Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Monday, October 30, 2006
Sunday, October 29, 2006
whatever you do, dont cut in line
Man killed over cutting in line at Manhattan food vendor cart
NEW YORK (AP) -- An argument that started over cutting in line at a popular Middle Eastern food vending street cart turned deadly when one man stabbed the other to death, police said.
Tyrone Gibbons, 19, of Short Hills, N.J., was standing in line at a falafel cart in midtown Manhattan at about 4 a.m. Saturday when he and his friends got into an argument with Ziad Tayeh, 23, about cutting in line, police spokeswoman Detective Theresa Farello said.
After a heated exchange, Gibbons and his friends got in their car, and Tayeh got in his, police said.
The fight erupted again a couple of blocks away, where the vehicles caught up with each other, and the victim was stabbed in the chest, police said.
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Gibbons was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Tayeh, of Brooklyn, was picked up by police several blocks away and was being charged with second-degree murder, Farello said.
A woman who answered the telephone at Tayeh's Park Slope home on Sunday said she could not comment on the stabbing.
The food cart where the dispute started is known for its tasty Pakistani and Middle Eastern dishes, including its falafel, fried balls or patties of ground chickpeas usually stuffed into pita bread.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy.
LEFT
NEW YORK (AP) -- An argument that started over cutting in line at a popular Middle Eastern food vending street cart turned deadly when one man stabbed the other to death, police said.
Tyrone Gibbons, 19, of Short Hills, N.J., was standing in line at a falafel cart in midtown Manhattan at about 4 a.m. Saturday when he and his friends got into an argument with Ziad Tayeh, 23, about cutting in line, police spokeswoman Detective Theresa Farello said.
After a heated exchange, Gibbons and his friends got in their car, and Tayeh got in his, police said.
The fight erupted again a couple of blocks away, where the vehicles caught up with each other, and the victim was stabbed in the chest, police said.
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Gibbons was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Tayeh, of Brooklyn, was picked up by police several blocks away and was being charged with second-degree murder, Farello said.
A woman who answered the telephone at Tayeh's Park Slope home on Sunday said she could not comment on the stabbing.
The food cart where the dispute started is known for its tasty Pakistani and Middle Eastern dishes, including its falafel, fried balls or patties of ground chickpeas usually stuffed into pita bread.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy.
LEFT
another hero dies
The man behind Celtics, cigars
There'll never be another like Red
Red Auerbach in 1962.
It was the night of another NBA opener a year ago, at the new Boston Garden, the one known as the TD Banknorth Garden. So it wasn't Red Auerbach's Garden at North Station in Boston, wasn't really the same place or the same parquet floor where Auerbach became the greatest basketball coach who ever lived. But it was the Celtics against the Knicks on this night, and it had been such an important rivalry once in pro basketball, even if both teams had been going the wrong way for a while. So we wanted the night to be special. And it was, because the old man showed up.
I had come down the hall from the visitors' locker room to say hello to Doc Rivers, an old friend who coaches the Celtics now. And there were a lot of people in his office that night one year ago, and one of them was Red Auerbach. He had been gravely ill a few months earlier, and no one expected him to make the opener. There he was.
"Why am I here?" he said. "Because they told me I wouldn't be, that's why."
There had been a time earlier in 2005 when we had been told to expect the worst, that he was in the hospital and on his way out. But he fooled everybody again. There was already a famous story going around about how he was in his hospital bed one day, and opened his eyes, and told an old friend sitting at his bedside, to come closer.
When the friend did the old man said, "I'll decide."
Meaning he would decide when it was time to go.
It was his time yesterday. He was 89 when his heart finally gave out. So he will not make another NBA opener this year.
That means this will be the first season in NBA history that opens without Arnold (Red) Auerbach. He was there when the league opened for business in 1946 and he was a part of that league all the way until yesterday. There has never been anybody bigger than this in the history of American sports.
He won nine championships coaching the Celtics, eight of them in a row. Nobody has won more. He won 938 regular-season games and led the world in victories until Lenny Wilkens finally passed him. He was Bill Russell and Bob Cousy and Sam and K.C. Jones. He made the trade that got the Celtics Russell. He drafted Larry Bird a year ahead of everybody. There was a draft day trade that got him Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. He went from being the best coach in league history to the best executive. He built a championship team around Russell and then in the '80s, he built another one around Bird with Parish and McHale. And if Len Bias hadn't died of a drug overdose, maybe a third championship era in Boston would have been built around him. That was another trade the old man made, and all it got him with Bias was the No. 1 pick in the draft. "That's the ache that will never go away," he said to me once, sitting in the little office he kept in downtown Washington, D.C. "Not just because of what might have been for the Celtics. What might have been for the kid."
His best friend was Paul Sann, the editor of the old New York Post when I went to work there covering the Knicks in 1975. Sann called Auerbach and said to be nice to the new kid. He only did that for the next 30 years. He was not just a giant of sports then. He was a friend of the family. He was so many days and nights of basketball conversation over those years I have lost count.
One night he was talking about one of those seven-game Finals the old Celtics always used to play. He said he was alone before Game 7, and he had given every pregame speech by then, pushed every button. He said he was out of words before the only game that mattered. He walked into the locker room and told the old Celtics sixth man, Frank Ramsey, "You give the pregame speech tonight."
Ramsey thought about it for a moment, stood up, walked up to the blackboard and wrote, "We win, $10,000. We lose, $5,000." He sat back down without saying a word.
"Greatest pregame speech I ever heard," Auerbach said.
Not everybody loved him. He and Red Holzman were not always the best of friends. He was still a giant of it all. There was even the time when Auerbach had gotten disgusted with the ownership of the Celtics, and Sonny Werblin thought he had talked him into coming to New York to run the Knicks.
It was a huge story at the time, in both New York and Boston, by the time Auerbach got on the shuttle to close the deal. Maybe the story got better over the years. Who knows what really happened that day? By the time the plane landed, Auerbach was staying in Boston.
