It’s just one of those songs, really. I mean, for me it is. I can come across it while scanning for something to listen to while driving and I will stop. It is sort of funny, very 80′s in a way that hasn’t been co-opted by Urban Outfitters or American Apparel to sell deep v-necks to hipsters. It has remained sweetly 80′s and as far as I know, has not been the soundtrack to a gory Tarantino mass murder montage. So I guess any memories of the song are not splintered in different directions, they are simply driving with friends because there was really nothing else to do.
“Shattered Dreams” entered the UK Singles Chart in March 1987 at #92 but gained popularity through extensive radio play and video rotation on MTV and the song quickly climbed the charts and peaked at #5 in May 1987, spending three weeks at the top and a total of 16 weeks in the chart. It went on to become a top five hit throughout Europe and Asia, reaching #2 in Japan.
The song fared even better the following year in the U.S. There, “Shattered Dreams” was released early in 1988 with a totally different music video, shot entirely in black and white and directed by David Fincher. The single peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and topped Billboard’sAdult Contemporary chart for one week. A midtempo club remix of the track was released on 12″ vinyl.
Billboard magazine ranked “Shattered Dreams” as the #26 song of the year 1988 in their December 31 issue.
Clark Datchler and the group would soon part, and Datchler released an acoustic version of the song as a track on his 1990 Virgin solo single “Crown of Thorns.”
The song has been covered by boyband Ultra, on its UK Top 40 eponymous album in 1999; by House artist Jaybee in 2005[3]; by Russian pop star Sergey Lazarev in 2007; and in 2009 by Quentin Elias, former singer for French boyband Alliage and by House artist Vibelicious.
I am have been fully obsessed with the band Garbage for nearly two decades, in no small part due to Shirley Manson. I am a sucker for a misfit badass and a fuck-all outsider. I adore her passion, her vision, her apologetically living on her own terms, her artistry, her charity, and her singing. I press repeat whenever “Not Your Kind of People” plays in my ears at the gym, it is my not-so-secret anthem as of late. Ladies and gentlemen, Shirley Manson. Style Icon.
Best Known For: Shirley Manson is a Scottish singer best known as the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band Garbage.
Born on August 26, 1966, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Shirley Manson is best known for her work as the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band Garbage. Before fronting Garbage, Manson played keyboards and sang back-up with Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie, and performed as the lead singer of Angelfish. In 1995, Garbage released its self-titled debut album, which went double platinum due to hits such as “Only Happy When It Rains,” “Stupid Girl” and “Vow.” Manson went on to release four more albums with Garbage, including Not Your Kind of People (2012).
Shirley Manson was born on August 26, 1966, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The musician was the second of three daughters born to John Manson, a geneticist, and Muriel Manson, a former big-band vocalist.
Manson began taking piano lessons at age 7, and her love of music led her to eventually study at the City of Edinburgh Music School. Perhaps music was a refuge for the young girl, who was bullied relentlessly in school. The harassment took its toll; Manson fell into a deep depression and began cutting herself.
In 1904, Manson found an outlet to express herself: She became a member of the band Autumn, and later joined the group Wild Indians. Manson dropped out of high school at age 16, and soon joined the band Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie as a back-up vocalist and keyboardist. She performed with the band until 1992.
Manson joined the band Angelfish as its lead singer, and together they released the EP Suffocate Me in 1993. Though the album failed to produce hits, it did get Manson noticed by Butch Vig, drummer for the band Garbage, when he saw her on MTV. He contacted Manson, who auditioned for Garbage twice before joining the band as its lead singer in 1994.
Garbage’s self-titled debut album in 1995 went double platinum in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia due to hits such as “Only Happy When It Rains,” “Stupid Girl” and “Vow.” Three years later, the band released its second album, Version 2.0, with Manson serving as not only the face and voice of Garbage, but also its primary lyricist. During the band’s two-year tour, Manson modeled for Calvin Klein to promote the album.
In 1999, Manson co-produced the theme for the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Bronson as James Bond, the iconic character created by author Ian Fleming. Garbage’s third album, beautifulgarbage, was released in 2001 to lackluster sales. Infighting between members ensued, and Garbage broke up in 2003. The split didn’t last long, and the band reunited to release its fourth album, Bleed Like Me, in 2005. Led by the hit “Why Do You Love Me,” the album met with international success and, reaching Top 5 in the United States.
The reunion was brief, and the band took a hiatus for several years. During this time, Manson made attempts to create a solo album, but to no avail.
Her label refused to release the album. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Manson revealed, “I had a collection of songs that I thought were really strong. I took them in [and] played them for the record company. They weren’t interested. They told me they were too dark. They wanted me to have international radio hits and ‘be the Annie Lennox of my generation.’ I kid you not; I am quoting directly.”
Manson made her acting debut in 2008, playing cyborg Catherine Weaver on the second season of the show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. She returned to Garbage in 2010, when the band returned to the studio to write and record music for its fifth album, Not Your Kind of People, released in 2012.
Manson married Scottish actor Eddie Farrell in 1996. The couple split in 2001 and finalized their divorce in 2003.
In May 2010, Manson married record producer and Garbage sound engineer Billy Bush, who helped produce the 2012 album Not Your Kind of People. They live with their terrier named Veela.
