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All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:47:19 GMT Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:47:19 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Forty years on, McCartney wants the world to hear 'lost' Beatles epic http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/forty-years-on-mccartney-wants-the-world-to-hear-20081179215.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/forty-years-on-mccartney-wants-the-world-to-hear-20081179215.htm Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:03:06 GMT For Beatles fans across the world it has gained near mythical status. The 14-minute improvised track called 'Carnival of Light' was recorded in 1967 and played just once in public. It was never released because three of the Fab Four thought it too adventurous. The track, a jumble of shrieks and psychedelic effects, is said to be as far from the melodic ballads that made Sir Paul McCartney famous as it is possible to imagine. But now McCartney has said that the public will have the chance to judge for themselves.'It does exist,' McCartney says on a BBC Radio 4 arts programme to be broadcast this week. Talking to John Wilson, the presenter of Front Row, the former Beatle confirms that he still has a master tape of the work and says he suspects that 'the time has come for it to get its moment'.'I like it because it's the Beatles free, going off piste,' he adds.In the 40 years since 'Carnival of Light' was recorded by McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon in the Abbey Road studios in London, its collection of disparate rhythms has become a kind of holy grail for Beatles obsessives. The track was put together on 5 January 1967, in between working on the vocals for the song 'Penny Lane'. Once released it should offer proof that the Fab Four, and McCartney in particular, were much more avant-garde in their tastes than many gave them credit for. According to the few who heard the track on the one occasion the recording was played publicly, at a London music festival in 1967, it features the sound of gargled water and strangled shouts from Lennon which vie with church organs and distorted guitar.'We were set up in the studio and would just go in every day and record,' McCartney tells Wilson. 'I said to the guys, this is a bit indulgent but would you mind giving me 10 minutes? I've been asked to do this thing. All I want you to do is just wander round all of the stuff and bang it, shout, play it. It doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum, wander to the piano, hit a few notes ... and then we put a bit of echo on it. It's very free.' McCartney had been commissioned to create a piece for an electronic music festival at the Roundhouse Theatre in north London by his friend Barry Miles. The event, the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, was organised by International Times, an underground newspaper. Many in the audience had no idea they were listening to a new Beatles track. Other performers included Delia Derbyshire whose work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop included jointly creating the theme for Doctor Who.McCartney, who this month releases his third experimental album of new work under the alias the Fireman, regards 'Carnival of Light' as evidence of how musically adventurous he has always been. For the three other Beatles the track was just an oddity. George Harrison dismissed it as too weird. But McCartney is hopeful it can now be released with the agreement of the group's estate.'It will help reaffirm McCartney's claim to have been the most musically adventurous of all the Beatles,' said Wilson this weekend. 'He told me he would love to release the track. All he needs now is the blessing of Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow Olivia.'The piece was inspired, McCartney says, by the works of composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In his book Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, author Mark Lewisohn - who was played the track in 1987 - describes 'distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds, a distorted lead guitar, the sound of a church organ, various effects (water gargling was one) and, perhaps most intimidating of all, Lennon and McCartney screaming and bawling random phrases including "Are you all right?" and '"Barcelona!".'Beatles fans came close to hearing 'Carnival Of Light' in 1996 when it was considered for inclusion in the exhaustive Anthology compilation. 'We were listening to everything we'd every recorded,' McCartney says. 'I said it would be great to put this on because it would show we were working with really avant-garde stuff ... But it was vetoed. The guys didn't like the idea, like "this is rubbish".'McCartney revealed that George Harrison disparaged sonic experimentation as 'avant-garde a clue'.Sir George Martin, the Beatles producer who oversaw the track, has described it as 'one of those weird things'. 'It was a kind of uncomposed, free-for-all melange of sound that went on. It was not considered worthy of issuing as a normal piece of Beatles music at the time and was put away.'Coincidentally, McCartney played some of his Fireman compositions at the reopened Roundhouse venue last year during the Electric Proms. 'With the Fireman you're in disguise,' he told Observer Music Monthly. His pseudonym may have been taken from the lyric of 'Penny Lane' where a fireman 'rushes in from the pouring rain' and could also be a nod to his father, Jim McCartney, a firewatcher on the Liverpool docks in the Second World War. ? John Wilson's interview with Paul McCartney can be heard on Front Row, Radio 4, on ThursdayThe BeatlesPaul McCartneyPop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Guardian.Co.Uk Forty years on, McCartney wants the world to hear 'lost' Beatles epic {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - For Beatles fans across the world it has gained near mythical status. The 14-minute improvised track called 'Carnival of Light' was recorded in 1967 and played just once in public. It was never released because three of the Fab Four thought it too adventurous. The track, a jumble of shrieks and psychedelic effects, is said to be as far from the melodic ballads that made Sir Paul McCartney famous as it is possible to imagine. But now McCartney has said that the public will have the chance to judge for themselves.'It does exist,' McCartney says on a BBC Radio 4 arts programme to be broadcast this week. Talking to John Wilson, the presenter of Front Row, the former Beatle confirms that he still has a master tape of the work and says he suspects that 'the time has come for it to get its moment'.'I like it because it's the Beatles free, going off piste,' he adds.In the 40 years since 'Carnival of Light' was recorded by McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon in the Abbey Road studios in London, its collection of disparate rhythms has become a kind of holy grail for Beatles obsessives. The track was put together on 5 January 1967, in between working on the vocals for the song 'Penny Lane'. Once released it should offer proof that the Fab Four, and McCartney in particular, were much more avant-garde in their tastes than many gave them credit for. According to the few who heard the track on the one occasion the recording was played publicly, at a London music festival in 1967, it features the sound of gargled water and strangled shouts from Lennon which vie with church organs and distorted guitar.'We were set up in the studio and would just go in every day and record,' McCartney tells Wilson. 'I said to the guys, this is a bit indulgent but would you mind giving me 10 minutes? I've been asked to do this thing. All I want you to do is just wander round all of the stuff and bang it, shout, play it. It doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum, wander to the piano, hit a few notes ... and then we put a bit of echo on it. It's very free.' McCartney had been commissioned to create a piece for an electronic music festival at the Roundhouse Theatre in north London by his friend Barry Miles. The event, the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, was organised by International Times, an underground newspaper. Many in the audience had no idea they were listening to a new Beatles track. Other performers included Delia Derbyshire whose work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop included jointly creating the theme for Doctor Who.McCartney, who this month releases his third experimental album of new work under the alias the Fireman, regards 'Carnival of Light' as evidence of how musically adventurous he has always been. For the three other Beatles the track was just an oddity. George Harrison dismissed it as too weird. But McCartney is hopeful it can now be released with the agreement of the group's estate.'It will help reaffirm McCartney's claim to have been the most musically adventurous of all the Beatles,' said Wilson this weekend. 'He told me he would love to release the track. All he needs now is the blessing of Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow Olivia.'The piece was inspired, McCartney says, by the works of composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In his book Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, author Mark Lewisohn - who was played the track in 1987 - describes 'distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds, a distorted lead guitar, the sound of a church organ, various effects (water gargling was one) and, perhaps most intimidating of all, Lennon and McCartney screaming and bawling random phrases including "Are you all right?" and '"Barcelona!".'Beatles fans came close to hearing 'Carnival Of Light' in 1996 when it was considered for inclusion in the exhaustive Anthology compilation. 'We were listening to everything we'd every recorded,' McCartney says. 'I said it would be great to put this on because it would show we were working with really avant-garde stuff ... But it was vetoed. The guys didn't like the idea, like "this is rubbish".'McCartney revealed that George Harrison disparaged sonic experimentation as 'avant-garde a clue'.Sir George Martin, the Beatles producer who oversaw the track, has described it as 'one of those weird things'. 'It was a kind of uncomposed, free-for-all melange of sound that went on. It was not considered worthy of issuing as a normal piece of Beatles music at the time and was put away.'Coincidentally, McCartney played some of his Fireman compositions at the reopened Roundhouse venue last year during the Electric Proms. 'With the Fireman you're in disguise,' he told Observer Music Monthly. His pseudonym may have been taken from the lyric of 'Penny Lane' where a fireman 'rushes in from the pouring rain' and could also be a nod to his father, Jim McCartney, a firewatcher on the Liverpool docks in the Second World War. ? John Wilson's interview with Paul McCartney can be heard on Front Row, Radio 4, on ThursdayThe BeatlesPaul McCartneyPop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Forty years on, McCartney wants the world to hear 'lost' Beatles epic | Music | The Observer {...} George Harrison said it was too avant-garde. Now Sir Paul says the time has come to release Carnival of Light {...}
Published: November 16, 2008, 12:03 am - Indexed: November 16, 2008, 12:13 pm - Page Size: 77KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media

]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media {NORTH AMERICA > LODGING} - ATLANTIS Harborside Resort Bahamas -CHRISTMAS WEEK!! (saratoga) $3250 1bd http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/travel-and-tourism/lodging/atlantis-harborside-resort-bahamas-christmas-20081112710.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/travel-and-tourism/lodging/atlantis-harborside-resort-bahamas-christmas-20081112710.htm Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:44:35 GMT ATLANTIS Harborside Resort Bahamas -CHRISTMAS WEEK!! 1 BR Villa Timeshare Vacation Rental – 8 days 7 nights $3250 or Best Offer Two 1-BR Units Available This is a one-week villa rental for CHRISTMAS WEEK, Sunday Dec. 21 to Sunday Dec. 28, 2008 at the Harborside Villas Resort at Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas. THE FABULOUS WORLD-CLASS ATLANTIS RESORT is one of the most unique resorts in the world! It is stunning with incredible facilities. And kid-friendly to boot. Check out the Atlantis website: www.atlantis.com This is a one bedroom villa in the Harborside Resort of private timeshare owners’ villas. As a guest at Harborside Resort you have full access to all of the extraordinary Atlantis facilities! I am a villa timeshare owner, not a middleman. This is the real thing. Your week is guaranteed by Harborside Resort at Atlantis. The Villas of Harborside Resort at Atlantis Adjacent to the marina, Harborside Resort offers a wealth of private amenities and pleasures just steps from your villa. From the world's largest marine habitat, second only to Mother Nature, to the luxurious Spa and Sports Center and vast array of dining and entertainment choices, Harborside Resort and Atlantis offer you and your family an unparalleled vacation experience. Your spacious villa provides home-away-from-home comforts. This one-bedroom villa has: • Fully-equipped kitchenette with refrigerator, microwave convection oven, 4-burner stovetop, dishwasher, coffee maker, toaster and blender • Accommodates up to 4 guests • Living room and dining area • Bedroom has a queen bed and television • Full sleeper sofa in the living room • Armoire with cable television, DVD, and stereo in the living room • Climate controlled air-conditioning and ceiling fans throughout • Washer and dryer Laundry in unit allows you to travel light. Fully-equipped kitchen gives you enormous flexibility in meals. As a guest at Harborside Resort you have full access to all of the endless and