"I was a Celtic," he said.
In the 1960s, he was the coach who started five black players in Boston, not because he wanted to make some statement about racial harmony in America, but because winning the game had made him completely color blind. He would take his chances with Russell and Satch Sanders and Willie Naulls and Sam and K.C. Jones. He had been at this a long time, all the way back to when he was 49-11 with the old Washington Capitols. The only thing that ever interested him, truly, was winning the game. A year ago, there was a moment when Doc Rivers said to him in his office, "Anything I can get you?"
And the old man said, "Yeah, one more banner hanging from the ceiling."
He looked as fragile as a teacup that night. Even the familiar growl of his voice sounded as if it was coming from another room. Then he went out and sat at one end of the court and they introduced him, and the old man got one more cheer in Boston. Not his Garden. But close enough. The old man died yesterday. Finally his time. He is survived by the most famous basketball team of them all.
There'll never be another like Red
Red Auerbach in 1962.
It was the night of another NBA opener a year ago, at the new Boston Garden, the one known as the TD Banknorth Garden. So it wasn't Red Auerbach's Garden at North Station in Boston, wasn't really the same place or the same parquet floor where Auerbach became the greatest basketball coach who ever lived. But it was the Celtics against the Knicks on this night, and it had been such an important rivalry once in pro basketball, even if both teams had been going the wrong way for a while. So we wanted the night to be special. And it was, because the old man showed up.
I had come down the hall from the visitors' locker room to say hello to Doc Rivers, an old friend who coaches the Celtics now. And there were a lot of people in his office that night one year ago, and one of them was Red Auerbach. He had been gravely ill a few months earlier, and no one expected him to make the opener. There he was.
"Why am I here?" he said. "Because they told me I wouldn't be, that's why."
There had been a time earlier in 2005 when we had been told to expect the worst, that he was in the hospital and on his way out. But he fooled everybody again. There was already a famous story going around about how he was in his hospital bed one day, and opened his eyes, and told an old friend sitting at his bedside, to come closer.
When the friend did the old man said, "I'll decide."
Meaning he would decide when it was time to go.
It was his time yesterday. He was 89 when his heart finally gave out. So he will not make another NBA opener this year.
That means this will be the first season in NBA history that opens without Arnold (Red) Auerbach. He was there when the league opened for business in 1946 and he was a part of that league all the way until yesterday. There has never been anybody bigger than this in the history of American sports.
He won nine championships coaching the Celtics, eight of them in a row. Nobody has won more. He won 938 regular-season games and led the world in victories until Lenny Wilkens finally passed him. He was Bill Russell and Bob Cousy and Sam and K.C. Jones. He made the trade that got the Celtics Russell. He drafted Larry Bird a year ahead of everybody. There was a draft day trade that got him Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. He went from being the best coach in league history to the best executive. He built a championship team around Russell and then in the '80s, he built another one around Bird with Parish and McHale. And if Len Bias hadn't died of a drug overdose, maybe a third championship era in Boston would have been built around him. That was another trade the old man made, and all it got him with Bias was the No. 1 pick in the draft. "That's the ache that will never go away," he said to me once, sitting in the little office he kept in downtown Washington, D.C. "Not just because of what might have been for the Celtics. What might have been for the kid."
His best friend was Paul Sann, the editor of the old New York Post when I went to work there covering the Knicks in 1975. Sann called Auerbach and said to be nice to the new kid. He only did that for the next 30 years. He was not just a giant of sports then. He was a friend of the family. He was so many days and nights of basketball conversation over those years I have lost count.
One night he was talking about one of those seven-game Finals the old Celtics always used to play. He said he was alone before Game 7, and he had given every pregame speech by then, pushed every button. He said he was out of words before the only game that mattered. He walked into the locker room and told the old Celtics sixth man, Frank Ramsey, "You give the pregame speech tonight."
Ramsey thought about it for a moment, stood up, walked up to the blackboard and wrote, "We win, $10,000. We lose, $5,000." He sat back down without saying a word.
"Greatest pregame speech I ever heard," Auerbach said.
Not everybody loved him. He and Red Holzman were not always the best of friends. He was still a giant of it all. There was even the time when Auerbach had gotten disgusted with the ownership of the Celtics, and Sonny Werblin thought he had talked him into coming to New York to run the Knicks.
It was a huge story at the time, in both New York and Boston, by the time Auerbach got on the shuttle to close the deal. Maybe the story got better over the years. Who knows what really happened that day? By the time the plane landed, Auerbach was staying in Boston.
"I was a Celtic," he said.
In the 1960s, he was the coach who started five black players in Boston, not because he wanted to make some statement about racial harmony in America, but because winning the game had made him completely color blind. He would take his chances with Russell and Satch Sanders and Willie Naulls and Sam and K.C. Jones. He had been at this a long time, all the way back to when he was 49-11 with the old Washington Capitols. The only thing that ever interested him, truly, was winning the game. A year ago, there was a moment when Doc Rivers said to him in his office, "Anything I can get you?"
And the old man said, "Yeah, one more banner hanging from the ceiling."
He looked as fragile as a teacup that night. Even the familiar growl of his voice sounded as if it was coming from another room. Then he went out and sat at one end of the court and they introduced him, and the old man got one more cheer in Boston. Not his Garden. But close enough. The old man died yesterday. Finally his time. He is survived by the most famous basketball team of them all.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
more controversy
NBC Rejects TV Ads for Dixie Chicks Film
Published: October 27, 2006
Filed at 9:26 p.m. ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Citing its policy barring ads dealing with ``public controversy,'' the NBC network said on Friday it rejected a TV commercial for a new film documenting the furor over the Dixie Chicks' criticism of President George W. Bush.
Ads for the documentary ``Shut Up & Sing'' also were rebuffed by the smaller CW network, though local affiliates of all five major broadcasters, including NBC and CW, ran promotional spots for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the two cities where it opened on Friday.