Manson has no children, but that’s by choice. She told the Daily Mail UK, “I just missed that whole baby calling. I feel a lot of women think you’re a freak if you feel like that, and maybe I am strange, I never got that feeling.”
Manson and her husband reside in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Last night, I watched “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and balled my fucking eyes out. Audible, nose-running, sobbing, ugly crying. I spent the morning not being able to shake my melancholy movie hangover and not really wanting to. Naturally, I am watching it again and have clogged my Kindle up with the book. It is true, all you need to get through high school is a couple friends that understand you, and a lot of great music.
Charlie himself is a mystery. He has mental problems, gets angry, sees things and then passes out. Right before he started high school his best friend shot himself, but there is also another, worse reason for his problems…
The adolescent inside me loves “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” The adolescent inside me remembers the heart-breaking, bone-crushing importance of everything, even if time and perspective have proven the contrary.
“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”
The movie confirms one of my convictions: If you are too popular in high school, you may become so fond of the feeling that you never find out who you really are. The film is based on Stephen Chbosky‘s best-selling young-adult novel, which was published in 1999 and is now on many shelves next to The Catcher in the Rye.
Charlie’s Mixtape
“Asleep” by the Smiths
“Vapour Trail” by Ride
“Scarborough Fair” by Simon & Garfunkel
“A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum
“Dear Prudence” by the Beatles
“Gypsy” by Suzanne Vega
“Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues
“Daydream” by Smashing Pumpkins
“Dusk” by Genesis (before Phil Collins was even in the band!)
“MLK” by U2″Blackbird” by the Beatles
“Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac
“Asleep” by the Smiths (again!)
The story, set in the early 1990s, tells the story of Charlie, who begins it as a series of letters to a “friend.” He enters high school tremulously and without confidence, and is faced on his first day by that great universal freshman crisis: Which table in the lunchroom will they let me sit at? Discouraged at several tables, he’s welcomed by two smart and sympathetic seniors.
They are Sam and Patrick. Charlie makes the mistake of assuming they are a couple, and Sam’s laughter corrects him; actually, they’re step-siblings. Charlie is on the edge of outgrowing his depression and dorkdom, and is eerily likable in his closed-off way. One of the key players in his life is the dead aunt he often has imaginary meetings with.
Their crowd is artsy, outsider, non-conformist. We learn a lot about their high school crowd by finding out they’re instrumental in the local midnight showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” When Charlie is unexpectedly pressed into service playing a key role one night during their performance, it provides him with a turning point that may be contrived but is certainly entertaining.
Film Soundtrack:
“Could It Be Another Change?” by The Samples
“Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners
“Tugboat” by Galaxie 500
“Temptation” by New Order
“Evensong” by The Innocence Mission
“Asleep” by The Smiths
“Low” by Cracker
“Teen Age Riot” by Sonic Youth
“Dear God” by XTC
“Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops” by Cocteau Twins
“Heroes” by David Bowie
He’s also guided by his English teacher, who steers him toward seminal books including The Catcher in the Rye. Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
“Standing on the fringes of life… offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.”
Van Cliburn died yesterday. I loaded “Van Cliburn Conducts Interlochen Youth Symphony and Chorus” onto my iPod before I left for work this morning, so I could listen to him conduct my uncle Waldie (Waldina’s son). I do not know how I could host them so you could listen, but I also loaded the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 which is my favorite of his recordings that I have and one of my favorite piano concertos.
I have included the NY Times obituary, a few videos of his playing, and a note from my aunt below.
Van Cliburn, Pianist and Cold War Envoy, Dies at 78 – NYTimes.com
Van Cliburn, the American pianist whose first-place award at the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow made him an overnight sensation and propelled him to a phenomenally successful and lucrative career, though a short-lived one, died on Wednesday at his home in Fort Worth. He was 78.
His publicist, Mary Lou Falcone, confirmed the death, saying that Mr. Cliburn had been treated for bone cancer.
Hailing from Texas, Mr. Cliburn was a tall, lanky 23-year-old when he clinched the gold medal in the inaugural year of the Tchaikovsky competition. The feat, in Moscow, was viewed as an American triumph over the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. He became a cultural celebrity of pop-star dimensions and brought overdue attention to the musical assets of his native land.
When Mr. Cliburn returned to New York he received a ticker-tape parade in Lower Manhattan, the first musician to be so honored, cheered by 100,000 people lining Broadway. In a ceremony at City Hall, Mayor Robert F. Wagner proclaimed that “with his two hands, Van Cliburn struck a chord which has resounded around the world, raising our prestige with artists and music lovers everywhere.”
Even before his Moscow victory the Juilliard-trained Mr. Cliburn was a notable up-and-coming pianist. He won the Leventritt Foundation award in 1954, which earned him debuts with five major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. For that performance, at Carnegie Hall in November 1954, he performed the work that would become his signature piece, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, garnering enthusiastic reviews and a contract with Columbia Artists.
At the time, Mr. Cliburn was part of an exceptional American generation of pianists in promising stages of their own careers, among them Leon Fleisher, Byron Janis and Gary Graffman. And the Tchaikovsky competition came at a time when American morale had been shaken in 1957 by the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite.