awe-inspiring Atlantis amenities and facilities. For the courageous, there is Atlantis' six-story Mayan Temple with five water slides, including two with clear acrylic tunnels that pass you through a shark-filled lagoon, plus the Power Tower with four adrenaline-inducing waterslides. You will also find a casino of mythical proportions, the largest open-air marine habitat in the world, second only to mother nature, 11 pool areas, including formal pools, free-form pools, kids' pools and slides, and the mile-long river expedition with four-foot waves. Harborside Resort Amenities include: • Zero-entry, free-form pool • Kids pool • Whirlpool spa • Exercise center featuring Nautilus® and Star Trac® fitness equipment • The Point Poolside Restaurant & Bar • Lush tropical courtyards • Controlled access gate • In-room baby sitting For more information about Harborside Resort please see, www.harborsideresort.com. Atlantis amenities include (see www.atlantis.com for more): • The largest casino in the Caribbean • The huge Power Tower with four adrenaline-inducing waterslides • The six-story Mayan Temple with five water slides • Mile-long river expedition with four-foot waves pushing inner tube riders through a densely landscaped, tropical jungle of rapids, underground tunnels, tidal waves and Tower slides. The complex ‘transportainment’ system allows riders to float along the river or join in a queue for water slides without leaving their inner tubes • The Dig, a captivating interpretation of the legendary paradise of Atlantis • 141-acre Atlantis Waterscape featuring 50,000 sea animals representing 200 species • 11 swimming pools plus three miles of white sandy beaches • Many kids’ activities • Interact with dolphins at Dolphin Cay • Miles of beaches • A sports center featuring ten lighted tennis courts • 18-hole championship Tom Weiskopf-designed golf course • 18 restaurants • 20 lounges and clubs • Mandara Spa • Duty-free couture shopping at Crystal Court Shops • The finest yacht facility in The Bahamas at The Marina • Water sports, charters and tours Weather The average temperature from November through March is 77 degrees Fahrenheit. You will avoid the rainy season, which runs from June through October. TERMS: If you have any questions, please email. There are no cancellations and no refunds.. You will receive an email with your reservation confirmation number within 2 days after payment is received. Remember to take your passports with you! Sfbay.Craigslist.Org ATLANTIS Harborside Resort Bahamas -CHRISTMAS WEEK!! (saratoga) $3250 1bd {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - ATLANTIS Harborside Resort Bahamas -CHRISTMAS WEEK!! 1 BR Villa Timeshare Vacation Rental – 8 days 7 nights $3250 or Best Offer Two 1-BR Units Available This is a one-week villa rental for CHRISTMAS WEEK, Sunday Dec. 21 to Sunday Dec. 28, 2008 at the Harborside Villas Resort at Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas. THE FABULOUS WORLD-CLASS ATLANTIS RESORT is one of the most unique resorts in the world! It is stunning with incredible facilities. And kid-friendly to boot. Check out the Atlantis website: www.atlantis.com This is a one bedroom villa in the Harborside Resort of private timeshare owners’ villas. As a guest at Harborside Resort you have full access to all of the extraordinary Atlantis facilities! I am a villa timeshare owner, not a middleman. This is the real thing. Your week is guaranteed by Harborside Resort at Atlantis. The Villas of Harborside Resort at Atlantis Adjacent to the marina, Harborside Resort offers a wealth of private amenities and pleasures just steps from your villa. From the world's largest marine habitat, second only to Mother Nature, to the luxurious Spa and Sports Center and vast array of dining and entertainment choices, Harborside Resort and Atlantis offer you and your family an unparalleled vacation experience. Your spacious villa provides home-away-from-home comforts. This one-bedroom villa has: • Fully-equipped kitchenette with refrigerator, microwave convection oven, 4-burner stovetop, dishwasher, coffee maker, toaster and blender • Accommodates up to 4 guests • Living room and dining area • Bedroom has a queen bed and television • Full sleeper sofa in the living room • Armoire with cable television, DVD, and stereo in the living room • Climate controlled air-conditioning and ceiling fans throughout • Washer and dryer Laundry in unit allows you to travel light. Fully-equipped kitchen gives you enormous flexibility in meals. As a guest at Harborside Resort you have full access to all of the endless and awe-inspiring Atlantis amenities and facilities. For the courageous, there is Atlantis' six-story Mayan Temple with five water slides, including two with clear acrylic tunnels that pass you through a shark-filled lagoon, plus the Power Tower with four adrenaline-inducing waterslides. You will also find a casino of mythical proportions, the largest open-air marine habitat in the world, second only to mother nature, 11 pool areas, including formal pools, free-form pools, kids' pools and slides, and the mile-long river expedition with four-foot waves. Harborside Resort Amenities include: • Zero-entry, free-form pool • Kids pool • Whirlpool spa • Exercise center featuring Nautilus® and Star Trac® fitness equipment • The Point Poolside Restaurant & Bar • Lush tropical courtyards • Controlled access gate • In-room baby sitting For more information about Harborside Resort please see, www.harborsideresort.com. Atlantis amenities include (see www.atlantis.com for more): • The largest casino in the Caribbean • The huge Power Tower with four adrenaline-inducing waterslides • The six-story Mayan Temple with five water slides • Mile-long river expedition with four-foot waves pushing inner tube riders through a densely landscaped, tropical jungle of rapids, underground tunnels, tidal waves and Tower slides. The complex ‘transportainment’ system allows riders to float along the river or join in a queue for water slides without leaving their inner tubes • The Dig, a captivating interpretation of the legendary paradise of Atlantis • 141-acre Atlantis Waterscape featuring 50,000 sea animals representing 200 species • 11 swimming pools plus three miles of white sandy beaches • Many kids’ activities • Interact with dolphins at Dolphin Cay • Miles of beaches • A sports center featuring ten lighted tennis courts • 18-hole championship Tom Weiskopf-designed golf course • 18 restaurants • 20 lounges and clubs • Mandara Spa • Duty-free couture shopping at Crystal Court Shops • The finest yacht facility in The Bahamas at The Marina • Water sports, charters and tours Weather The average temperature from November through March is 77 degrees Fahrenheit. You will avoid the rainy season, which runs from June through October. TERMS: If you have any questions, please email. There are no cancellations and no refunds.. You will receive an email with your reservation confirmation number within 2 days after payment is received. Remember to take your passports with you!
ATLANTIS Harborside Resort Bahamas -CHRISTMAS WEEK!! {...}
Published: November 11, 2008, 5:44 am - Indexed: November 11, 2008, 12:34 pm - Page Size: 8KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Travel and Tourism > Lodging

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Travel and Tourism > Lodging {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Luke Bainbridge visits Detroit on the 50th anniversary of Motown http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/luke-bainbridge-visits-detroit-on-the-50th-anniversary-20081151518.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/luke-bainbridge-visits-detroit-on-the-50th-anniversary-20081151518.htm Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:05:13 GMT 'This was it,' says Smokey Robinson, with his arms open and a shrug that suggests he still finds it slightly unbelievable himself. 'People who think about the music that came out of here would think that this place was huge. Think it was this huge recording studio where we had all these people ... but everyone was crammed in here ... and we were making music, we were jamming.''It' is the converted garage of a small frame house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan. Detroit being the home of the automobile, it's only appropriate that this story should revolve around a garage. This is the Motor City, and the house, christened Hitsville USA, is the birthplace of Motown Records. The garage at the rear is Studio A, one of the most revered recording studios in history.It was in this room that Barrett Strong, on Motown's first national hit, declared 'Money (That's What I Want)', where Smokey Robinson cried his 'Tears of a Clown', the Four Tops promised 'Reach Out, I'll Be There', Martha Reeves and the Vandellas sent a call out around the world, asking 'are you ready for a brand new beat?' and Diana Ross and the Supremes demanded 'Stop! In the Name of Love'. It was within these four walls that little Stevie Wonder recorded his first songs and, later, as the Sixties faded, Marvin Gaye asked 'What's Going On?'.Between 1961 and 1971, Motown had a staggering 110 Top 10 hits in the US, more than half of which were million-sellers, and most of them were recorded in this converted garage, barely big enough to house a Lincoln Continental.Motown is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary - the label was founded by Berry Gordy Jr as Tamla Records on 12 January 1959, then incorporated as the Motown Record Corporation in 1960. Downstairs in Hitsville is the reception area, the control room and Studio A. Upstairs was originally the living quarters for Gordy and his family, before Motown's success allowed them to move out into a home of their own. The building remains much as it was in its heyday. Smokey, now 68 and based in LA and Las Vegas, hasn't been back for a couple of years himself. 'This is a very spiritual room for me,' he explains. 'There's a lot of energy. So many things happened in here ...'Does it really feel like 50 years, I ask.'No, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like 50 years. 50 years have gone by in an instant; like that,' says Smokey, clicking his fingers. 'It just seems like yesterday that this stuff was going on. When Berry Gordy first came and saw this house and envisaged this garage being a studio.''It seems like yesterday,' he says again, rubbing his eye, 'it seems impossible. I always relate it to when I was a kid - I would be watching television and I would see Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis and those guys and they would say "Oh man, we've been doing this for 20 years" and I'd think, "God, how can someone have been doing something for 20 years?" But I see now, because 50 years have gone by like that.' He clicks his fingers again. 'Just overnight, you know ... 50 years ... God, that's half a century.'That half a century covers an extraordinary tale of love and loss - the remarkable dream of one man and the creation of a label that produced an unrivalled succession of hits, and the desperate decline of the city that was once at the heart of the American dream.It was 1913 when Henry Ford pioneered the use of a moving assembly line for mass production at his factory in the Highland Park district, then on the northern fringes of the city, and by the 1920s Detroit had already been christened the Motor City. The promise of employment in the car plants meant that Detroit overtook Chicago as the favoured destination for black families migrating from the south, and the city's population swelled to over two million, making it the fourth biggest city in America. By the 1950s, 80% of the world's cars were built in America, and most of those in Detroit. The city was the manufacturing centre of the America, and thus the world.Born in 1929 in Detroit - his parents had migrated north from Georgia - by the mid-Fifties Berry Gordy Jr, the seventh of eight children, was still searching for his way in life. Having dropped out of high school, he attempted to make it as a professional boxer before being drafted for the war in Korea. Back in Detroit, in 1953, he married Thelma Gorman and decided to pursue a career in music. In a rare interview in 1984 - the 78-year-old isn't giving any to coincide with Motown's 50th anniversary, although he has been working on a documentary which should surface next year - Gordy told the Los Angeles Times how seeing an advert for a battle of the bands when he was in a Detroit gym gave him a wake-up call - he noticed the stark juxtaposition of 'young fighters who were 23 but looked like 50, all scarred and beat up... then I saw the musicians who were 50 and they looked 23'.After the failure of his first musical venture, the 3-D Record Mart store, Gordy was forced to find work on the Lincoln-Mercury production line of the Ford plant to support his family. Now writing songs, he was introduced to the R'n'B singer Jackie Wilson, a fellow ex-boxer, who recorded one of Gordy's compositions 'Reet Petite', then several more over the next couple of years. Gordy, however, became quickly disillusioned with the industry when he realised the labels in Chicago and New York that were distributing these songs were the ones making serious dollar. In the offices of Wilson's manager one day, Gordy met the Matadors, fronted by a 16-year-old with sparkling green eyes and light dark skin called William 'Smokey' Robinson. Gordy persuaded the group to change their name to the Miracles and on Robinson's 18th birthday, their first single 'Got a Job', written and produced by Gordy, was released on New York's End Records.Gordy began to dream of building his own label, an equivalent to Ford's assembly lines, a hit factory. It was Smokey who persuaded Gordy that he needed to stop leasing records, and go national himself. 