The ad features footage of lead singer Natalie Maines declaring during a London concert in March 2003 that the band was ``ashamed'' to come from the same state -- Texas -- as Bush.
The film's distributor, the Weinstein Co., seized on the rejection of its spots as evidence of political censorship by NBC and CW and said it was ``exploring taking legal action.''
The studio provided media outlets copies of ``clearance'' reports from NBC's standards and practices department bearing handwritten notations stating the ads were deemed unacceptable because ``they are disparaging of President Bush.''
Similar documents from the CW cited ``concerns we do not have appropriate programing in which to schedule this spot.''
``It's a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America,'' studio co-owner Harvey Weinstein said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for Weinstein, renowned for aggressive marketing tactics as former co-chief executive of Miramax Films, dismissed suggestions by several industry sources that his attack on NBC and CW amounted to a publicity ploy.
``The idea that we're making an issue of this for the sake of publicity is nonsense,'' she said. ``We're making an issue of this because we want the networks to run our ads.''
NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., and CW, a joint venture of CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. studio, denied they were engaging in political censorship.
NBC said it was merely following its ``policy of not broadcasting ads that deal with issues of public controversy.'' A CW spokesman said the press release issued by the Weinstein Co. was ``flat-out inaccurate, period.''
``We asked them where they wanted to air (the spot) on the network, and then they said, 'We don't have plans for a buy.' That's really all I can tell you.''
The studio said it is routine for movie distributors to seek advance network ``clearance'' for ads promoting limited-release films before deciding whether to proceed with a national advertising campaign.
A spokeswoman for the Dixie Chicks said the country pop trio were on tour in Canada and unavailable for comment.
But the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way weighed into controversy, saying NBC appeared to be trying to squelch political dissent less than two weeks before the mid-term congressional elections. ``This is a film about censorship, and now it sounds as though it's being censored,'' the group's president, Ralph Neas, said.
CBS and Fox, a unit of News Corp. Ltd. said they had approved the ads for network broadcast, but ABC, owned by the Walt Disney Co. said it has not yet decided.
``Shut Up & Sing,'' directed by Cecilia Peck and Oscar winner Barbara Kopple, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the backlash sparked by Maines' anti-Bush outburst in 2003.
Maines later said she was sorry for ``disrespecting the office of the president'' but fanned flames anew when she retracted her apology in a Time magazine interview this year, saying: ``I don't feel he is owned any respect whatsoever.''
Many country music radio stations reacted by refusing the play the Chicks' records, and some even boycotted ads for their current ``Accidents & Accusations'' tour, leading the band to cancel numerous dates in the South and Midwest.
Published: October 27, 2006
Filed at 9:26 p.m. ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Citing its policy barring ads dealing with ``public controversy,'' the NBC network said on Friday it rejected a TV commercial for a new film documenting the furor over the Dixie Chicks' criticism of President George W. Bush.
Ads for the documentary ``Shut Up & Sing'' also were rebuffed by the smaller CW network, though local affiliates of all five major broadcasters, including NBC and CW, ran promotional spots for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the two cities where it opened on Friday.
The ad features footage of lead singer Natalie Maines declaring during a London concert in March 2003 that the band was ``ashamed'' to come from the same state -- Texas -- as Bush.
The film's distributor, the Weinstein Co., seized on the rejection of its spots as evidence of political censorship by NBC and CW and said it was ``exploring taking legal action.''
The studio provided media outlets copies of ``clearance'' reports from NBC's standards and practices department bearing handwritten notations stating the ads were deemed unacceptable because ``they are disparaging of President Bush.''
Similar documents from the CW cited ``concerns we do not have appropriate programing in which to schedule this spot.''
``It's a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America,'' studio co-owner Harvey Weinstein said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for Weinstein, renowned for aggressive marketing tactics as former co-chief executive of Miramax Films, dismissed suggestions by several industry sources that his attack on NBC and CW amounted to a publicity ploy.
``The idea that we're making an issue of this for the sake of publicity is nonsense,'' she said. ``We're making an issue of this because we want the networks to run our ads.''
NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., and CW, a joint venture of CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. studio, denied they were engaging in political censorship.
NBC said it was merely following its ``policy of not broadcasting ads that deal with issues of public controversy.'' A CW spokesman said the press release issued by the Weinstein Co. was ``flat-out inaccurate, period.''
``We asked them where they wanted to air (the spot) on the network, and then they said, 'We don't have plans for a buy.' That's really all I can tell you.''
The studio said it is routine for movie distributors to seek advance network ``clearance'' for ads promoting limited-release films before deciding whether to proceed with a national advertising campaign.
A spokeswoman for the Dixie Chicks said the country pop trio were on tour in Canada and unavailable for comment.
But the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way weighed into controversy, saying NBC appeared to be trying to squelch political dissent less than two weeks before the mid-term congressional elections. ``This is a film about censorship, and now it sounds as though it's being censored,'' the group's president, Ralph Neas, said.
CBS and Fox, a unit of News Corp. Ltd. said they had approved the ads for network broadcast, but ABC, owned by the Walt Disney Co. said it has not yet decided.
``Shut Up & Sing,'' directed by Cecilia Peck and Oscar winner Barbara Kopple, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the backlash sparked by Maines' anti-Bush outburst in 2003.
Maines later said she was sorry for ``disrespecting the office of the president'' but fanned flames anew when she retracted her apology in a Time magazine interview this year, saying: ``I don't feel he is owned any respect whatsoever.''
Many country music radio stations reacted by refusing the play the Chicks' records, and some even boycotted ads for their current ``Accidents & Accusations'' tour, leading the band to cancel numerous dates in the South and Midwest.
shut up and sing
On March 10, 2003, Natalie Maines fired a shot heard ’round the world. From a London stage, Ms. Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, declared, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
Her remark, uttered on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, when President Bush’s popularity was near an all-time high, had instant, negative repercussions. Overnight, the Dixie Chicks, America’s country-pop sweethearts, who had sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” less than two months earlier at the Super Bowl, found their music banished from much of country radio.