The impact of Mr. Cliburn’s victory was enhanced by a series of vivid articles written for The New York Times by Max Frankel, then a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and later an executive editor of the paper. The reports of Mr. Cliburn’s progress — prevailing during the early rounds, making it to the finals and becoming the darling of the Russian people, who embraced him in the streets and flooded him with fan mail and flowers — created intense anticipation as he entered the finals.
In his 1999 memoir, “The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times,” Mr. Frankel recalled his coverage of Mr. Cliburn’s triumph in Moscow: “The Soviet public celebrated Cliburn not only for his artistry but for his nationality; affection for him was a safe expression of affection for America.”
Mr. Frankel said he had “posed the obvious question of whether the Soviet authorities would let an American beat out the finest Russian contestants.”
“We now know that Khrushchev” — Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet premier — “personally approved Cliburn’s victory,” he wrote, “making Van a hero at home and a symbol of a new maturity in relations between the two societies.”
Mr. Cliburn was at first oblivious to the political ramifications of the prize.
“Oh, I never thought about all that,” Mr. Cliburn recalled in 2008 during an interview with The Times. “I was just so involved with the sweet and friendly people who were so passionate about music.” The Russians, he added, “reminded me of Texans.”
The interview was conducted in conjunction with 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Moscow competition. The festivities, sponsored by the Van Cliburn Foundation, included a gala dinner at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth for 1,000 guests, among them the Russian culture minister and the Russian ambassador to the United States, who led a long round of toasts.
Mr. Cliburn was a naturally gifted pianist whose enormous hands had an uncommonly wide span. He developed a commanding technique, cultivated an exceptionally warm tone and manifested deep musical sensitivity. At its best his playing had a surging Romantic fervor, but one leavened by an unsentimental restraint that seemed peculiarly American. The towering Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, a juror for the competition, described Mr. Cliburn as a genius — a word, he added, “I do not use lightly about performers.”
Drawbacks of Early Success
But if the Tchaikovsky competition represented Mr. Cliburn’s breakthrough, it also turned out to be his undoing. Relying inordinately on his keen musical instincts, he was not an especially probing artist, and his growth was stalled by his early success. Audiences everywhere wanted to hear him in his prizewinning pieces, the Tchaikovsky First Concerto and the Rachmaninoff Third. Every American town with a community concert series wanted him to come play a recital.
“When I won the Tchaikovsky I was only 23, and everyone talked about that,” Mr. Cliburn said in 2008. “But I felt like I had been at this thing for 20 years already. It was thrilling to be wanted. But it was pressure, too.”
His subsequent explorations of wider repertory grew increasingly insecure. During the 1960s he played less and less. By 1978 he had retired from the stage; he returned in 1989, but performed rarely. Ultimately, his promise and potential were never fulfilled, but his great talent was apparent early on.
Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. was born in Shreveport, La., on July 12, 1934. His mother, Rildia Bee O’Bryan, a pianist who had studied in New York with Arthur Friedheim, a longtime student of Liszt, had hoped to have a career in music, but her mother forbade it. Instead she married Harvey Lavan Cliburn, a purchasing agent for an oil company, a laconic man of moderate income.
An only child, Van started studying with his mother when he was 3. By 4 he was playing in student recitals. When he was 6 the family moved to Kilgore, Tex. (population 10,500). Although Van’s father had hoped his son would become a medical missionary, he realized that the boy was destined for music, so he added a practice studio to the garage.
As a plump 13-year-old Mr. Cliburn won a statewide competition to perform with the Houston Symphony and he played the Tchaikovsky concerto. Thinking her son should study with a more well-connected and advanced teacher, Mr. Cliburn’s mother took him to New York, where he attended master classes at Juilliard and was offered a scholarship to the school’s preparatory division. But Van adamantly refused to study with anyone but his mother, so they returned to Kilgore.
He spoke with affecting respect for his mother’s excellence as a teacher and attributed the lyrical elegance of his playing to her. “My mother had a gorgeous singing voice,” he said. “She always told me that the first instrument is the human voice. When you are playing the piano, it is not digital. You must find a singing sound — the ‘eye of the sound,’ she called it.”
By 16 he had shot up to 6 feet 4 inches. Excruciatingly self-conscious, he was excused from athletics out of fear that he might injure his hands. He later recalled his adolescence outside the family as “a living hell.”
On graduation at 17 he finally accepted a scholarship from Juilliard and moved to New York. Studying with the Russian-born piano pedagogue Rosina Lhevinne, he entered the diploma rather than the degree program to spare himself from having to take 60 semester hours of academic credits. Even his close friends said he displayed little intellectual curiosity outside of music.
Winning the Leventritt award in 1954 was a major achievement. Though held annually, the competition had not given a prize in three years because the judges had not deemed any contestant worthy. But this panel, which included Rudolf Serkin, George Szell and Leonard Bernstein, was united in its assessment of Mr. Cliburn.
That same year he graduated from Juilliard and was to have begun graduate-level studies. But performing commitments as a result of the Leventritt kept him on tour.
In 1957 he was inducted into the Army but released after two days because he was found to be prone to nosebleeds. By this point, despite his success, his career was stagnating and he was $7,000 in debt. His managers at Columbia Artists wanted him to undertake a European tour. But Ms. Lhevinne encouraged him instead to enter the first Tchaikovsky competition.