'I recorded this record, the Miracles and me, called 'Way Over There' and it broke out really big here in Detroit and so we re-recorded it and put violins on it and I just told him: "We might as well take this record national. Nobody's paying us anyway so we might as well take the chance on doing it ourselves." So that's what we did.'Spurred on by Smokey, and his sisters Gwen and Anna Gordy, who had already started Anna Records with Billy Davis, Gordy borrowed $800 from his family and started the label in January 1959. 'On the very first day, when Berry decided to start Motown,' Smokey recalls, those green eyes sparkling, 'he sat down and said, "Hey, you guys, I wanted to tell you something: we are not going to make black music, we're going to make world music, we're going to make music for everybody. We're going to make great music, we're going to have some great stories, make some great beats" - and that's what we set out to do.'Though Gordy's ambition always stretched much further than Detroit city limits - the label called itself 'the sound of young America' - he still wanted its name to show its roots. 'Detroit was known as "The Motor City",' says Smokey. 'Berry wanted to name the label something that sounded familiar. First, he was going to call it 'Mocity' but he decided that 'town' was more homely, more family-sounding, so he called it 'Motown'.In his determination to build a hit factory, Gordy employed various songwriters. The best known were Holland-Dozier-Holland, aka Laurent Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland. Other notables included Norman Whitfield, William 'Mickey' Stevenson and Smokey himself, whom Gordy made vice president. The producers' mantra was 'KISS' - 'keep it simple, stupid.'Most of the records were also recorded with the same studio session musicians - a tight-knit group known as the Funk Brothers. The 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown claimed that in 14 years, they 'played on more No1 hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined'. Gordy now had the hit factory that he had dreamt of.He introduced weekly quality control meetings to ensure a consistent procession of hits. Smokey, sitting back in his chair in the Hitsville control room, explains: 'We had Monday morning meetings, they started at 9 o'clock, and at 9 o'clock and five seconds you were locked out. You had to be there at 9 o'clock in order to get your stuff heard. All the creative people were in those meetings, the writers, the producers. We would play our stuff for each other, critique each other's stuff and make suggestions on each other's stuff to make it better. We were very competitive but we still pulled for each other to be creatively strong. A lot of people have said to me, "Berry decided..." No, Berry did not decide any of that. Berry was in those meetings, but Berry was still producing and writing at that time and his stuff would get shot down just like anybody else's.' He laughs. 'It was very hard for Berry to get a record out."Several timeless tracks - including Marvin Gaye's 'Heard it Through the Grapevine - were initially rejected by Gordy. 'Absolutely,' confirms Smokey. 'Many of the tracks were sent back and re-worked, and re-worked, until they became the hits that they became.'The label was a strong and highly visible example of black empowerment when the civil rights movement was gathering pace. In her 1999 book, Dancing in the Street, Suzanne Smith points out that Gordy was 'extremely wary about affiliating his business with any organisation or movement that might negatively influence his company's commercial success'. What Gordy cared about was record sales. 'Nevertheless,' Smith adds, 'both Motown's music and its entrepreneurial acumen emerged from an urban black community that regularly asserted its "politics" through cultural and economic means.'In other words, the success of the black-owned Motown was a powerful statement in itself.Gordy may have been wary about Motown becoming overly politicised, but the label decided to release its first spoken-word recording in August 1963: a recording of Martin Luther King's speech at the Great March to Freedom in June that year. King declared the Detroit march 'the largest and greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States', and his speech that day included an early version of his 'I Have a Dream' oration.The record was deliberately released on 28 August, the same day King appeared at the March on Washington, and Gordy spoke of how 'the Negro revolt of 1963 will take its place historically with the American Revolution' and how 'this album belongs in the home of every American and should be required listening for every American child, white or black'. 'There is no way that you could be a black person in the United States in the Sixties and not be affected,' says Smokey, when I ask him about the civil rights movement. 'Dr Martin Luther King came to visit us here at Motown. He was such a dynamic, incredible person. 'We all experienced it [racism]. We'd go to the South and we'd be shot at and run out of places and all kinds of stuff just for being black. But the music transcended all of that. We'd go to the South and at first, even though the white kids would have our music, the audiences would be separated: white people on one side, black people on the other side; white people upstairs, black people downstairs or vice-versa, no mingling or any of that. After the music became so popular a year or two later we'd go to the same places and the black and white kids would be together and they'd be dancing, having a good time, singing, holding hands and mingling and talking. The music bridged a lot of gaps.'In the early years, Motown was as much a family as a record label. Several of Gordy's own family worked within the company, and in the early days half the artists and groups were thrown together in one bus when they went on the road as the Motown Revue. Remarkably, three Motown secretaries at Motown - Janie Bradford, Martha Reeves and Diana Ross, went on to be stars.There were also several relationships within the label, including those between Smokey and Claudette Robinson, Marvin Gaye and Berry Gordy's sister, Anne. 'We still have it,' says Smokey. 'You've been around here today and you've seen the reaction when Kim Weston and I saw each other, or "Duke" Fakir of the Four Tops.' Weston and Fakir are also at Hitsville today. 'We just have that brother and sisterhood and it's always been that way,' continues Smokey. 'When people talk about the Motown family, people think, "That's mythical, they couldn't possibly have been like that," but it wasn't and it isn't mythical.''When we first got here we could feel the difference right away; we was family,' explains Fakir when I speak to him later. (the Four Tops had already recorded for Chess, Red Top, Riverside and Columbia before signing for Motown, but had yet to have a hit.) 'On another label you just went and in and did a session and you were out, you didn't meet other artists. But [at Motown] you were talking to the Supremes, the Temptations, the Miracles and you were having fun, and you felt like you were part of something. And you knew that they were on their way.'The Four Tops went on to be Motown's longest standing group, keeping the same line-up for more than four decades. Levi Stubbs died shortly after I met Fakir, who is now the only surviving member. The producer Norman Whitfield also died in the week I was in Detroit. Most of Motown's output still sounds fresh and vibrant today, but the Motor City itself hasn't aged quite as well. By the early Sixties, the city and its car industry were already in decline. The population drain from American inner cities which began after the Second World War was already more pronounced in Detroit than elsewhere. The city had suffered race riots in 1863 and 1943 but the 12th Street riot in 1967, which ignited after a raid on a speakeasy, grew into the biggest riot in modern American history, lasting five days and leaving 43 dead, with 7,200 arrests and 2,000 buildings burned down. This hastened the 'white flight', many of whom fled a lot further than the suburbs. Over the next two decades the population of Detroit halved to around 900,000, leaving swaths of the inner city derelict and desolate.As Detroit entered these desperate times, Gordy made the decision, in 1972, to uproot Motown to the sunshine of the West Coast, a devastating blow to Detroit's already crumbling civic pride. The reclusive Gordy had increasingly spent time in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and decided that Motown needed to branch out and become an entertainment company, and in order to do that it needed to be in LA.'I was the biggest protester about us moving,' stresses Smokey. 'I was born here in Detroit. Motown was born here in Detroit and I told Berry this. I explained all of this to him: "Berry, this is our roots, we started here" and he explained to me that he wanted to become a record complex. He said we could stay in Detroit and be a record company but LA is where entertainment is centralised. I bought him books on earthquakes and smog and everything you can think of, trying to get him not to move, but finally he said, "Look, you're vice-president of the company, get your family, come on out here because you've got to" and so I moved out there.'Not everyone followed. Several artists including the Four Tops, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Martha Reeves and the Funk Brothers either remained in Detroit or left Motown for other reasons. 'It left a hole in Detroit, absolutely,' says Fakir. 'People still don't understand why he left. I understand, because he was looking for bigger things and Hollywood is where everything happens. But I always felt you should leave at least the foundation of what you started here. Just like Ford. He didn't need to leave Detroit to be a global industry giant.'Detroit's fortunes remain tied to the automobile industry, and here in the rust belt that means the big three - Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. The three traditionally built big, brash gas-guzzlers, and failed to react as the price of oil escalated and buyers turned to cheaper and more fuel-economical foreign imports. Ford once employed more than 100,000 workers at the Dearborn plant; now it is a tenth of that.To drive around Detroit - and really, you need to drive - is to pass block after block of untended wasteland and forlorn shells of buildings, many of which have stood empty for decades, the halving of the city's population reducing the need for refurbishment or regeneration. Many rows of buildings look like the front teeth of an old bluesman - for every one still standing true, there's two missing and two askew. Some are victims of Devil's Night, the evening before Halloween, which, in Detroit, has traditionally been a night of mischief for youths but in the 70s and 80s developed into little less than mass arson as vacant buildings throughout the city were set on fire. It was not unknown for property owners who were unable to sell to use the date to torch their buildings in an attempt to claim on the insurance.If the landscape of a city is reflected in its music output, then it's no surprise that the black youths of the rust belt took diverging routes when they began to experiment with drum machines and samplers at the turn of the 80s. While neighbouring Chicago progressed down a more soulful, gospel-tinged route, based around old disco edits, which led to the invention of what we now know as acid house, the kids of the post-industrial wasteland of Detroit produced a harder-edged, almost dehumanised, spectral version of this new electronic music, which became techno.Today, even downtown Detroit seems quite deserted. Within two blocks of the beautifully ornate Fox Theatre and the neighbouring Comerica Park, home of Detroit Tigers, lie deserted buildings and wasteland. A couple of blocks further west is the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, where Diana Ross and the Supremes grew up. As I drive through the projects, two men are overloading a truck with baths, having liberated them from the derelict buildings.Arriving in almost any city in the world, it's usually possible to establish some reference points and begin to work out the city in your own head within a couple of days. In Detroit, despite the fact that much of the city is based on the grid system favoured by American cities, that's not the case. It's a city designed for three million inhabitants but now with less than a million and the social geography and layout don't seem to make sense.Driving up Woodward Avenue, one of the main arteries leading northwards from downtown, a flickering sign outside the Little Rock Baptist Church meekly suggests 'Give thanks ... it could be worse'. A short distance away, another derelict building turns out to be a disused police station. Every door and window is missing and stepping inside, I find charge books and reams of mug shots from the mid-Nineties lying in the rubble.The queen of Motown is Martha Reeves. If one image sums up Motown, it's that of Martha and the Vandellas filmed on the production line at Ford, miming to 'Dancing in the Street' from the back of a Mustang. Reeves is now a city councillor, and we meet in her office at City Hall, looking out over the Detroit river towards Canada. By coincidence, today is the final day in office of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who resigned after admitting two charges of obstruction of justice that followed on from a wild party involving strippers at his official residence, Manoogian Mansion, in 2002. Tamara Greene, a 27-year-old exotic dancer who allegedly performed at the party, was later murdered in a drive-by shooting. Kilpatrick was sentenced to 120 days in prison last month. Reeves's office is a crammed space, papers overflowing from her desk. The walls are adorned with certificates and pictures of herself with Bruce Springsteen, who invited her on stage to sing 'Dancing in the Street' when he played Detroit.When Motown left Detroit, Reeves signed with the label MCA and moved to the West Coast. But after 14 years away, she decided that 'Detroit is where I want to be'. She exudes civic pride and is keen to cement Motown's legacy. After winning a council seat in 2005 she successfully campaigned to have West Grand Boulevard changed to Berry Gordy Jr Boulevard and is now planning to have statues of Motown greats erected downtown .'The city struggled because it was deserted,' she admits, before adding bullishly: 'But Detroit is on the rebound. We're working diligently to get the city moving again and I see it happening.'Much is made by those who argue that Detroit is bouncing back, of the arrival of three vast casinos. One night I get a taxi to Motor City Casino - 'built to the beat of Detroit' - and it's a bit of a shock. Unlike every other place I have visited in town, the casino is busy, with people of all ages and races. I see more people in half an hour than I have seen in the previous half week. Again it strikes me how dysfunctional Detroit is. 