At angry rallies in the South, Dixie Chicks CD’s were gathered and destroyed, and Ms. Maines received death threats. How she, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison coped with the furor is the main subject of Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s documentary “Shut Up & Sing.”
On the surface, “Shut Up & Sing” is a modest film with no obvious axes to grind. As it follows the Dixie Chicks around for three years, it takes Ms. Kopple’s usual route and lets events speak for themselves. No talking heads appear to debate the politics of the Bush administration. Neither the group nor its manager, Simon Renshaw, sat for a formal interview.
Shifting back and forth between 2003 and the more recent past, as the trio prepares its newest album, “Taking the Long Way,” with the producer Rick Rubin, the movie offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today’s polarized social climate. The hatred hurled at the Dixie Chicks seems outsized measured against an offhand remark at an overseas concert. As the Dixie Chicks would put it in their song “Not Ready to Make Nice”:
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over.
The movie also brings up the skirmishes between the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith, the rowdy country star and superpatriot, which began in 2002 and heated up when Ms. Maines wore a T-shirt to the Academy of Country Music Awards bearing a four-letter acronym that could be interpreted as an obscene dig at him.
It all makes for a sad commentary on pop culture and public relations. The movie suggests how pop stars are marketed like politicians to targeted constituencies. Given the echo chamber of mass media feeding a public addiction to high drama, when an act like the Dixie Chicks goes against the beliefs of its “base” (to use a word favored by Republican strategists), reason is drowned out by noise, and there can be hell to pay.
The movie also implies that there is a double standard when it comes to celebrities’ speaking out: women are condescendingly assumed not to know their place.
The first question facing the Dixie Chicks after the incident: Should Ms. Maines eat her words and apologize? No way, she decides; she backtracks only so far as to say she supports American troops. The second question: Will the consequences of her decision rupture the solidarity of three women who call themselves a sisterhood? Another emphatic no.
To Ms. Maines’s surprise, the controversy doesn’t blow over in a week or two. The Dixie Chicks are forced to reassess their career and public image. Should they cultivate a blue-state audience? And if so, how far toward rock should they go? In their flashiest publicity stunt, they appear nude, their bodies stenciled with slogans, on the cover of Entertainment Weekly; they also go on the Bill Maher and Howard Stern shows.
The new album, “Taking the Long Way,” is finally released in May 2006 and sells one million copies within three weeks. But in the South the boycott persists. In a revealing scene of the concert business in action, ticket sales for a coming tour are monitored by computer from the moment they begin. It’s immediately apparent that sales in the South are weak, and so the itinerary is changed to take the group across Canada.
Although the movie focuses on Ms. Maines, it spends enough time with Ms. Maguire and Ms. Robison for us to get a sense of them. We meet Ms. Maguire’s twin daughters and observe the pregnancy of Ms. Robison, who had twins (a boy and a girl) in 2005. Ms. Maines has a historical perspective on it all. Coming from Lubbock, the birthplace of Buddy Holly, she recalls a time when Holly, an early rock ’n’ roller in a country music bastion, was no local hero.
The film’s generous helpings of the Dixie Chicks’ music culminate with thrilling performances of “The Long Way Around” and “Not Ready to Make Nice” from the recent album. Performing these anthems expressing passionate defiance and solidarity, the group has never sounded more vital and engaged.
“Shut Up & Sing” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for language.
SHUT UP & SING
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck; directors of photography, Christine Burrill, Luis Lopez, Seth Gordon, Gary Griffin and Joan Churchill; edited by Bob Eisenhardt, Jean Tsien, Aaron Kuhn and Emma Morris; music by the Dixie Chicks; produced by Ms. Kopple, Ms. Peck and David Cassidy; released by the Weinstein Company. Running tim
Her remark, uttered on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, when President Bush’s popularity was near an all-time high, had instant, negative repercussions. Overnight, the Dixie Chicks, America’s country-pop sweethearts, who had sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” less than two months earlier at the Super Bowl, found their music banished from much of country radio.
At angry rallies in the South, Dixie Chicks CD’s were gathered and destroyed, and Ms. Maines received death threats. How she, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison coped with the furor is the main subject of Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s documentary “Shut Up & Sing.”
On the surface, “Shut Up & Sing” is a modest film with no obvious axes to grind. As it follows the Dixie Chicks around for three years, it takes Ms. Kopple’s usual route and lets events speak for themselves. No talking heads appear to debate the politics of the Bush administration. Neither the group nor its manager, Simon Renshaw, sat for a formal interview.
Shifting back and forth between 2003 and the more recent past, as the trio prepares its newest album, “Taking the Long Way,” with the producer Rick Rubin, the movie offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today’s polarized social climate. The hatred hurled at the Dixie Chicks seems outsized measured against an offhand remark at an overseas concert. As the Dixie Chicks would put it in their song “Not Ready to Make Nice”:
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over.
The movie also brings up the skirmishes between the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith, the rowdy country star and superpatriot, which began in 2002 and heated up when Ms. Maines wore a T-shirt to the Academy of Country Music Awards bearing a four-letter acronym that could be interpreted as an obscene dig at him.
It all makes for a sad commentary on pop culture and public relations. The movie suggests how pop stars are marketed like politicians to targeted constituencies. Given the echo chamber of mass media feeding a public addiction to high drama, when an act like the Dixie Chicks goes against the beliefs of its “base” (to use a word favored by Republican strategists), reason is drowned out by noise, and there can be hell to pay.
The movie also implies that there is a double standard when it comes to celebrities’ speaking out: women are condescendingly assumed not to know their place.
The first question facing the Dixie Chicks after the incident: Should Ms. Maines eat her words and apologize? No way, she decides; she backtracks only so far as to say she supports American troops. The second question: Will the consequences of her decision rupture the solidarity of three women who call themselves a sisterhood? Another emphatic no.