A $1,000 grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Aid to Music program made the journey to the Soviet Union possible. The contestants’ Moscow expenses were paid by the Soviet government.
A Darling of the Russians
The Russian people warmed to Mr. Cliburn from the preliminary rounds. There was something endearing about the contrast between his gawky boyishness and his complete absorption while performing. At the piano he bent far back from the keys, staring into space, his head tilted in a kind of pained ecstasy. During rapid-fire passages he would lean in close, almost scowling at his fingers. On the night of the final round, when Mr. Cliburn performed the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, a solo work by Dmitry Kabalevsky (written as a test piece for the competition) and the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, the audience broke into chants of “First prize! First prize!” Emil Gilels, one of the judges, went backstage to embrace him.
The jury agreed with the public, and Moscow celebrated. At a Kremlin reception, Mr. Cliburn was bearhugged by Khrushchev. “Why are you so tall?” Khrushchev asked. “Because I am from Texas,” Mr. Cliburn answered.
His prize consisted of 25,000 rubles (about $2,500), though he was permitted to take only half of that out of the country. Immediately, concert offers for enormous fees engulfed him.
His income for the 1958-59 concert season topped $150,000. His postcompetition concert at Carnegie Hall on May 19, 1958, with Kiril Kondrashin and the Symphony of the Air, repeating the program from the final round, was broadcast over WQXR. He signed a contract with RCA Victor, and his recording of the Tchaikovsky First Concerto sold over a million copies within a year.
Reviewing that recording in The Times in 1958, the critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, “Cliburn stands revealed as a pianist whose potentialities have fused into a combination of uncommon virtuosity and musicianship.” Yet Mr. Schonberg had reservations even then: “If there is one thing lacking in this performance it is the final touch of flexibility that can come only with years of public experience.”
An idolatrous biography, “The Van Cliburn Legend,” written by the pianist and composer Abram Chasins, with Villa Stiles, was published in 1959. Mr. Chasins used Mr. Cliburn’s Moscow victory as a club to attack the American cultural system for neglecting its own.
Nothing could diminish Mr. Cliburn’s popularity in the late 1950s. He earned a then-stunning $5,000 for a pair of concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, and played with the Moscow State Symphony at Madison Square Garden for an audience of over 16,000.
Yet as early as 1959 his attempts to broaden his repertory were not well received. That year, for a New York Philharmonic benefit concert at Carnegie Hall conducted by Bernstein, Mr. Cliburn played the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25, the Schumann Concerto and the Prokofiev Third Concerto. Howard Taubman, reviewing the program in The Times, called the Mozart performance “almost a total disappointment.” Only the Prokofiev was successful, he wrote, praising the brashness, exuberance and crispness of the playing.
Reviewing a 1961 performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto by Mr. Cliburn with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, Mr. Schonberg wrote, “It was the playing of an old-young man, but without the spirit of youth or the mellowness of age.” Mr. Cliburn performed the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto yet again, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, for the inaugural week of Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) in 1962.
Despite the criticism, Mr. Cliburn tried to expand his repertory, playing concertos by MacDowell and Prokofiev and solo works by Samuel Barber (the demanding Piano Sonata), Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Liszt. But the artistic growth and maturity that were expected of him never fully came. Even as a personality, Mr. Cliburn began to seem out of step. In the late 1950s this baby-faced, teetotaling, churchgoing, wholesome Texan had fit the times. But to young Americans of the late 1960s he seemed a strained, stiff representative of the demonized establishment.
A New Competition
Many subsequent pianists tried to emulate Mr. Cliburn’s path to success through international competition victories. But a significant number of critics and teachers took to castigating the premise and value of competitions as an encouragement of faceless virtuosity, superficial brilliance and inoffensive interpretations. Nevertheless, in 1962, some arts patrons and business leaders in the Fort Worth area, to honor their hometown hero, inaugurated the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. It remains the most lucrative and visible of these contests.
In 1978, at 44, Mr. Cliburn, now a wealthy man, announced his withdrawal from concertizing. He moved with his mother into a magnificent home in the Fort Worth area, where he hosted frequent late-night dinner parties.
As a young man Mr. Cliburn was briefly linked romantically with a soprano classmate from Juilliard. But even then he was discreet in his homosexuality. That discretion was relaxed considerably in 1966 when, at 32, he met Thomas E. Zaremba, who was 19.
The details of their romantic relationship exploded into public view in 1996, when Mr. Zaremba filed a palimony suit against Mr. Cliburn seeking “multiple millions,” according to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Mr. Zaremba, who had moved to Michigan and become a funeral director, claimed that during his 17-year relationship with Mr. Cliburn he had served as a business associate and promoter and that he had helped care for Mr. Cliburn’s mother, who died in 1994 at 97. The suit was eventually dismissed.
Mr. Cliburn returned to the concert stage in 1987, but his following performances were infrequent. The stress involved was almost palpable on May 21, 1998, when, to inaugurate a concert hall in Fort Worth, Mr. Cliburn played the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony, suffered a memory lapse in the final movement and collapsed onstage. He was given oxygen by a medical team backstage and taken to a hospital.