'There's some really fascinating people in this city,' techno pioneer Derrick May said in 2005, 'but you'll never meet them. Because nobody walks and nobody talks.'After leaving Reeves, I meet Gloria Jones at the Foxtown Grille. Jones was coined the 'queen of northern soul' after her 1965 classic 'Tainted Love', later covered by Soft Cell. She joined Motown in 1968 as a singer and songwriter, penning songs for Gladys Knight, the Four Tops and the Jackson Five. She was a backing singer for T. Rex and had a son, Rolan, with Marc Bolan. She was driving the car on the day of Bolan's fatal crash. 'At Motown, we were writing 10 songs a day, and good songs,' she recalls, 'because we had all these fantastic artists to write for. Mr Gordy stressed to us to write a standard and we were so young, we were like, "What's a standard?" and he said, "A song that someone like Frank Sinatra would cover 50 years later," which was such fantastic advice. Which is why I'm still getting royalties from songs I wrote 30 years ago.'Many of the Motown artists are still performing, in Detroit's clubs, cabarets and casinos. One night I go to Baker's Keyboard Lounge, near 8 Mile Road, which proclaims to be the 'world's oldest jazz club'. It's a no-frills room with a low ceiling, waitresses serving soul food to the small booths that face a low stage. In its 74-year history the club has played host to many an American jazz great, from Louis Armstrong to Chick Corea. Tonight the stage is occupied by Dennis Coffey, who played on the Temptations' 1968 hit 'Cloud 9', one of Norman Whitfield's first psychedelic soul tracks. After the show he tells me how the other Funk Brothers were gobsmacked when he first played his signature wah-wah guitar in the recording sessions. Later in the week, I drive out to the suburbs to meet Joe Billingslea from the Contours, at the home of fellow band member Charles 'Chuck' Davis. The Contours signed to Motown in 1960 and scored a hit with the Berry Gordy-penned 'Do You Love Me?', which later featured in Dirty Dancing, before leaving Motown over a disagreement about money. Billingslea was then on the production line at Chrysler for four years, before joining the police. He got the Contours back together in 1971 and has been performing ever since. 'I remember Stevie Wonder running around the studio,' he says. 'He'd be running and then stop right before hitting a wall. I said, "That guy can see, who you fooling?" Stevie has always been a nice guy, but, to me, the icon of Motown is Smokey Robinson. He is still the same guy I met back in '59. Smokey's just a nice guy.'Billingslea isn't the type to say a bad word against anyone, but he's clearly still devastated by the events of 2004, when group member Sylvester Potts left overnight, with their manager, and started an alternative version of the Contours. 'It took a lot of work from us because they had all the contacts. We basically didn't work for three years. What made me angry is they told lies. If you don't want to sing with me that's fine, but don't go and tell lies. One lie was that I was deceased, the other lie was I had pulled a gun and disbanded the group.''My friend ... Joe Billingslea ...' says Chuck, his voice faltering and a tear rolling down his face, 'if you saw his face when he found out that there was another group, you would understand how I feel. There's been a lot of hurt over the last few years.'While we are there, a phone call confirms a court appearance to decide who has the rights to use the name of the Contours. Joe and Chuck agree to arrange an impromptu performance for us at 1pm the following day. When we arrive, the band are sat around the basement studio, joking and passing round a huge packet of barbecue-flavoured crisps and drinking lemonade from plastic cups. They run through a few songs including 'Do You Love Me?'. It's touching to see five guys in their twilight years going through their paces in this suburban basement, trying not to bump into each other. There can't be many people of their age, or any age, who are still dancing the mash potato.Despite the bullish statements of Martha Reeves, Detroit's plight has worsened. The credit crunch has bitten GM and Ford, with car sales plunging and warnings that even the biggest automobile firms could face bankruptcy. The situation could hardly be bleaker for what is left of Detroit's car industry. 'I can't think of a worse scenario short of a war in America,' declared veteran industry analyst John Casesa. 'But maybe that would be better because we would need tanks from Detroit.'I stop off at the Henry J Ford museum. Built on a scale only Americans understand, its exhibits include the Lincoln that President Kennedy was shot in, built by Ford here in Dearborn. I find myself drawn to the part of the museum that depicts the late 1950s, that golden age of automobile design and the American dream. All the imagery suggests that Detroit and Michigan must have felt like the centre of the world, a place of endless possibilities. The comparison with modern, post-industrial ghost town Detroit could not be more stark. The words of Marvin Gaye - originally Motown's fourth-choice drummer, who became one of its greatest stars - come to mind. 'Detroit turned out to be heaven,' said Gaye, 'but it also turned out to be hell.' ? For full details of Motown's anniversary releases see motown50.com10 classics picked by Motown writer Janie Bradford1. The Four Tops - Baby I Need Your Loving Levi Stubbs is spellbinding.2. Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It OnThere's raw sexuality in every word.3. The Temptations - My GirlSimply a classic. 4. The Supremes - Where Did Our Love Go?The beat + the nasal voice of Diana Ross = winner.5. The Miracles - Who's Lovin' YouAn underrated gut-bucket blues with Smokey on lead. Can you imagine Smokey singing the blues?6. Brenda Holloway - Every Little Bit HurtsWow!!!7. Stevie Wonder - For Once In My LifeStevie put this great lyric into its place in history. 8. The Marvelettes - ForeverWanda Young's emotional lead is matchless.9. The Originals - Baby I'm For RealThe blending of perfect voices on a perfect song.10. Barrett Strong - Money (That's What I Want)This one has that raw edge over the many versionsof the song that followed.? Janie Bradford's songwriting credits include 'Money' and 'Too Busy Thinking 'Bout My Baby'Motown recordsUrban musicguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Guardian.Co.Uk Luke Bainbridge visits Detroit on the 50th anniversary of Motown {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - 'This was it,' says Smokey Robinson, with his arms open and a shrug that suggests he still finds it slightly unbelievable himself. 'People who think about the music that came out of here would think that this place was huge. Think it was this huge recording studio where we had all these people ... but everyone was crammed in here ... and we were making music, we were jamming.''It' is the converted garage of a small frame house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan. Detroit being the home of the automobile, it's only appropriate that this story should revolve around a garage. This is the Motor City, and the house, christened Hitsville USA, is the birthplace of Motown Records. The garage at the rear is Studio A, one of the most revered recording studios in history.It was in this room that Barrett Strong, on Motown's first national hit, declared 'Money (That's What I Want)', where Smokey Robinson cried his 'Tears of a Clown', the Four Tops promised 'Reach Out, I'll Be There', Martha Reeves and the Vandellas sent a call out around the world, asking 'are you ready for a brand new beat?' and Diana Ross and the Supremes demanded 'Stop! In the Name of Love'. It was within these four walls that little Stevie Wonder recorded his first songs and, later, as the Sixties faded, Marvin Gaye asked 'What's Going On?'.Between 1961 and 1971, Motown had a staggering 110 Top 10 hits in the US, more than half of which were million-sellers, and most of them were recorded in this converted garage, barely big enough to house a Lincoln Continental.Motown is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary - the label was founded by Berry Gordy Jr as Tamla Records on 12 January 1959, then incorporated as the Motown Record Corporation in 1960. Downstairs in Hitsville is the reception area, the control room and Studio A. Upstairs was originally the living quarters for Gordy and his family, before Motown's success allowed them to move out into a home of their own. The building remains much as it was in its heyday. Smokey, now 68 and based in LA and Las Vegas, hasn't been back for a couple of years himself. 'This is a very spiritual room for me,' he explains. 'There's a lot of energy. So many things happened in here ...'Does it really feel like 50 years, I ask.'No, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like 50 years. 50 years have gone by in an instant; like that,' says Smokey, clicking his fingers. 'It just seems like yesterday that this stuff was going on. When Berry Gordy first came and saw this house and envisaged this garage being a studio.''It seems like yesterday,' he says again, rubbing his eye, 'it seems impossible. I always relate it to when I was a kid - I would be watching television and I would see Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis and those guys and they would say "Oh man, we've been doing this for 20 years" and I'd think, "God, how can someone have been doing something for 20 years?" But I see now, because 50 years have gone by like that.' He clicks his fingers again. 'Just overnight, you know ... 50 years ... God, that's half a century.'That half a century covers an extraordinary tale of love and loss - the remarkable dream of one man and the creation of a label that produced an unrivalled succession of hits, and the desperate decline of the city that was once at the heart of the American dream.It was 1913 when Henry Ford pioneered the use of a moving assembly line for mass production at his factory in the Highland Park district, then on the northern fringes of the city, and by the 1920s Detroit had already been christened the Motor City. The promise of employment in the car plants meant that Detroit overtook Chicago as the favoured destination for black families migrating from the south, and the city's population swelled to over two million, making it the fourth biggest city in America. By the 1950s, 80% of the world's cars were built in America, and most of those in Detroit. The city was the manufacturing centre of the America, and thus the world.Born in 1929 in Detroit - his parents had migrated north from Georgia - by the mid-Fifties Berry Gordy Jr, the seventh of eight children, was still searching for his way in life. Having dropped out of high school, he attempted to make it as a professional boxer before being drafted for the war in Korea. Back in Detroit, in 1953, he married Thelma Gorman and decided to pursue a career in music. In a rare interview in 1984 - the 78-year-old isn't giving any to coincide with Motown's 50th anniversary, although he has been working on a documentary which should surface next year - Gordy told the Los Angeles Times how seeing an advert for a battle of the bands when he was in a Detroit gym gave him a wake-up call - he noticed the stark juxtaposition of 'young fighters who were 23 but looked like 50, all scarred and beat up... then I saw the musicians who were 50 and they looked 23'.After the failure of his first musical venture, the 3-D Record Mart store, Gordy was forced to find work on the Lincoln-Mercury production line of the Ford plant to support his family. Now writing songs, he was introduced to the R'n'B singer Jackie Wilson, a fellow ex-boxer, who recorded one of Gordy's compositions 'Reet Petite', then several more over the next couple of years. Gordy, however, became quickly disillusioned with the industry when he realised the labels in Chicago and New York that were distributing these songs were the ones making serious dollar. In the offices of Wilson's manager one day, Gordy met the Matadors, fronted by a 16-year-old with sparkling green eyes and light dark skin called William 'Smokey' Robinson. Gordy persuaded the group to change their name to the Miracles and on Robinson's 18th birthday, their first single 'Got a Job', written and produced by Gordy, was released on New York's End Records.Gordy began to dream of building his own label, an equivalent to Ford's assembly lines, a hit factory. It was Smokey who persuaded Gordy that he needed to stop leasing records, and go national himself. 'I recorded this record, the Miracles and me, called 'Way Over There' and it broke out really big here in Detroit and so we re-recorded it and put violins on it and I just told him: "We might as well take this record national. Nobody's paying us anyway so we might as well take the chance on doing it ourselves." So that's what we did.'Spurred on by Smokey, and his sisters Gwen and Anna Gordy, who had already started Anna Records with Billy Davis, Gordy borrowed $800 from his family and started the label in January 1959. 