To Ms. Maines’s surprise, the controversy doesn’t blow over in a week or two. The Dixie Chicks are forced to reassess their career and public image. Should they cultivate a blue-state audience? And if so, how far toward rock should they go? In their flashiest publicity stunt, they appear nude, their bodies stenciled with slogans, on the cover of Entertainment Weekly; they also go on the Bill Maher and Howard Stern shows.
The new album, “Taking the Long Way,” is finally released in May 2006 and sells one million copies within three weeks. But in the South the boycott persists. In a revealing scene of the concert business in action, ticket sales for a coming tour are monitored by computer from the moment they begin. It’s immediately apparent that sales in the South are weak, and so the itinerary is changed to take the group across Canada.
Although the movie focuses on Ms. Maines, it spends enough time with Ms. Maguire and Ms. Robison for us to get a sense of them. We meet Ms. Maguire’s twin daughters and observe the pregnancy of Ms. Robison, who had twins (a boy and a girl) in 2005. Ms. Maines has a historical perspective on it all. Coming from Lubbock, the birthplace of Buddy Holly, she recalls a time when Holly, an early rock ’n’ roller in a country music bastion, was no local hero.
The film’s generous helpings of the Dixie Chicks’ music culminate with thrilling performances of “The Long Way Around” and “Not Ready to Make Nice” from the recent album. Performing these anthems expressing passionate defiance and solidarity, the group has never sounded more vital and engaged.
“Shut Up & Sing” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for language.
SHUT UP & SING
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck; directors of photography, Christine Burrill, Luis Lopez, Seth Gordon, Gary Griffin and Joan Churchill; edited by Bob Eisenhardt, Jean Tsien, Aaron Kuhn and Emma Morris; music by the Dixie Chicks; produced by Ms. Kopple, Ms. Peck and David Cassidy; released by the Weinstein Company. Running tim
DIXIE CHICKS – SHUT UP AND SING
uly 30, 2006
Toronto Film Festival
Toronto – DIXIE CHICKS - SHUT UP AND SING, a powerful documentary from two-time Academy Award®- winning director Barbara Kopple (HARLAN COUNTY USA, AMERICAN DREAM) and director Cecilia Peck receives its world premiere as a Gala Presentation at the 31st Toronto International Film Festival in September.
With unprecedented access to the behind-closed-doors world of celebrities in the center of a political and pop culture storm, DIXIE CHICKS - SHUT UP AND SING provides a view of the real and raw emotional roller coaster of three strong women thrust into the turbulent center of a national debate. This is the first time in 14 years that the Festival has featured a documentary as a Gala Presentation.
On stage at a 2003 London concert, Natalie Maines, lead singer of Texan trio the Dixie Chicks, spoke these 15 words to a small audience at the start of their sold-out international tour: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The comment was delivered on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, and drew cheers from the decidedly anti-war and anti-Bush British crowd. It was an off the cuff remark typical of the lead singer’s temperament. Natalie and fellow Dixie Chicks Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, thought little of it. But history and this film demonstrate that at this heightened moment of political polarization in the United States, many people did care, and empowered this simple, yet loaded remark to carry serious and longstanding ramifications.
DIXIE CHICKS – SHUT UP AND SING travels with the Chicks, from their peak of popularity as the national anthem-singing darlings of country music and top-selling female recording artists of all time, through the now infamous anti-Bush comment, and on through the days, months and years of mayhem. The film follows the lives and careers of the Chicks through the writing and recording of their first album since “the incident” – and three years of political attack, making music, birthing babies, bonding, death threats, and laughter. At the end, the film presents a complete reconsideration of who people think they are, who they want to be and who, ultimately, they really are as women, as public figures, and as musicians.
Directed and produced by Barbara Kopple and Cecila Peck, DIXIE CHICKS – SHUT UP AND SING is a presentation of Cabin Creek Films
Toronto Film Festival
Toronto – DIXIE CHICKS - SHUT UP AND SING, a powerful documentary from two-time Academy Award®- winning director Barbara Kopple (HARLAN COUNTY USA, AMERICAN DREAM) and director Cecilia Peck receives its world premiere as a Gala Presentation at the 31st Toronto International Film Festival in September.
With unprecedented access to the behind-closed-doors world of celebrities in the center of a political and pop culture storm, DIXIE CHICKS - SHUT UP AND SING provides a view of the real and raw emotional roller coaster of three strong women thrust into the turbulent center of a national debate. This is the first time in 14 years that the Festival has featured a documentary as a Gala Presentation.
On stage at a 2003 London concert, Natalie Maines, lead singer of Texan trio the Dixie Chicks, spoke these 15 words to a small audience at the start of their sold-out international tour: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The comment was delivered on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, and drew cheers from the decidedly anti-war and anti-Bush British crowd. It was an off the cuff remark typical of the lead singer’s temperament. Natalie and fellow Dixie Chicks Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, thought little of it. But history and this film demonstrate that at this heightened moment of political polarization in the United States, many people did care, and empowered this simple, yet loaded remark to carry serious and longstanding ramifications.
DIXIE CHICKS – SHUT UP AND SING travels with the Chicks, from their peak of popularity as the national anthem-singing darlings of country music and top-selling female recording artists of all time, through the now infamous anti-Bush comment, and on through the days, months and years of mayhem. The film follows the lives and careers of the Chicks through the writing and recording of their first album since “the incident” – and three years of political attack, making music, birthing babies, bonding, death threats, and laughter. At the end, the film presents a complete reconsideration of who people think they are, who they want to be and who, ultimately, they really are as women, as public figures, and as musicians.
Directed and produced by Barbara Kopple and Cecila Peck, DIXIE CHICKS – SHUT UP AND SING is a presentation of Cabin Creek Films
SubUrbia
Writer and Director Will Confer at Home
By CELIA McGEE
Published: August 27, 2006
THE director Jo Bonney is watching Eric Bogosian tear up the script of his play “SubUrbia.”