“It was a massive panic attack,” a friend, John Ardoin, who was a critic at The Dallas Morning News, said at the time. “It was sheer exhaustion and nervousness. Van had given a solo recital two days earlier, a really first-class performance, a black-tie affair with all of the cultural and political officialdom of Texas in attendance, and he was overwhelmed by it all.”
His last public appearance was in September, when he spoke at a concert, at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Van Cliburn Foundation. He is survived by Thomas L. Smith, with whom he shared his home for many years.
Mr. Cliburn leaves a lasting if not extensive discography. One recording in particular, his performance of the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto recorded live at Carnegie Hall on the night of his post-Tchaikovsky competition concert, was praised by Mr. Schonberg, the critic, for its technical strength, musical poise, and “manly lyricism unmarred by eccentricity.”
Mr. Schonberg then added, prophetically, “No matter what Cliburn eventually goes on to do this will be one of the great spots of his career; and if for some reason he fails to fulfill his potentialities, he will always have this to look back upon.”
An email from my aunt this evening:
Dear Scott,
Thank you for forwarding this article. I had tried to access it earlier from the NYTimes website but, for some reason, I was unable to do so. I first met and heard Van Cliburn when I was in high school in Baltimore about a year after he won in Moscow. Then I saw/heard him again when I was playing first stand viola in the orchestra at Interlochen in 1961. Just a few summers ago Waldie and I had a short visit with him after he played with WYSO and he was as charming as ever–but he had certainly aged (don’t we all?).
Robert F. Kennedy’s speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was given on April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Kennedy, the United States senator from New York, was campaigning to earn the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination when he learned of King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Earlier that day Kennedy had spoken at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend and at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Before boarding a plane to attend campaign rallies in Indianapolis, Kennedy learned that King had been shot. When he arrived, Kennedy was informed that King had died. Despite fears of riots and concerns for his safety, Kennedy went ahead with plans to attend a rally at 17th and Broadway in the heart of Indianapolis’s African-American ghetto. That evening Kennedy addressed the crowd, many of whom had not heard about King’s assassination. Instead of the rousing campaign speech they expected, Kennedy offered brief, impassioned remarks for peace that is considered to be one of the great public addresses of the modern era.
Kennedy was the first to publicly inform the audience of King’s assassination, causing members of the audience to scream and wail in disbelief. Several of Kennedy’s aides were worried that the delivery of this information would result in a riot. Once the audience quieted down, Kennedy spoke of the threat of disillusion and divisiveness at King’s death and reminded the audience of King’s efforts to “replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.” Kennedy acknowledged that many in the audience would be filled with anger, especially since the assassin was believed to be a white man. He empathized with the audience by referring to the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, by a white man. The remarks surprised Kennedy aides, who had never heard him speak of his brother’s death in public. Quoting the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, whom he had discovered through his brother’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, Kennedy said, “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Kennedy then delivered one of his most well-remembered remarks: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. To conclude, Kennedy reiterated his belief that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites and encouraged the country to “dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.” He finished by asking the audience members to pray for “our country and our people.” Rather than exploding in anger at the tragic news of King’s death, the crowd dispersed quietly.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some — some very sad news for all of you — Could you lower those signs, please? — I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with — be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King — yeah, it’s true — but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we — and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Thank you very much.
Despite rioting in other major American cities, Indianapolis remained calm that night after Kennedy’s remarks, which is believed to have been in part because of the speech. In stark contrast to Indianapolis, riots erupted in more than one hundred U.S. cities including Chicago, New York City, Boston, Detroit, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, killing 35 and injuring more than 2,500. Across the country, approximately seventy thousand army and National Guard troops were called out to restore order.
Two months later, Robert Kennedy was shot while exiting the ballroom through kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died early the next morning
The speech itself has been listed as one of the greatest in American history, ranked 17th by communications scholars in a survey of 20th century American speeches.
I am a huge civics nerd, it is true. I watched most of the inauguration when I got home from work and cried my eyes out. The best moment as far as I am concerned was Richard Blanco’s poem. Civic Nerd + Art Nerd = PERFECTION. I hope you agree. I have included the text of the poem, a video of Mr. Blanco reading the poem at the inauguration, and an article he wrote below.
One Today
One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—
to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.
One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.
The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.
Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me—in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.
One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.
One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together.
(CNN) — As my official bio reads, I was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States — meaning my mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of my family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid, where I was born. Less than two months later, we emigrated once more and settled in New York City, then eventually in Miami, where I was raised and educated.
By the time I was 45 days old, I belonged to three countries. My first newborn photo appears on my U.S. alien registration card. As an adult, I see this as a foreshadowing of what would eventually obsess my writing and my psyche: the negotiation of identity.
My first encounter with this was with cultural negotiation. My childhood was braced between two imaginary worlds. The first was the nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba in the hearts and minds of my parents, grandparents, and immediate family, but also the exile community at large in Miami. “Somewhere” there was an island paradise we all came from, a paradise we lost (for complex reasons I was too young to comprehend), but nevertheless, a paradise, a homeland known as la patria — to which we’d all return someday, exactly as we were, to find it exactly as it was.