'On the very first day, when Berry decided to start Motown,' Smokey recalls, those green eyes sparkling, 'he sat down and said, "Hey, you guys, I wanted to tell you something: we are not going to make black music, we're going to make world music, we're going to make music for everybody. We're going to make great music, we're going to have some great stories, make some great beats" - and that's what we set out to do.'Though Gordy's ambition always stretched much further than Detroit city limits - the label called itself 'the sound of young America' - he still wanted its name to show its roots. 'Detroit was known as "The Motor City",' says Smokey. 'Berry wanted to name the label something that sounded familiar. First, he was going to call it 'Mocity' but he decided that 'town' was more homely, more family-sounding, so he called it 'Motown'.In his determination to build a hit factory, Gordy employed various songwriters. The best known were Holland-Dozier-Holland, aka Laurent Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland. Other notables included Norman Whitfield, William 'Mickey' Stevenson and Smokey himself, whom Gordy made vice president. The producers' mantra was 'KISS' - 'keep it simple, stupid.'Most of the records were also recorded with the same studio session musicians - a tight-knit group known as the Funk Brothers. The 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown claimed that in 14 years, they 'played on more No1 hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined'. Gordy now had the hit factory that he had dreamt of.He introduced weekly quality control meetings to ensure a consistent procession of hits. Smokey, sitting back in his chair in the Hitsville control room, explains: 'We had Monday morning meetings, they started at 9 o'clock, and at 9 o'clock and five seconds you were locked out. You had to be there at 9 o'clock in order to get your stuff heard. All the creative people were in those meetings, the writers, the producers. We would play our stuff for each other, critique each other's stuff and make suggestions on each other's stuff to make it better. We were very competitive but we still pulled for each other to be creatively strong. A lot of people have said to me, "Berry decided..." No, Berry did not decide any of that. Berry was in those meetings, but Berry was still producing and writing at that time and his stuff would get shot down just like anybody else's.' He laughs. 'It was very hard for Berry to get a record out."Several timeless tracks - including Marvin Gaye's 'Heard it Through the Grapevine - were initially rejected by Gordy. 'Absolutely,' confirms Smokey. 'Many of the tracks were sent back and re-worked, and re-worked, until they became the hits that they became.'The label was a strong and highly visible example of black empowerment when the civil rights movement was gathering pace. In her 1999 book, Dancing in the Street, Suzanne Smith points out that Gordy was 'extremely wary about affiliating his business with any organisation or movement that might negatively influence his company's commercial success'. What Gordy cared about was record sales. 'Nevertheless,' Smith adds, 'both Motown's music and its entrepreneurial acumen emerged from an urban black community that regularly asserted its "politics" through cultural and economic means.'In other words, the success of the black-owned Motown was a powerful statement in itself.Gordy may have been wary about Motown becoming overly politicised, but the label decided to release its first spoken-word recording in August 1963: a recording of Martin Luther King's speech at the Great March to Freedom in June that year. King declared the Detroit march 'the largest and greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States', and his speech that day included an early version of his 'I Have a Dream' oration.The record was deliberately released on 28 August, the same day King appeared at the March on Washington, and Gordy spoke of how 'the Negro revolt of 1963 will take its place historically with the American Revolution' and how 'this album belongs in the home of every American and should be required listening for every American child, white or black'. 'There is no way that you could be a black person in the United States in the Sixties and not be affected,' says Smokey, when I ask him about the civil rights movement. 'Dr Martin Luther King came to visit us here at Motown. He was such a dynamic, incredible person. 'We all experienced it [racism]. We'd go to the South and we'd be shot at and run out of places and all kinds of stuff just for being black. But the music transcended all of that. We'd go to the South and at first, even though the white kids would have our music, the audiences would be separated: white people on one side, black people on the other side; white people upstairs, black people downstairs or vice-versa, no mingling or any of that. After the music became so popular a year or two later we'd go to the same places and the black and white kids would be together and they'd be dancing, having a good time, singing, holding hands and mingling and talking. The music bridged a lot of gaps.'In the early years, Motown was as much a family as a record label. Several of Gordy's own family worked within the company, and in the early days half the artists and groups were thrown together in one bus when they went on the road as the Motown Revue. Remarkably, three Motown secretaries at Motown - Janie Bradford, Martha Reeves and Diana Ross, went on to be stars.There were also several relationships within the label, including those between Smokey and Claudette Robinson, Marvin Gaye and Berry Gordy's sister, Anne. 'We still have it,' says Smokey. 'You've been around here today and you've seen the reaction when Kim Weston and I saw each other, or "Duke" Fakir of the Four Tops.' Weston and Fakir are also at Hitsville today. 'We just have that brother and sisterhood and it's always been that way,' continues Smokey. 'When people talk about the Motown family, people think, "That's mythical, they couldn't possibly have been like that," but it wasn't and it isn't mythical.''When we first got here we could feel the difference right away; we was family,' explains Fakir when I speak to him later. (the Four Tops had already recorded for Chess, Red Top, Riverside and Columbia before signing for Motown, but had yet to have a hit.) 'On another label you just went and in and did a session and you were out, you didn't meet other artists. But [at Motown] you were talking to the Supremes, the Temptations, the Miracles and you were having fun, and you felt like you were part of something. And you knew that they were on their way.'The Four Tops went on to be Motown's longest standing group, keeping the same line-up for more than four decades. Levi Stubbs died shortly after I met Fakir, who is now the only surviving member. The producer Norman Whitfield also died in the week I was in Detroit. Most of Motown's output still sounds fresh and vibrant today, but the Motor City itself hasn't aged quite as well. By the early Sixties, the city and its car industry were already in decline. The population drain from American inner cities which began after the Second World War was already more pronounced in Detroit than elsewhere. The city had suffered race riots in 1863 and 1943 but the 12th Street riot in 1967, which ignited after a raid on a speakeasy, grew into the biggest riot in modern American history, lasting five days and leaving 43 dead, with 7,200 arrests and 2,000 buildings burned down. This hastened the 'white flight', many of whom fled a lot further than the suburbs. Over the next two decades the population of Detroit halved to around 900,000, leaving swaths of the inner city derelict and desolate.As Detroit entered these desperate times, Gordy made the decision, in 1972, to uproot Motown to the sunshine of the West Coast, a devastating blow to Detroit's already crumbling civic pride. The reclusive Gordy had increasingly spent time in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and decided that Motown needed to branch out and become an entertainment company, and in order to do that it needed to be in LA.'I was the biggest protester about us moving,' stresses Smokey. 'I was born here in Detroit. Motown was born here in Detroit and I told Berry this. I explained all of this to him: "Berry, this is our roots, we started here" and he explained to me that he wanted to become a record complex. He said we could stay in Detroit and be a record company but LA is where entertainment is centralised. I bought him books on earthquakes and smog and everything you can think of, trying to get him not to move, but finally he said, "Look, you're vice-president of the company, get your family, come on out here because you've got to" and so I moved out there.'Not everyone followed. Several artists including the Four Tops, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Martha Reeves and the Funk Brothers either remained in Detroit or left Motown for other reasons. 'It left a hole in Detroit, absolutely,' says Fakir. 'People still don't understand why he left. I understand, because he was looking for bigger things and Hollywood is where everything happens. But I always felt you should leave at least the foundation of what you started here. Just like Ford. He didn't need to leave Detroit to be a global industry giant.'Detroit's fortunes remain tied to the automobile industry, and here in the rust belt that means the big three - Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. The three traditionally built big, brash gas-guzzlers, and failed to react as the price of oil escalated and buyers turned to cheaper and more fuel-economical foreign imports. Ford once employed more than 100,000 workers at the Dearborn plant; now it is a tenth of that.To drive around Detroit - and really, you need to drive - is to pass block after block of untended wasteland and forlorn shells of buildings, many of which have stood empty for decades, the halving of the city's population reducing the need for refurbishment or regeneration. Many rows of buildings look like the front teeth of an old bluesman - for every one still standing true, there's two missing and two askew. Some are victims of Devil's Night, the evening before Halloween, which, in Detroit, has traditionally been a night of mischief for youths but in the 70s and 80s developed into little less than mass arson as vacant buildings throughout the city were set on fire. It was not unknown for property owners who were unable to sell to use the date to torch their buildings in an attempt to claim on the insurance.If the landscape of a city is reflected in its music output, then it's no surprise that the black youths of the rust belt took diverging routes when they began to experiment with drum machines and samplers at the turn of the 80s. While neighbouring Chicago progressed down a more soulful, gospel-tinged route, based around old disco edits, which led to the invention of what we now know as acid house, the kids of the post-industrial wasteland of Detroit produced a harder-edged, almost dehumanised, spectral version of this new electronic music, which became techno.Today, even downtown Detroit seems quite deserted. Within two blocks of the beautifully ornate Fox Theatre and the neighbouring Comerica Park, home of Detroit Tigers, lie deserted buildings and wasteland. A couple of blocks further west is the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, where Diana Ross and the Supremes grew up. As I drive through the projects, two men are overloading a truck with baths, having liberated them from the derelict buildings.Arriving in almost any city in the world, it's usually possible to establish some reference points and begin to work out the city in your own head within a couple of days. In Detroit, despite the fact that much of the city is based on the grid system favoured by American cities, that's not the case. It's a city designed for three million inhabitants but now with less than a million and the social geography and layout don't seem to make sense.Driving up Woodward Avenue, one of the main arteries leading northwards from downtown, a flickering sign outside the Little Rock Baptist Church meekly suggests 'Give thanks ... it could be worse'. A short distance away, another derelict building turns out to be a disused police station. Every door and window is missing and stepping inside, I find charge books and reams of mug shots from the mid-Nineties lying in the rubble.The queen of Motown is Martha Reeves. If one image sums up Motown, it's that of Martha and the Vandellas filmed on the production line at Ford, miming to 'Dancing in the Street' from the back of a Mustang. Reeves is now a city councillor, and we meet in her office at City Hall, looking out over the Detroit river towards Canada. By coincidence, today is the final day in office of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who resigned after admitting two charges of obstruction of justice that followed on from a wild party involving strippers at his official residence, Manoogian Mansion, in 2002. Tamara Greene, a 27-year-old exotic dancer who allegedly performed at the party, was later murdered in a drive-by shooting. Kilpatrick was sentenced to 120 days in prison last month. Reeves's office is a crammed space, papers overflowing from her desk. The walls are adorned with certificates and pictures of herself with Bruce Springsteen, who invited her on stage to sing 'Dancing in the Street' when he played Detroit.When Motown left Detroit, Reeves signed with the label MCA and moved to the West Coast. But after 14 years away, she decided that 'Detroit is where I want to be'. She exudes civic pride and is keen to cement Motown's legacy. After winning a council seat in 2005 she successfully campaigned to have West Grand Boulevard changed to Berry Gordy Jr Boulevard and is now planning to have statues of Motown greats erected downtown .'The city struggled because it was deserted,' she admits, before adding bullishly: 'But Detroit is on the rebound. We're working diligently to get the city moving again and I see it happening.'Much is made by those who argue that Detroit is bouncing back, of the arrival of three vast casinos. One night I get a taxi to Motor City Casino - 'built to the beat of Detroit' - and it's a bit of a shock. Unlike every other place I have visited in town, the casino is busy, with people of all ages and races. I see more people in half an hour than I have seen in the previous half week. Again it strikes me how dysfunctional Detroit is. 