Rip, rip, rip. There go Pages 103 and 104 of the nine-character ensemble piece about young people lost, longing and addled as they head into their 20’s, afraid they’ll never escape the suburban mallscape where they have come of age. They feed off hunks of anger and frustrated idealism as thick and unhealthy as the pizza slices they buy from the Pakistani owner of an unidentified convenience store. As they hang out in his parking lot, their Rollerblades at the ready, their self-confidence is under siege and their jealous suspicion of outsiders ratchets up to racism and violence. They’re waiting not for Godot but for Pony, a former schoolmate nearing the brass ring as a rock musician who drops by in a limo with his publicist.
But the play was written in 1994, and as Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian prepare for a new production at the Second Stage Theater next month, he brings in pages that are reworked to take into account the reality she wants reflected in the piece, about an American anyplace where everything, yet nothing, has changed. He really gets into shredding the old pages in front of his director and the somewhat awestruck young cast.
“Or maybe we should just autograph them and sell them at a benefit somewhere,” Mr. Bogosian, 53, said in a satirical aside. Ms. Bonney merely smiled a tolerant smile.
The actors include the likes of Jessica Capshaw and Kieran Culkin, no strangers to celebrity’s wattage. Nevertheless they seem fascinated to see this famous progenitor of bad-dudeness — writer and performer of “Drinking in America,” “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and other genre-altering solos — at the professional beck and call of a respected, versatile and in-demand director, his wife.
Like, wow. Mr. “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead” is married.
Yet the fact of their marriage was precisely why Ms. Bonney says she didn’t want to direct the play.
“That was a real stumbling block for me,” she said. “I had to eliminate knowing Eric. If I’d never met him, what would I think of this play? For so long my personal and professional lives have been separate: we would go off and work apart, then come together at the end of the day.”
Ms. Bonney, a graphic artist by training, got her start as a director inadvertently, helping Mr. Bogosian in the 1980’s on the acts with which he first made his name. But in recent years she has moved on, with notable success, to diverse ensemble works like Lisa Loomer’s “Living Out,” Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” Neil LaBute’s last two plays and this year’s hip-hop adaptation of Euripides, “The Seven.”
“There was this thing where our kids were older, and I could be Jo Bonney, in brackets, director, rather than, in brackets, wife of Eric Bogosian,” she said.
The notion of having Ms. Bonney direct “SubUrbia” came from Carol Rothman, the artistic director of Second Stage, where Ms. Bonney is an artistic associate. “We circled around it for two or three months,” Ms. Rothman said, “but I knew it was right for her. It has a large cast — she loves that — and it’s political.”
When Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian met 26 years ago — he a caustic refugee from Woburn, Mass., she a hip Australian art-school graduate circling the globe and on her way to South America — both were avid participants in the downtown punk scene, sharing a commitment to anti-establishment culture and social change. They still do, as well as a belief in theater’s concomitant role.
Wait — South America? “I never knew that,” Mr. Bogosian said. Two teenage sons, a tranquil country house and breakfasts near home at Bubby’s in TriBeCa later, “she can still surprise me,” he said. “Whereas if I come up with a story she hasn’t heard, it’s a good day for me.”
The choreographer Bill T. Jones has known the couple since those early days and collaborated with Ms. Bonney on “The Seven.” “Jo wants to do what’s worth doing,” he said. “She takes on tough projects that come from the fringe and gives them new life in a way that helps move them into a position where they can encounter a wider audience.”
The original “SubUrbia,” with a cast that featured Martha Plimpton and Steve Zahn, managed the rare feat of drawing an MTV-conditioned audience to Lincoln Center Theater. In the intervening years it has become a staple of college theater and drama-school auditions. The actor Daniel Eric Gold, who plays Jeff, a would-be writer paralyzed by his ambivalent desire to make something of himself, directed and acted in the play as his senior thesis at Pennsylvania State University. Yet under Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian “it’s like a new play,” he said. “It feels even more relevant. Kids in suburbia now have the Internet, and because it connects them to the outside, they feel even more stuck because they can see the larger world.”
MS. BONNEY said the context of politics and history made the greatest difference, more than any changes she or Mr. Bogosian had brought to bear. “What’s remarkable is how little in the play had to be changed,” she said. Still, as an observer of cultural tidings, Mr. Bogosian continues to update the play with small nuggets: a reference to “The Da Vinci Code,” here a nod to Eve Ensler, there a mention of Darfur.
Ms. Bonney has contributed a subtle shift with the set, no longer a rundown 7-Eleven but “one of those pristine, aluminum-gridded stores we see driving through New Jersey or Massachusetts,” she said. The bleak, dead-end mind-set of much of the teenage generation, she said, remains what it was in the 90’s — or the 70’s, when Mr. Bogosian hung at the Woburn strip mall that inspired the play — but the “cookie-cutter” quality of the surroundings is more threatening and depressing.
All the stores look exactly the same,” she said. “They have no character.” Take into account 9/11 and six years of a presidential administration representing Ms. Bonney’s and Mr. Bogosian’s worst political nightmares, and “SubUrbia” seems altered almost beyond recall. “It shows what history has done to us,” Ms. Bonney said.
Nazeer and Pakeeza, the Pakistani brother and sister who run the store, for instance, “have been dogged by events bigger than themselves,” she said. “Just the decision about whether they’re going to call the cops is so loaded, because the I.N.S. is such a presence now.” Suddenly the word terrorist is among the epithets the local teenagers hurl at them. And, unlike in 1994, these same thoughtless kids “could be sent off to war,” Ms. Bonney said.
For Tim, the alcoholic military dropout, Mr. Bogosian said he felt he had to create a glancing back story that “goes into Operation Iraqi Freedom but also explains why he didn’t see active duty.”