That storyline was what I knew of that homeland I imagined from family folklore told across the dinner table, gossip at beauty salons with my mother, or in the aisles of the mercados shopping for Cuban staples like chorizo and yucca with my grandmother; or from old photo albums that they had managed to smuggle out of Cuba, and the rum-drunk talk about “what happened” from the men playing dominos on the terraza in the backyard.
The other imaginary world — America– was at the other end of the spectrum.
Although technically we lived in the United States, the Cuban community was culturally insular in Miami during the 1970s, bonded together by the trauma of exile. What’s more, it seemed that practically everyone was Cuban: my teachers, my classmates, the mechanic, the bus driver. I didn’t grow up feeling different or treated as a minority. The few kids who got picked on in my grade school were the ones with freckles and funny last names like Dawson and O’Neil.
Against that setting, America seemed like some “other” place. And as a child, I truly believed that the real America, just beyond my reach, was exactly like the America I saw on TV reruns like “The Brady Bunch” and “Leave it to Beaver.” In my case, the stereotypical American family was the “other,” the exotic life yearned for, as much as I yearned to finally see that imaginary Cuba. Sorting out these contradictions and yearnings was an everyday part of my childhood, and one of the main themes of my writing today.
The other negotiation was the engineer versus the poet. As might be typical, my exile/immigrant family pushed for me to pursue a career that would ensure I would have a better life than they did. Also, in a working-class family, the idea of pursuing a life in the arts was outside the realm of possibilities. My family even thought architecture was too “artsy.”
Add to that the cultural-generational divide when it came to the arts in America. Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot were not dinner conversation at my house. My parents didn’t even know of the Rolling Stones. They wanted me to continue the story of the “American dream” that they had begun. Fortunately — or unfortunately — I was a whiz at math, and when the time came to decide on a career path, I succumbed to their loving insistence. But I always harbored a creative spirit throughout my childhood, completely taken by Legos, paint-by-number sets, latch-hook rug kits — anything that gave me expression.
My sexual identity was something I also had to negotiate. The antagonist in my coming-out story was my grandmother, a woman as xenophobic as she was homophobic. Anything she perceived as culturally “weird,” she also labeled as “faggotry” — “mariconería.” This included my playing with toys like G.I. Joes and action figures of super heroes (Wonder Woman being my favorite). Convinced that I was queer — she had good intuition, I guess — she was verbally and psychologically abusive because she was also convinced she could make me a “real” man.
She scared me into a closet so deep and dark that the idea of living as a gay man was completely, like a career in arts, out of the realm of possibilities. And so, like many gay men of my generation, I led a straight life, and was even engaged twice to be married, until I came out in my mid-20s.
Being named poet laureate for the inauguration personally validates and stitches together several ideals against which I have long measured America, since the days of watching “My Three Sons” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” reruns. For one, the essence of the American dream: how a little Cuban-American kid on the margins of mainstream America could grow up with confidence, have the opportunity to become an engineer thanks to the hard work of his parents who could barely speak English, and then go on, choosing to become a poet who is now asked to speak to, for and about the entire nation.
The most powerful quality of our country is that each day is full of a million possibilities: We are a country of fierce individualism, which invites me to shape my life as I see fit. As I reflect on this, I see how the American story is in many ways my story — a country still trying to negotiate its own identity, caught between the paradise of its founding ideals and the realities of its history, trying to figure it out, trying to “become” even today — the word “hope” as fresh on our tongues as it ever was.
Regardless of my cultural, socioeconomic background and my sexuality, I have been given a place at the table, or more precisely, at the podium, because that is America.
Origin: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Genres: Indie rock, New Wave, Post-punk revival Years active: 1998–present Labels: Metric Music International Website: ilovemetric.com
Metric is a Canadian indie rock and New Wave band founded in 1998 in Toronto. The band has also at various times been based in Montreal, London, New York City and Los Angeles. Metric consists of vocalist Emily Haines (who also plays the synthesizer and guitar), guitarist James Shaw (who also plays the synthesizer and theremin), bassist Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key.
Their first full-length album, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, was released in 2003 and earned a Juno Award nomination for Best Alternative Album. Live It Out was released on October 4, 2005 and was nominated for the 2006 Polaris Music Prize for the Canadian Album of The Year and once again the Juno Award nomination for Best Alternative Album.
The first album the band recorded, Grow Up and Blow Away, was finally released on June 26, 2007 by Last Gang Records. The album was originally recorded for Restless Records, but got neglected when the label was bought out by Rykodisc.
Haines and Shaw also perform with Broken Social Scene, and Haines has been a guest on albums by Stars, KC Accidental, The Stills, Jason Collett and Tiësto. Scott-Key and Winstead have their own side project, Bang Lime, and Haines has released a solo album and companion EP, Knives Don’t Have Your Back and What Is Free to a Good Home?, respectively, under the name Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton.
Their fourth studio album Fantasies was released in Canada and the United States on April 7, 2009. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Polaris Music Prize for Canadian Album of the Year, and won the Alternative Album of the Year at the 2010 Juno Awards. Metric won as well in 2010 Group of the Year.
When sexual abuse is frequently in the news, I unfortunately get to relive my own. I relive it, but I relive the whole story of my life, not just the abuse. It is a trick I have figured out for dealing with the difficult memories. I can relive the abuse and the years of hating myself and wanting to die, but I also make myself relive the part where I begin to figure it out and I start to like myself. There is no avoiding being reminded of the abuse, but I chose to remind myself of how far I’ve come from there.