'There's some really fascinating people in this city,' techno pioneer Derrick May said in 2005, 'but you'll never meet them. Because nobody walks and nobody talks.'After leaving Reeves, I meet Gloria Jones at the Foxtown Grille. Jones was coined the 'queen of northern soul' after her 1965 classic 'Tainted Love', later covered by Soft Cell. She joined Motown in 1968 as a singer and songwriter, penning songs for Gladys Knight, the Four Tops and the Jackson Five. She was a backing singer for T. Rex and had a son, Rolan, with Marc Bolan. She was driving the car on the day of Bolan's fatal crash. 'At Motown, we were writing 10 songs a day, and good songs,' she recalls, 'because we had all these fantastic artists to write for. Mr Gordy stressed to us to write a standard and we were so young, we were like, "What's a standard?" and he said, "A song that someone like Frank Sinatra would cover 50 years later," which was such fantastic advice. Which is why I'm still getting royalties from songs I wrote 30 years ago.'Many of the Motown artists are still performing, in Detroit's clubs, cabarets and casinos. One night I go to Baker's Keyboard Lounge, near 8 Mile Road, which proclaims to be the 'world's oldest jazz club'. It's a no-frills room with a low ceiling, waitresses serving soul food to the small booths that face a low stage. In its 74-year history the club has played host to many an American jazz great, from Louis Armstrong to Chick Corea. Tonight the stage is occupied by Dennis Coffey, who played on the Temptations' 1968 hit 'Cloud 9', one of Norman Whitfield's first psychedelic soul tracks. After the show he tells me how the other Funk Brothers were gobsmacked when he first played his signature wah-wah guitar in the recording sessions. Later in the week, I drive out to the suburbs to meet Joe Billingslea from the Contours, at the home of fellow band member Charles 'Chuck' Davis. The Contours signed to Motown in 1960 and scored a hit with the Berry Gordy-penned 'Do You Love Me?', which later featured in Dirty Dancing, before leaving Motown over a disagreement about money. Billingslea was then on the production line at Chrysler for four years, before joining the police. He got the Contours back together in 1971 and has been performing ever since. 'I remember Stevie Wonder running around the studio,' he says. 'He'd be running and then stop right before hitting a wall. I said, "That guy can see, who you fooling?" Stevie has always been a nice guy, but, to me, the icon of Motown is Smokey Robinson. He is still the same guy I met back in '59. Smokey's just a nice guy.'Billingslea isn't the type to say a bad word against anyone, but he's clearly still devastated by the events of 2004, when group member Sylvester Potts left overnight, with their manager, and started an alternative version of the Contours. 'It took a lot of work from us because they had all the contacts. We basically didn't work for three years. What made me angry is they told lies. If you don't want to sing with me that's fine, but don't go and tell lies. One lie was that I was deceased, the other lie was I had pulled a gun and disbanded the group.''My friend ... Joe Billingslea ...' says Chuck, his voice faltering and a tear rolling down his face, 'if you saw his face when he found out that there was another group, you would understand how I feel. There's been a lot of hurt over the last few years.'While we are there, a phone call confirms a court appearance to decide who has the rights to use the name of the Contours. Joe and Chuck agree to arrange an impromptu performance for us at 1pm the following day. When we arrive, the band are sat around the basement studio, joking and passing round a huge packet of barbecue-flavoured crisps and drinking lemonade from plastic cups. They run through a few songs including 'Do You Love Me?'. It's touching to see five guys in their twilight years going through their paces in this suburban basement, trying not to bump into each other. There can't be many people of their age, or any age, who are still dancing the mash potato.Despite the bullish statements of Martha Reeves, Detroit's plight has worsened. The credit crunch has bitten GM and Ford, with car sales plunging and warnings that even the biggest automobile firms could face bankruptcy. The situation could hardly be bleaker for what is left of Detroit's car industry. 'I can't think of a worse scenario short of a war in America,' declared veteran industry analyst John Casesa. 'But maybe that would be better because we would need tanks from Detroit.'I stop off at the Henry J Ford museum. Built on a scale only Americans understand, its exhibits include the Lincoln that President Kennedy was shot in, built by Ford here in Dearborn. I find myself drawn to the part of the museum that depicts the late 1950s, that golden age of automobile design and the American dream. All the imagery suggests that Detroit and Michigan must have felt like the centre of the world, a place of endless possibilities. The comparison with modern, post-industrial ghost town Detroit could not be more stark. The words of Marvin Gaye - originally Motown's fourth-choice drummer, who became one of its greatest stars - come to mind. 'Detroit turned out to be heaven,' said Gaye, 'but it also turned out to be hell.' ? For full details of Motown's anniversary releases see motown50.com10 classics picked by Motown writer Janie Bradford1. The Four Tops - Baby I Need Your Loving Levi Stubbs is spellbinding.2. Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It OnThere's raw sexuality in every word.3. The Temptations - My GirlSimply a classic. 4. The Supremes - Where Did Our Love Go?The beat + the nasal voice of Diana Ross = winner.5. The Miracles - Who's Lovin' YouAn underrated gut-bucket blues with Smokey on lead. Can you imagine Smokey singing the blues?6. Brenda Holloway - Every Little Bit HurtsWow!!!7. Stevie Wonder - For Once In My LifeStevie put this great lyric into its place in history. 8. The Marvelettes - ForeverWanda Young's emotional lead is matchless.9. The Originals - Baby I'm For RealThe blending of perfect voices on a perfect song.10. Barrett Strong - Money (That's What I Want)This one has that raw edge over the many versionsof the song that followed.? Janie Bradford's songwriting credits include 'Money' and 'Too Busy Thinking 'Bout My Baby'Motown recordsUrban musicguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Luke Bainbridge visits Detroit on the 50th anniversary of Motown | Music | The Observer {...} Luke Bainbridge visits Detroit on the 50th anniversary of Motown, 'the sound of young America' {...}
Published: November 9, 2008, 12:05 am - Indexed: November 10, 2008, 1:03 pm - Page Size: 130KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media

]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media {LIBRARIES > WEBLOGS} - Yma Sumac R.I.P. http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/libraries/library-and-information-science/weblogs/yma-sumac-r-i-p-2008119862.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/libraries/library-and-information-science/weblogs/yma-sumac-r-i-p-2008119862.htm Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:17:20 GMT Yma Sumac, one of the most unique and original singers of the 1950s passed away last Saturday aged 86. Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in Peru in 1922, she was first noticed by a larger public in 1950, when her debut recording Voice of the Xtabay was released. The unsuspecting listener was not only confronted by lush orchestral arrangements conceived by the "king of easy listening" Les Baxter, but also by unprecedented vocal acrobatics. Sumac's voice had a range of four and a half octaves (she herself claimed to have five), and the record was clearly designed to showcase this incredible range in each and every song. Baxter managed to create a pseudo-exoticism that was on the one hand immediately recognizable as American, but that still carried a strange otherworldly flavour, which was further augmented by the claim that Sumac was actually an Inca princess. Together with the liner notes, which explained that "xtabay" was the primal female energy, the album was a stylized product of mythical exotic femininity. Voice of the Xtabay became a huge success; it is the only record that was never deleted from the Capitol catalogue since its first release in 1950. The success of Voice of the Xtabay led to other records; none of them was quite a match for the debut, but they still kept up the atmosphere of unrestrained exoticism and gave ample room to Sumac's vocal acrobatics. Inca Taqui from 1952, which further built on Sumac's alleged Inca heritage (which in turn led to the rumour that her real name was Amy Camus and that she was in reality a housewife from Brooklyn), was followed in 1954 by Mambo!, a crazy set of -- as the title suggests - eight fiery mambos, arranged by Billy May using brass sharper than a sane ear could bear and sung by Sumac in multiple voices reminiscent of anything between the Muppet Show and the Queen of the Night from Mozart's Magic Flute. It's more mambo that a sane person can stand, but it's an unique experience packaged inside a fantastic record cover. Sumac's success seemed to decline somewhat towards the late 1950s. Later recordings, such as Legend of Jivaro, whose liner notes claimed that Sumac and her husband Moises Vivanco had travelled to the Amazonian jungle and studied the music of the Jivaro, a tribe of savage headhunters, are lacking both the tightness and the novelty factor of earlier recordings; in fact the album cover of the Inca princess among the headhunters is slightly more appealing than the music. Still, even though record sales decreased, Sumac toured regularly through the United States and other countries, and her stage presence was legendary, even when her vocal range decreased with age. She retired in the 1980s, claiming to have moved to Peru (which was not true; she lived in Los Angeles), but appeared occasionally on stage, even at age 75 at the 1997 Montreal Jazz Festival. Yma Sumac, the "nightingale of the Andes", born September 13, 1922, died November 1, 2008. Homepage.Univie.Ac.At Yma Sumac R.I.P. {new window}   Homepage.Univie.Ac.At - Yma Sumac, one of the most unique and original singers of the 1950s passed away last Saturday aged 86. Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in Peru in 1922, she was first noticed by a larger public in 1950, when her debut recording Voice of the Xtabay was released. The unsuspecting listener was not only confronted by lush orchestral arrangements conceived by the "king of easy listening" Les Baxter, but also by unprecedented vocal acrobatics. Sumac's voice had a range of four and a half octaves (she herself claimed to have five), and the record was clearly designed to showcase this incredible range in each and every song. Baxter managed to create a pseudo-exoticism that was on the one hand immediately recognizable as American, but that still carried a strange otherworldly flavour, which was further augmented by the claim that Sumac was actually an Inca princess. Together with the liner notes, which explained that "xtabay" was the primal female energy, the album was a stylized product of mythical exotic femininity. Voice of the Xtabay became a huge success; it is the only record that was never deleted from the Capitol catalogue since its first release in 1950. The success of Voice of the Xtabay led to other records; none of them was quite a match for the debut, but they still kept up the atmosphere of unrestrained exoticism and gave ample room to Sumac's vocal acrobatics. Inca Taqui from 1952, which further built on Sumac's alleged Inca heritage (which in turn led to the rumour that her real name was Amy Camus and that she was in reality a housewife from Brooklyn), was followed in 1954 by Mambo!, a crazy set of -- as the title suggests - eight fiery mambos, arranged by Billy May using brass sharper than a sane ear could bear and sung by Sumac in multiple voices reminiscent of anything between the Muppet Show and the Queen of the Night from Mozart's Magic Flute. It's more mambo that a sane person can stand, but it's an unique experience packaged inside a fantastic record cover. Sumac's success seemed to decline somewhat towards the late 1950s. Later recordings, such as Legend of Jivaro, whose liner notes claimed that Sumac and her husband Moises Vivanco had travelled to the Amazonian jungle and studied the music of the Jivaro, a tribe of savage headhunters, are lacking both the tightness and the novelty factor of earlier recordings; in fact the album cover of the Inca princess among the headhunters is slightly more appealing than the music. Still, even though record sales decreased, Sumac toured regularly through the United States and other countries, and her stage presence was legendary, even when her vocal range decreased with age. She retired in the 1980s, claiming to have moved to Peru (which was not true; she lived in Los Angeles), but appeared occasionally on stage, even at age 75 at the 1997 Montreal Jazz Festival. Yma Sumac, the "nightingale of the Andes", born September 13, 1922, died November 1, 2008.