Manu Narayan, who plays Nazeer, “SubUrbia’s” immigrant conscience, added that in the new version: “Nazeer talks about the political situation in Pakistan and how a change of regimes affected certain classes of people, who had to leave the country. You understand why these people want to live here, which is more important to them than their religion.”
As for Pony, whether Mr. Bogosian and his vegetable-gardening, doting-father self likes it or not, Ms. Bonney said, the incipient rock star and the writer who imagined him into being are one and the same. Both were “suffocating in small places and had to get out, be allowed to be themselves and dangerous,” she said.
That residual sense of brooding anger is what led the playwright and television writer Warren Leight, who goes back 25 years with the couple, to push for casting Mr. Bogosian as the police Captain Cross in the new season of NBC’s “Law & Order, Criminal Intent,” on which Mr. Leight is also a co-executive producer.
“Eric just has to stand there, and the subtext comes across,” Mr. Leight said with a laugh. “You can tell his character has axes to grind, that it wasn’t easy for him coming up through the force. Eric wanted me to make sure Cross carries a gun. He’s probably packing now.”
More stage work is in the offing too. Though Mr. Bogosian said he was “done with the solo performance thing,” the actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz of the Labyrinth Theater Company have persuaded him to reprise a recent semi-solo piece next spring. Last year at the Labyrinth, which Mr. Bogosian has since joined, Mr. Hoffman directed him in “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” as a gentleman by the name of Satan. “I was really intimidated about meeting him,” Mr. Hoffman recalled. “I mean, he was an iconic figure to us, he’s the guy. But he’s embodied the idea of the company, to be worker among workers, and he couldn’t be more self-effacing.”
The new show will be running around the same time that Ms. Bonney directs Mr. LaBute’s latest, followed by Alan Ball’s first play in 12 years, “All That I Will Ever Be,” at the New York Theater Workshop. And then a new production of “Talk Radio” arrives on Broadway, starring Liev Schreiber.
It will be another opportunity to look in the mirror of Mr. Bogosian’s career, as has happened on this project. “What’s interesting to me working on ‘SubUrbia,’ ” he said, “is that the guy I was 12 years ago was fascinated with the whole topic of fame and fortune — I was just coming off a period of pretty strong stuff like that — but that’s not the leading plane of it for me anymore. Not to sound pretentious, but I’ve been reading ‘The Three Sisters’ again lately, and looking at the way Chekhov paid such close attention to character. Which is what Jo is also so good at, the earned small beats, the little nuances. And no director I’ve ever worked with is as precise about the writing. She won’t let you cover up the flaws.”
He is not alone in this opinion.
“Jo is quick to dismiss and exile anything in the writing that isn’t top-notch,” Mr. LaBute said.
That’s where the sound of ripping paper comes in.
By CELIA McGEE
Published: August 27, 2006
THE director Jo Bonney is watching Eric Bogosian tear up the script of his play “SubUrbia.”
Rip, rip, rip. There go Pages 103 and 104 of the nine-character ensemble piece about young people lost, longing and addled as they head into their 20’s, afraid they’ll never escape the suburban mallscape where they have come of age. They feed off hunks of anger and frustrated idealism as thick and unhealthy as the pizza slices they buy from the Pakistani owner of an unidentified convenience store. As they hang out in his parking lot, their Rollerblades at the ready, their self-confidence is under siege and their jealous suspicion of outsiders ratchets up to racism and violence. They’re waiting not for Godot but for Pony, a former schoolmate nearing the brass ring as a rock musician who drops by in a limo with his publicist.
But the play was written in 1994, and as Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian prepare for a new production at the Second Stage Theater next month, he brings in pages that are reworked to take into account the reality she wants reflected in the piece, about an American anyplace where everything, yet nothing, has changed. He really gets into shredding the old pages in front of his director and the somewhat awestruck young cast.
“Or maybe we should just autograph them and sell them at a benefit somewhere,” Mr. Bogosian, 53, said in a satirical aside. Ms. Bonney merely smiled a tolerant smile.
The actors include the likes of Jessica Capshaw and Kieran Culkin, no strangers to celebrity’s wattage. Nevertheless they seem fascinated to see this famous progenitor of bad-dudeness — writer and performer of “Drinking in America,” “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and other genre-altering solos — at the professional beck and call of a respected, versatile and in-demand director, his wife.
Like, wow. Mr. “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead” is married.
Yet the fact of their marriage was precisely why Ms. Bonney says she didn’t want to direct the play.
“That was a real stumbling block for me,” she said. “I had to eliminate knowing Eric. If I’d never met him, what would I think of this play? For so long my personal and professional lives have been separate: we would go off and work apart, then come together at the end of the day.”
Ms. Bonney, a graphic artist by training, got her start as a director inadvertently, helping Mr. Bogosian in the 1980’s on the acts with which he first made his name. But in recent years she has moved on, with notable success, to diverse ensemble works like Lisa Loomer’s “Living Out,” Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” Neil LaBute’s last two plays and this year’s hip-hop adaptation of Euripides, “The Seven.”
“There was this thing where our kids were older, and I could be Jo Bonney, in brackets, director, rather than, in brackets, wife of Eric Bogosian,” she said.
The notion of having Ms. Bonney direct “SubUrbia” came from Carol Rothman, the artistic director of Second Stage, where Ms. Bonney is an artistic associate. “We circled around it for two or three months,” Ms. Rothman said, “but I knew it was right for her. It has a large cast — she loves that — and it’s political.”
When Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian met 26 years ago — he a caustic refugee from Woburn, Mass., she a hip Australian art-school graduate circling the globe and on her way to South America — both were avid participants in the downtown punk scene, sharing a commitment to anti-establishment culture and social change. They still do, as well as a belief in theater’s concomitant role.
Wait — South America? “I never knew that,” Mr. Bogosian said. Two teenage sons, a tranquil country house and breakfasts near home at Bubby’s in TriBeCa later, “she can still surprise me,” he said. “Whereas if I come up with a story she hasn’t heard, it’s a good day for me.”