I wrote the below piece a while ago and have edited it bit by bit over time. It all still matches what I believe and I still sometimes have to go against my first reaction and behave in the way the person I want to be would behave. I still sometimes “fake it.” Those situations are seldom, but I still occasionally find myself thinking “the old Scott would do this or that” and then choosing to do the opposite.
The P.S.A. on SPA
The first 25 years of my life, I had a different name, actually 25 years and 28 days. On the 17th of February 1995, Scott Parker-Anderson was born. My original name has been lost to history. I took “Parker” from my maternal grandfather’s last name and “Anderson” from my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. I also dropped my first name completely. The act of a name change is mostly ceremonial, a marker of change, nothing happens inside of you when you do it. It is usually an outward feature of something that has or is in the process of happening internally.
I was sexually abused by my grandfather, my father’s father, when I was quite young, five years and younger. It is a bit confusing, that term: ”sexually abused,” I was raped. That explains it. I was pinned face down to the bed and raped. My face was pushed to his crotch and mouth forced open, tears mixing with snot, and raped. My thoughts and feelings on a man who, when entrusted with the safety and well-being of a child, his first and only grandson, chooses to absolutely destroy that child are obvious. He was a predator and a monster, and I feel sorry for whatever happened to him that caused him to lose his perspective of right and wrong. None of that changes anything, what happened, happened, and I saw no need in keeping his last name.
Looking back, I was your standard-issue “abused boy.” I wet the bed, I was a bad student, I was angry and depressed, scared, everything It is easy to look back and see everything so clearly, so obvious, so black and white. While you are in it and while it is happening, it is not so obvious to you or people around you. It takes a while for a kid to understand what happened, to put it into perspective, and be able to express it in words, and to not feel like it was his fault or he deserved it. Until that time, the anger and depression tell the story. It is interesting how life and circumstances and events all can snowball into creating a “you” that is so far from the real “you.” The abuse manifests itself as depression and self hate, which results in bad grades, which causes the understandable conclusion of parents and teachers to think you aren’t very smart. You are put on weekly interim grade reports by school counselors and was told by your father that your mother and sister got the brains in the family. You start to believe it and see no reason in trying to prove anyone wrong.
Flash ahead to the 21st of May 1994. My cousin Erik committed suicide The first thing I thought and possibly said when my mother told me was “he really did it.” I had thought and daydreamed about doing it for years. I mean, why not? I was stupid and worthless and ugly, I was never going to amount to anything, so why bother keeping on with it? Right about a month before, Kurt Cobain had done the same thing, which in Seattle was the equivalent to losing a brother. Something changed inside me on that day. I had spent several summers with Erik and had been more than once compared to him in various ways, including as the family’s “Black Sheep” by relatives that had no way of knowing the whole story.
I guess the seeds of change had been planted before that day, I was reading books and trying to create more peace inside and around me, but that day, it was presented to me as a yes or no choice. ”Are you going this way or are you going that way?” Make up your mind.
I went to the lake house and lived there alone all summer. I read and wrote and walked in the woods. I would walk way up into the woods at night, away from all the electric lights, lay on my back, and stare at the stars. I would try to memorize their order and pattern. I would think about how many there were and how small I was and how small my problems were. I made promises to myself, to be everything I wanted to be, to not need anyone, and to behave in a manner that made me proud of who I am. I thought that as long as I could look up and see the stars no matter where I was, I would be familiar.
The thing about sexual abuse is that it happens to you for a specific amount of time and then the abuse stops. But the thought patterns and self-destructive behavior that it creates continue the abuse for years and years, until you stop it. He may have raped me when I was five years old, but I continued to tell myself how worthless and stupid and ugly I was for the next twenty.
The results of all this introspective work in the beginning makes everything seem and feel much worse. Like stirring up the silt on the bottom of the lake, the water looks clear and clean until all that has settled to the bottom gets mixed up back to the surface. Things often get worse before they get better, I think that is why so few people make the changes without a rather extreme catalyst.
The fall of 1994, I went to work in Seattle and in time, moved back to the city. I continued reading and sticking to the promises I had made. I became a huge believer in “Fake it ‘Till You Make it” as far as how I was treating others and myself. Over time, gradually, I began to have a rough outline of who I wanted to be. I had the framework of SPA. Then, on my lunch break on the 17th of February 1995, I swore in front of a judge that I was not running from anything and she read to herself my explanation, asked me if everything I had written was true and correct, and granted me my new name. I took those papers and walked to the DMV and got a new drivers license and went back to work a different person.
In no way, shape, or form was the process of transformation complete then any more than I think it is now. I have created a habit and belief in me that frequent and regular, if not constant, evaluation of my decisions, thought patterns, and reasonings is required for me to continue my path to who I want to be. I think that part of who I want to be is someone who is evaluating himself, and not just sitting back, creating outdated ways of operating, getting stuck in ruts that do not support who I want to become.
