolicyLink, a research and advocacy organization that focuses on poverty.
"The face of poverty for the nation has changed from being white to being black and Latino," she tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "That's made a difference, too, because when people thought of poverty as being white and elderly there was more general sympathy in the country and more commitment to do something about it."
It's estimated that the percentage of Americans living in poverty will increase to 15.7 percent this year, the highest in 50 years. "That shocking statistic really only represents the people who live below the official poverty level," Blackwell says. "But you have twice that number [of] people who are living near poverty."
Low-Wage Jobs Keep Incomes Low
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan delivered a State of the Union address in which he declared that the war on poverty had failed. Now, with the poverty rate in America expected to reach its highest rate since 1965, it looks like Reagan may have been right.
Not so, says Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University and an expert on poverty, but, he tells Raz, there is a lot to worry about.
"One reason is we're still in a recession," Edelman says. "We've had a change in our economy over the last 40 years that has produced a flood of low-wage jobs."
One half of all jobs in the U.S. today now pay less than $35,000 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that's one of the lowest rates for American workers in five decades.
There's a common perception that somebody who's poor or living below the poverty level is lazy or simply living off government handouts. Edelman says the actual average poor person is working.
"And working as hard as she or he possibly can," he says. "And particularly in the recession, not able to get work or steady work. There are certainly people who make bad choices, but the fundamental question in our economy is the number of people who are doing absolutely everything they can to support their families — and they just can't make it."
Some Battles Won, But Threats Loom
Back when LBJ declared his war on poverty, being poor looked very different than it does today. Traveling in Mississippi with Robert Kennedy in 1967, Edelman saw children with bloated bellies and sores that wouldn't heal. There was real hunger and real malnutrition.
"The food stamp program is a tremendous success," he says. "But since that time, it turns out that children are the poorest age group in our country because their families — typically single moms trying to make it — can't do so because of this flood of low-wage work that we have."
Many economists say that when the economy does recover, a lot of the jobs that were lost won't be coming back. That suggests the possibility of significantly high unemployment for a long time — maybe even a permanently large class of Americans who live in poverty. Blackwell says we can act to prevent that future. "And it's not rocket science."
"We know now that by 2018, 45 percent of all jobs in this nation will require at least an associate's degree," she says. "We could invest in the system of training — particularly focusing on community colleges and preparing people to go to four-year institutions and improving our high school education."
"We actually have extraordinary infrastructure in this country, from the manufacturing base we once had," she continues. "We need to retool it, we need to refit it, we need to make sure that it's ready for the kind of advanced manufacturing that we're seeing develop in other countries."
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Boston Herald News Article
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Memphis Grizzlies forward Zach Randolph is offering to pay for the rehabilitation and adoption of a male pit bull that was rescued from a drain pipe.
Randolph offered to help after hearing the story of the pit bull, which was rescued after getting stuck 15 feet down the pipe in mid-July in Memphis, the Grizzlies said in a news release Tuesday. The dog was found by a woman and her daughter, who heard the dog crying.
The dog had been trapped in the pipe for two days. Animal welfare advocates said he would not have survived many more hours of entrapment.
Public works employees used a backhoe to break the pipe and remove the pit bull.
The dog was taken to a local veterinary clinic after it was rescued.
Randolph, a pit bull advocate, has arranged for the dog to be cared for at Villalobos Rescue Center in New Orleans. The center cares for between 150 and 200 pit bulls on any given day at a 50,000 square foot facility.
Randolph's donation will go to the care and feeding of the dog at the rescue center, as well as the adoption process.
The story of the rescue and Randolph's involvement in the dog's recovery is being featured on the cable television show "Pit Bulls and Parolees."
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/sports/basketball/other_nba/view.bg?articleid=1061150489--
Jay