The Aardvark Speaks: Yma Sumac R.I.P. {...}
Published: November 3, 2008, 2:17 pm - Indexed: November 4, 2008, 11:26 am - Page Size: 31KB
Category: Reference > Libraries > Library and Information Science > Weblogs

]]> Reference > Libraries > Library and Information Science > Weblogs {LITERATURE > CYBERPUNK} - BBtv: Hunting for the Kappa Monster in Tokyo, part 1 http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/bbtv-hunting-for-the-kappa-monster-in-tokyo-part-20081089831.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/bbtv-hunting-for-the-kappa-monster-in-tokyo-part-20081089831.htm Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:10:05 GMT Oh, man, this is weird. How do we explain this? Okay. So, the Boing Boing tv team planned a series of episodes about Japanese monsters for Halloween, and for this purpose, we sent Sean Bonner to Tokyo, armed with a video camera. The plan was: meet up with Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda, authors of the previosly-boinged book Yokai Attack: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide, and hunt down the truth about mythical monstrous creatures from Japanese folklore. We'd planned to start our Japanese monster series with a hunt for the Kappa, a water-dwelling, ninja-turtle-like, child-sized creature who is fond of cucumbers and human colon meat (I'm not making this up). Legend says the Kappa will reach into your butt to eat your colon, which is grosstastically awesome. Anyway -- Sean made it to Tokyo, and shot evidence of the Kappa on Japan's urban streets (signs, blow-up Kappa dolls, stickers). But then, suddenly, the raw footage he was FTPing to us nightly just STOPPED. Bam. Just like that. And with it, all evidence we had of Sean's whereabouts and well-being. Today's BBtv episode is part one of what we hope will be a two-part series on Kappa Hunting in Tokyo. IF HE SURVIVED. Sean, if you can read this, I sure hope you were armed with cucumbers. The alternative is too horrible to imagine. Link to Boing Boing tv post with instructions on how to subscribe to our daily video podcast. Here's the direct MP4 link in case you can't deal with Flash video. Whatever you do, don't miss Sean dancing the Kappa Dance at 05:41. Previously on Boing Boing: Japanese monsters, and how to survive their wrath: YOKAI ATTACK... Boingboing.Net BBtv: Hunting for the Kappa Monster in Tokyo, part 1 {new window}   Www.Boingboing.Net - Oh, man, this is weird. How do we explain this? Okay. So, the Boing Boing tv team planned a series of episodes about Japanese monsters for Halloween, and for this purpose, we sent Sean Bonner to Tokyo, armed with a video camera. The plan was: meet up with Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda, authors of the previosly-boinged book Yokai Attack: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide, and hunt down the truth about mythical monstrous creatures from Japanese folklore. We'd planned to start our Japanese monster series with a hunt for the Kappa, a water-dwelling, ninja-turtle-like, child-sized creature who is fond of cucumbers and human colon meat (I'm not making this up). Legend says the Kappa will reach into your butt to eat your colon, which is grosstastically awesome. Anyway -- Sean made it to Tokyo, and shot evidence of the Kappa on Japan's urban streets (signs, blow-up Kappa dolls, stickers). But then, suddenly, the raw footage he was FTPing to us nightly just STOPPED. Bam. Just like that. And with it, all evidence we had of Sean's whereabouts and well-being. Today's BBtv episode is part one of what we hope will be a two-part series on Kappa Hunting in Tokyo. IF HE SURVIVED. Sean, if you can read this, I sure hope you were armed with cucumbers. The alternative is too horrible to imagine. Link to Boing Boing tv post with instructions on how to subscribe to our daily video podcast. Here's the direct MP4 link in case you can't deal with Flash video. Whatever you do, don't miss Sean dancing the Kappa Dance at 05:41. Previously on Boing Boing: Japanese monsters, and how to survive their wrath: YOKAI ATTACK...
BBtv: Hunting for the Kappa Monster in Tokyo, part 1 - Boing Boing {...}
Published: October 30, 2008, 5:10 pm - Indexed: November 2, 2008, 9:05 am - Page Size: 77KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk {LITERATURE > RSS FEEDS} - Q&A: More Truth Adventures! http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/q-a-more-truth-adventures-2008102971.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/q-a-more-truth-adventures-2008102971.htm Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:00:00 GMT Josh Gates, the host of SCI FI Channel's real-life adventure series Destination Truth, told reporters to expect more globe-trotting escapades as he and his team search for elusive mythical creatures, while having to deal with various kinds of trouble. Scifi.Com Q&A: More Truth Adventures! {new window}   Www.Scifi.Com - Josh Gates, the host of SCI FI Channel's real-life adventure series Destination Truth, told reporters to expect more globe-trotting escapades as he and his team search for elusive mythical creatures, while having to deal with various kinds of trouble.
Published: October 1, 2008, 6:00 am - Indexed: October 1, 2008, 10:42 am - Page Size: 50KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds {MARKETING AND ADVERTISING > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Pabbit Promotes, Corbis Matches, Kids Cross, Shawn Pops http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/marketing-and-advertising/advertising/news-and-media/pabbit-promotes-corbis-matches-kids-cross-shawn-20080964834.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/marketing-and-advertising/advertising/news-and-media/pabbit-promotes-corbis-matches-kids-cross-shawn-20080964834.htm Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:02:00 GMT So how do you promote a Philadelphia bar called Pub and Kitchen? You invent a mythical animal called Pabbit and make it your new logo Adrants.Com Pabbit Promotes, Corbis Matches, Kids Cross, Shawn Pops {new window}   Www.Adrants.Com - So how do you promote a Philadelphia bar called Pub and Kitchen? You invent a mythical animal called Pabbit and make it your new logo
Pabbit Promotes, Corbis Matches, Kids Cross, Shawn Pops » Adrants {...}
Published: September 29, 2008, 6:02 pm - Indexed: September 30, 2008, 7:38 pm - Page Size: 39KB
Category: Business > Marketing and Advertising > Advertising > News and Media

]]> Business > Marketing and Advertising > Advertising > News and Media {NORTH AMERICA > LODGING} - Studio Westin princeville condo style resort-Sun. June 28-Sun July 5th (noe valley) $1800 http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/travel-and-tourism/lodging/studio-westin-princeville-condo-style-resort-sun-20080972927.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/travel-and-tourism/lodging/studio-westin-princeville-condo-style-resort-sun-20080972927.htm Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:41:40 GMT This will be Westin's Princeville Villas first year open. The resort is poised two hundred feet above the majestic north shore of Kauai, with wide open vistas of limitless ocean and the rugged cliffs at road's end that begin the Na Pali Coast and create a verdant backdrop for Princeville's two renowned golf courses and Hanalei Bay, the on- location site for much of the movie musical South Pacific,and the mythical island of "Bali Hai." Our Premium Studio Villa features a 512 sq. ft. living area with kitchenette, plantation style decor, a separate shower and bath, and washer and dryer. The Studio has linens and kitchen service for 4 people. The studio villa features: Westin's own Queen-sized Heavenly Bed and Heavenly Bath whirlpool tub, and a separate shower. The living room has a sofa bed, LCD flat panel T.V.,and a DVD and Bose am/fm/cd wave stereo. The fully equipped kitchen provides a microwave, glass cook top, full-sized refrigerator with icemaker, dishwasher, coffee maker, toaster, blender and dinner ware. The unit has a washer and dryer, private lanai with outdoor furniture, two telephone lines with cordless phone, voice mail and data port, and an in-room safe. The resort has: one large main pool with spa, a kiddie pool with slide and spa, a cliffside plunge pool and spa, a pool and spa tucked into a remote bluff, and two pool bars. In addition the resort provides Westinworkout facilities powered by Reebok, a Westin kids club, and an on site restaurant, market, and business center. There are a number of excellent restaurants in the area and guests at the Villas, as an affiliate within the Starwood system, have access to the Princeville Resort nearby, as well as the Kauai Sheraton at Poipu Beach on the southern side of the island, where you may also use the facilities. For more information, see: http://www.starwoodvacationownership.com/westin_princeville_ocean_resort_villas/welcome.jsp Please email if interested Sfbay.Craigslist.Org Studio Westin princeville condo style resort-Sun. June 28-Sun July 5th (noe valley) $1800 {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - This will be Westin's Princeville Villas first year open. The resort is poised two hundred feet above the majestic north shore of Kauai, with wide open vistas of limitless ocean and the rugged cliffs at road's end that begin the Na Pali Coast and create a verdant backdrop for Princeville's two renowned golf courses and Hanalei Bay, the on- location site for much of the movie musical South Pacific,and the mythical island of "Bali Hai." Our Premium Studio Villa features a 512 sq. ft. living area with kitchenette, plantation style decor, a separate shower and bath, and washer and dryer. The Studio has linens and kitchen service for 4 people. The studio villa features: Westin's own Queen-sized Heavenly Bed and Heavenly Bath whirlpool tub, and a separate shower. The living room has a sofa bed, LCD flat panel T.V.,and a DVD and Bose am/fm/cd wave stereo. The fully equipped kitchen provides a microwave, glass cook top, full-sized refrigerator with icemaker, dishwasher, coffee maker, toaster, blender and dinner ware. The unit has a washer and dryer, private lanai with outdoor furniture, two telephone lines with cordless phone, voice mail and data port, and an in-room safe. The resort has: one large main pool with spa, a kiddie pool with slide and spa, a cliffside plunge pool and spa, a pool and spa tucked into a remote bluff, and two pool bars. In addition the resort provides Westinworkout facilities powered by Reebok, a Westin kids club, and an on site restaurant, market, and business center. There are a number of excellent restaurants in the area and guests at the Villas, as an affiliate within the Starwood system, have access to the Princeville Resort nearby, as well as the Kauai Sheraton at Poipu Beach on the southern side of the island, where you may also use the facilities. For more information, see: http://www.starwoodvacationownership.com/westin_princeville_ocean_resort_villas/welcome.jsp Please email if interested
Studio Westin princeville condo style resort-Sun. June 28-Sun July 5th {...}
Published: September 18, 2008, 6:41 am - Indexed: September 18, 2008, 12:44 pm - Page Size: 5KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Travel and Tourism > Lodging

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Travel and Tourism > Lodging {LITERATURE > CYBERPUNK} - Ancient Mayan underworld discovered in Mexico http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/ancient-mayan-underworld-discovered-in-mexico-20080819333.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/ancient-mayan-underworld-discovered-in-mexico-20080819333.htm Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:08:36 GMT Archeologists in Mexico think they might have discovered Xibalba, a mythical Mayan underworld also known as the "place of fear." After some serious scuba diving and inching across deeply submerged underwater tunnels near the Yucatan peninsula, investigators reached an entrance to a bunch of dry chambers with the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and a 330-foot long road. There were also lots and lots of human bones. According to the ancient Mayan scripture Popol Vuh, the entrance to Xibalba was once protected by rivers filled with blood, scorpions, and pus, and houses swarming with shrieking bats. Link to Reuters article Xibalba on Wikipedia (Thanks, Baker!)( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)... Boingboing.Net Ancient Mayan underworld discovered in Mexico {new window}   Www.Boingboing.Net - Archeologists in Mexico think they might have discovered Xibalba, a mythical Mayan underworld also known as the "place of fear." After some serious scuba diving and inching across deeply submerged underwater tunnels near the Yucatan peninsula, investigators reached an entrance to a bunch of dry chambers with the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and a 330-foot long road. There were also lots and lots of human bones. According to the ancient Mayan scripture Popol Vuh, the entrance to Xibalba was once protected by rivers filled with blood, scorpions, and pus, and houses swarming with shrieking bats. Link to Reuters article Xibalba on Wikipedia (Thanks, Baker!)( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)...