Fourteen years later, I went back to the place I last saw Erik, the place where he took his life. In more ways than I think I had every really realized, I owe him my life. I was part of the results of his decision to kill himself, and while I hated myself, I didn’t hate everyone around me. I couldn’t do that to them. There were other casualties from my decision. After telling my father, he vanished from my life. I haven’t seen or heard from him or anyone from his side of the family since. I hear third-hand reports of their lives, but not once have they attempted to make contact. That grandfather died at some point, I got the news from my mother whose coworker had read the obituary in the newspaper. One last casualty was my sister’s name, she changed it away from the name she grew up with to honor our maternal grandparents.
We are all born and raised differently, with circumstances, some better than others. If I could travel through time back to when I was that young boy and protect him, would I? I probably would. But who would I be today? We are all products of our life experience and how we decide to interpret it, are we not? I am happy with the SPA of today and wonder if without being confronted with the decision of living or dying, without being pushed to that point, would I have created the changes needed to be the same today? I don’t know.
What is the point of telling people all this? Originally, a lot of the power that abuse has is because it is kept a secret, that the kids feel that it is their fault or feel guilty or embarrassed. None of those things are real. I did nothing, I was a kid, an innocent. Keeping the secret only protects the abuser. Telling it removes the power, telling it kills the secret.
Watch/listen to the below clip, then subscribe to the podcast, they laugh laugh laugh. They are all so brilliant. Edgar Oliver, Kimya Dawson, Jessi Klein, and Starlee Kine are a few that I have saved and have listened to over and over, laughing more each time.
The Moth is a non-profit group based in New York City dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. It was founded in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate the feeling of sultry summer evenings in his native Georgia, when moths were attracted to the light on the porch where he and his friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales. George and his original group of storytellers called themselves “The Moths”, and George took the name with him to New York. The organization now runs a number of different storytelling events in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and other American cities, often featuring prominent literary and cultural personalities. Previous notable storytellers have included Andy Borowitz, Margaret Cho, Joe Lockhart, Jonathan Ames, Ethan Hawke, Malcolm Gladwell, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, George Plimpton, Al Sharpton, Gay Talese, Mira Nair, Moby, Lili Taylor, and Sam Shepard.
The organization also holds “StorySLAM” events, storytelling competitions open to everyone in New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Louisville, Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. The format was inspired by and is similar to poetry slams. Although hosts rotate, New York City StorySLAM hosts include Sara Barron, who hosts the last Monday night of every month at The Bitter End; Dan Kennedy, who hosts the second Tuesday of the month at the Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe; Ophira Eisenberg who hosts the third Thursday of the month at Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe; and Peter Aguero who hosts the first Monday of the month at The Bell House in Brooklyn.
The Moth also runs a community program that offers storytelling workshops free of charge to high school students and underprivileged New Yorkers.
The Moth offers a weekly podcast, which provides free audio of stories from all types of Moth events. The podcast has over 70,000 subscribers and averages over 1,000,000 downloads a month. In August 2009, the organization also launched a national public radio show, The Moth Radio Hour, produced by Jay Allison and distributed by Public Radio Exchange [1]. In the fall of 2009 The Moth Radio Hour was licensed by more than 200 public radio stations and won the Peabody Award in 2011.
Andy Borowitz became the Moth’s primary host in 1999. An evening hosted by him in Central Park on June 28, 2011, drew a capacity crowd of over 4500 people.
The organization’s annual fundraising event is called the Moth Ball, where the annual Moth award is presented. The 2008 Moth Award was presented to Salman Rushdie.
Best Known For: Former Illinois Senator Barack Obama is the 44th and current president of the United States. Inaugurated on January 27, 2009, he is the first African-American to serve as U.S. president.
Why He’s A Style Icon
Barack Obama has transcended politics and become an American Icon by adhering to the very old rule of dressing for the job you want. Most campaign-trail politicians in America like to appear in jeans to show they are one of the people, but Obama’s campaign already had that image and feel, so he never had to dress down for the cameras. In the process, he has taught men how to wear suits again. The clean lines and drape of his jacket never seem ill-fitting or bulky. The trouser cuffs break across his cap-toe oxfords just enough to perfectly end the slim silhouette that begins with the soft shouldered jacket. More importantly, by always wearing a suit so well, he never looks out of place. Few realize that he began his campaign wearing Ermenegildo Zegna suits, but just as Nicolas Sarkozy was lauded in France for wearing Prada, Obama soon found himself at the center of sartorial questions. Rather than change his look, however, he merely changed to similarly designed and fitted suits from Hart Schaffner Marx. Here, then, is another lesson to be learned: Be yourself and true to your own style no matter the designer or manufacturer.
Dress The Obama Way
The foundational rule of Barack Obama’s style is to keep your wardrobe simple with finely made dark suits, a crisp white shirt and the camera-friendly pale blue tie or a deep red tie just to change things up. At his most casual, you might see him wearing the suit without the tie or perhaps without the jacket and the tie with his sleeves rolled up just above the wrist. It is here at this moment that all men who aspire to greatness should take note: Obama rolls his sleeves in even folds revealing his only accessory — a sublime watch given to him as a gift from his Secret Service detail. At the beginning of his campaign, he sported a Tag Heuer on a black leather band, but nowadays he wears the Secret Service chronograph, which bears the seal of the United States Secret Service on a black dial with a black Buffalo leather strap.