Ancient Mayan underworld discovered in Mexico - Boing Boing {...}
Published: August 28, 2008, 8:08 pm - Indexed: August 29, 2008, 12:53 pm - Page Size: 54KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk {HEALTH > NEWS AND MEDIA} - How the Personal Genome Project Could Unlock the Mysteries of Life http://articles.world-of-newave.info/health/news-and-media/how-the-personal-genome-project-could-unlock-the-20080775638.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/health/news-and-media/how-the-personal-genome-project-could-unlock-the-20080775638.htm Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:00:00 GMT George Church is dyslexic, narcoleptic, and a vegan. He is married with one daughter, weighs about 210 pounds, and has worn a pioneer-style bushy beard for decades. He has elevated levels of creatine kinase in his blood, the consequence of a heart attack. He enjoys waterskiing, photography, rock climbing, and singing in his church choir. His mother's maiden name is Strong. He was born on August 28, 1954. If this all seems like too much information, well, blame Church himself. As the director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, he has a thing about openness, and this information (and plenty more, down to his signature) is posted online at arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/pers.html. By putting it out there for everyone to see, Church isn't just baiting identity thieves. He's hoping to demonstrate that all this personal information — even though we consider it private and somehow sacred — is actually fairly meaningless, little more than trivia. "The average person shouldn't be interested in this stuff," he says. "It's a philosophical exercise in what identity is and why we should care about that." As Church sees it, the only real utility to his personal information is as data that reflects his phenotype — his physical traits and characteristics. If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across 6 billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data — genotype and phenotype — for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality. Church has done more than imagine such an undertaking; he has launched it: The Personal Genome Project, an effort to make those correlations on an unprecedented scale, began last year with 10 volunteers and will soon expand to 100,000 participants. It will generate a massive database of genomes, phenomes, and even some omes in between. The first step is to sequence 1 percent of each volunteer's genome, focusing on the so-called exome — the protein-coding regions that, Church suspects, do 90 percent of the work in our DNA. It's a long way from sequencing all 6 billion nucleotides — the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs — of the human genome, but even so, cataloging 60 million bits multiplied by 100,000 individuals is an audacious goal. The PGP stands as the tent pole of what Church calls his "year of convergence," the moment when his 30 years as a geneticist, a technologist, and a synthetic biologist all come together. The project is a proof of concept for the Polonator G.007, the genetic-sequencing instrument developed in Church's lab that hit the market this spring. And the PGP will also put Church's expertise in synthetic biology to use, reverse engineering volunteers' skin cells into stem cells that could help diagnose and treat disease. If the convergence comes off as planned, the PGP will bring personal genomics to fruition and our genomes will unfold before us like road maps: We will peruse our DNA like we plan a trip, scanning it for possible detours (a predisposition for disease) or historical markers (a compelling ancestry). Bringing the genome into the light, Church says, is the great project of our day. "We need to inspire our current youth in a way that outer space exploration inspired us in 1960," he says. "We're seeing signs that knowing about our inner space is very compelling." To Church, who built his first computer at age 9 and taught himself three programming languages by 15, all of this is unfolding according to the same laws of exponential progress that have propelled digital technologies, from computer memory to the Internet itself, over the past 40 years: Moore's law for circuits and Metcalfe's law for networks. These principles are now at play in genetics, he argues, particularly in DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis. Exponentials don't just happen. In Church's work, they proceed from two axioms. The first is automation, the idea that by automating human tasks, letting a computer or a machine replicate a manual process, technology becomes faster, easier to use, and more popular. The second is openness, the notion that sharing technologies by distributing them as widely as possible with minimal restrictions on use encourages both the adoption and the impact of a technology. #genome_table {font-size:95%;} #genome_table img {width:100px;height:100px;margin:9px 0px;} #genome_table .img_cell {text-align:center;} #genome_table .txt_cell {padding:12px 25px;} Inside the Personal Genome Project The project will turn information from 100,000 subjects into a huge database thath can reveal the connections between our genes and our physical selves. Here's how. — Thomas Goetz 1. Entrance Exam Volunteers take a quiz to show genetic literacy. One question: How many chromosomes do unfertilized human egg cells contain? a) 11, b) 22, c) 23, d) 46, or e) 92? (Answer: c.) Only those with a perfect score proceed, but retests are allowed. 2. Data Collection Volunteers sign an "open consent" form acknowledging that their information, though anonymized, will be accessible by others. They fill out their phenotype traits, listing everything from waist size to diet habits. Suitable respondents go on to the next step. 3. Sample Collection Volunteers hit the medical center, where they are interviewed by an MD. Then a technician draws some blood, gathers a saliva sample, and takes a punch of skin. Don't worry: It hurts about as much as a bee sting. 4. Lab Work The tissues are sent to a biobank, where DNA is extracted from the blood. One percent of it — the exome — is sequenced. Meanwhile, bacteria DNA is extracted from the saliva and sequenced to reveal the volunteer's microbiome. 5. Research Now the fun part: Crunching the numbers. PGP scientists and other researchers start working with the data assembled from 100,000 individuals to investigate potential links between phenotypes and genotypes. The team will look for patterns and statistically significant anomalies. 6. Sharing The volunteers get access to not only the raw data from their genome, but anything the research team gleans from their information. Insights — a newly discovered cancer risk, for example — are posted in a volunteer's file, which they'll be free to share with other PGP participants. "I always tell people, your biggest problem in life is not going to be hiding your stuff so nobody steals it," Church says. "It's going to be getting anybody to ever use it. Start hiding it and that decreases the probability to almost zero." For most of his career, Church has been known as a brilliant technologist, more behind-the-scenes tinkerer than scientific visionary. Though he was part of the group that kicked off the Human Genome Project, he's far less known than scientists like Francis Collins or J. Craig Venter, who took the stage at the end. His obscurity is due partly to his style. He talks about his accomplishments with a certain detachment that one might mistake for ambivalence. "He's not without ego; it's just a different sort of ego," says entrepreneur Esther Dyson, a friend and one of the first 10 PGP volunteers. "Everything is a subject of his intellectual curiosity, including himself." His low profile may be the result of his tendency to get too far ahead of the curve, working a decade or two ahead of his field — so far that even the experts don't always get what he's talking about. "Lots of George's work is so advanced it's not ready to become standard," says Drew Endy, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford and cofounder with Church of Codon Devices, a synthetic-biology startup. "He's perfectly happy to spin out tons of ideas and see what might stick. It's high-throughput screening for technology and science. That's not the way most people work." But thanks to the PGP, the Polonator, and the fact that the rest of the world is finally starting to understand what he's been talking about, Church's obscurity is coming to an end. He sits on the advisory board of more than 14 biotech companies, including personal genomics startup 23andMe and genetic testing pioneer DNA Direct. He has also cofounded four companies in the past four years: Codon Devices, Knome, LS9, and Joule Biosciences, which makes biofuels from engineered algae. Newsweek recently tagged him as one of the 10 Hottest Nerds ("whatever that means," Church laughs). For someone who has spent his whole career ahead of his time, he is suddenly very much a man of the moment. Most historians would cite Prague or Paris or Berkeley as the intellectual hub of the 1960s, but for people interested in computers, there was no place so significant as Hanover, New Hampshire. There, at Dartmouth College, an experiment in time-share computing was flourishing. Developed by professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System let students remotely access the power of a mainframe computer to do calculations for mathematics or science assignments or to play a simulated game of college football. It ran on an easy-to-learn, intuitive program that Kemeny and Kurtz called Basic. In 1967, the DTSS transitioned to a more-powerful GE-635 machine and offered remote terminals to 33 secondary schools and colleges, including Phillips Academy, a prep school in nearby Andover, Massachusetts. The terminal — not much more than a teletype machine, really — sat in the basement of the school's math building, forgotten until the next fall, when a young George Church showed up for his freshman year and began asking whether there was a computer on campus. Someone pointed Church to the basement. "There wasn't even a chair in the room. I had used a typewriter before, but never a teletype. And so I just started pressing keys," Church recalls. "Eventually I hit Return, and it came back with 'What?' And so I started typing in stuff like crazy and hitting Return. And it kept coming back with 'What?' At that point, I was pretty convinced it wasn't a human, but it was actually talking in words. So I just hadn't asked the right question or given the right answer." Soon, Church found a book on Basic. "I was just sailing," he says. He spent endless hours in that basement — he eventually borrowed a chair — and taught himself the intricacies of coding, learning to program in Basic, Lisp, and Fortran. Indeed, thinking in code came so naturally to Church that he stopped going to his classes (a habit that would later get him kicked out of graduate school at Duke) and taught the computer linear algebra instead. It turns out that learning how to write code — change it, hit Return, see what it will do — was ideal training for Church's eventual career in computational biology. "That's how we reverse engineer things like E. coli — you change something, and you see how it behaves," he says. "Little did I know that 30 years later, we would use almost exactly the same operations to optimize metabolic networks." Church first hit on the power of computation to automate biology in the mid-'70s when he was in graduate school at Harvard. At the time, he was working on recombinant DNA, a then-new technique to splice a gene from one organism into another. Identifying a sequence of 80 or so base pairs of genetic code was a slow, tedious process. "You had to literally read off the bases and write them on a piece of paper, one by one," Church says. "So I wrote a sequence-reading program that would crunch it out. When the senior graduate student heard I had automated that, he said, 'What do you want to do that for? That's the only fun part.'" By 1980, when Church's adviser, Wally Gilbert, won the Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing techniques, the process was still slow and expensive, executing one DNA strand at a time. So Church began working on one of his earlier targets for automation. His idea was to sequence several strands together by combining them into a single sample mixture. He called it multiplexing, drawing an analogy to signal multiplexing in electronics, in which more than one signal flows through a current at the same time. Church thought most of the work could even be integrated into one device rather than numerous machines. It was a provocative idea, not just because he was substituting several human tasks for machine-driven ones, but also because he didn't make the usual false promise that technology would simplify the process. On the contrary, multiplexing would be complicated, Church maintained. But technology was up to the task. Four years later, Church was invited to present his work on multiplexing at a small meeti