The choreographer Bill T. Jones has known the couple since those early days and collaborated with Ms. Bonney on “The Seven.” “Jo wants to do what’s worth doing,” he said. “She takes on tough projects that come from the fringe and gives them new life in a way that helps move them into a position where they can encounter a wider audience.”
The original “SubUrbia,” with a cast that featured Martha Plimpton and Steve Zahn, managed the rare feat of drawing an MTV-conditioned audience to Lincoln Center Theater. In the intervening years it has become a staple of college theater and drama-school auditions. The actor Daniel Eric Gold, who plays Jeff, a would-be writer paralyzed by his ambivalent desire to make something of himself, directed and acted in the play as his senior thesis at Pennsylvania State University. Yet under Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian “it’s like a new play,” he said. “It feels even more relevant. Kids in suburbia now have the Internet, and because it connects them to the outside, they feel even more stuck because they can see the larger world.”
MS. BONNEY said the context of politics and history made the greatest difference, more than any changes she or Mr. Bogosian had brought to bear. “What’s remarkable is how little in the play had to be changed,” she said. Still, as an observer of cultural tidings, Mr. Bogosian continues to update the play with small nuggets: a reference to “The Da Vinci Code,” here a nod to Eve Ensler, there a mention of Darfur.
Ms. Bonney has contributed a subtle shift with the set, no longer a rundown 7-Eleven but “one of those pristine, aluminum-gridded stores we see driving through New Jersey or Massachusetts,” she said. The bleak, dead-end mind-set of much of the teenage generation, she said, remains what it was in the 90’s — or the 70’s, when Mr. Bogosian hung at the Woburn strip mall that inspired the play — but the “cookie-cutter” quality of the surroundings is more threatening and depressing.
All the stores look exactly the same,” she said. “They have no character.” Take into account 9/11 and six years of a presidential administration representing Ms. Bonney’s and Mr. Bogosian’s worst political nightmares, and “SubUrbia” seems altered almost beyond recall. “It shows what history has done to us,” Ms. Bonney said.
Nazeer and Pakeeza, the Pakistani brother and sister who run the store, for instance, “have been dogged by events bigger than themselves,” she said. “Just the decision about whether they’re going to call the cops is so loaded, because the I.N.S. is such a presence now.” Suddenly the word terrorist is among the epithets the local teenagers hurl at them. And, unlike in 1994, these same thoughtless kids “could be sent off to war,” Ms. Bonney said.
For Tim, the alcoholic military dropout, Mr. Bogosian said he felt he had to create a glancing back story that “goes into Operation Iraqi Freedom but also explains why he didn’t see active duty.”
Manu Narayan, who plays Nazeer, “SubUrbia’s” immigrant conscience, added that in the new version: “Nazeer talks about the political situation in Pakistan and how a change of regimes affected certain classes of people, who had to leave the country. You understand why these people want to live here, which is more important to them than their religion.”
As for Pony, whether Mr. Bogosian and his vegetable-gardening, doting-father self likes it or not, Ms. Bonney said, the incipient rock star and the writer who imagined him into being are one and the same. Both were “suffocating in small places and had to get out, be allowed to be themselves and dangerous,” she said.
That residual sense of brooding anger is what led the playwright and television writer Warren Leight, who goes back 25 years with the couple, to push for casting Mr. Bogosian as the police Captain Cross in the new season of NBC’s “Law & Order, Criminal Intent,” on which Mr. Leight is also a co-executive producer.
“Eric just has to stand there, and the subtext comes across,” Mr. Leight said with a laugh. “You can tell his character has axes to grind, that it wasn’t easy for him coming up through the force. Eric wanted me to make sure Cross carries a gun. He’s probably packing now.”
More stage work is in the offing too. Though Mr. Bogosian said he was “done with the solo performance thing,” the actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz of the Labyrinth Theater Company have persuaded him to reprise a recent semi-solo piece next spring. Last year at the Labyrinth, which Mr. Bogosian has since joined, Mr. Hoffman directed him in “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” as a gentleman by the name of Satan. “I was really intimidated about meeting him,” Mr. Hoffman recalled. “I mean, he was an iconic figure to us, he’s the guy. But he’s embodied the idea of the company, to be worker among workers, and he couldn’t be more self-effacing.”
The new show will be running around the same time that Ms. Bonney directs Mr. LaBute’s latest, followed by Alan Ball’s first play in 12 years, “All That I Will Ever Be,” at the New York Theater Workshop. And then a new production of “Talk Radio” arrives on Broadway, starring Liev Schreiber.
It will be another opportunity to look in the mirror of Mr. Bogosian’s career, as has happened on this project. “What’s interesting to me working on ‘SubUrbia,’ ” he said, “is that the guy I was 12 years ago was fascinated with the whole topic of fame and fortune — I was just coming off a period of pretty strong stuff like that — but that’s not the leading plane of it for me anymore. Not to sound pretentious, but I’ve been reading ‘The Three Sisters’ again lately, and looking at the way Chekhov paid such close attention to character. Which is what Jo is also so good at, the earned small beats, the little nuances. And no director I’ve ever worked with is as precise about the writing. She won’t let you cover up the flaws.”
He is not alone in this opinion.
“Jo is quick to dismiss and exile anything in the writing that isn’t top-notch,” Mr. LaBute said.
That’s where the sound of ripping paper comes in.
Capricorn Horoscope for week of October 26, 2006
Capricorn Horoscope for week of October 26, 2006
Verticle Oracle card Capricorn (December 22-January 19)
Thomas Paine was a zealous insurrectionary. He wrote incendiary pamphlets that helped ignite and sustain America's struggle for independence from Great Britain. Early in his life, however, he worked making women's girdles, which are among the most constrictive and oppressive garments in the history of the world. Do you think there was a connection between his two gigs? Like maybe his later struggle for liberation was an unconscious atonement for his youthful labors? That's my hypothesis. In the coming week, Capricorn, I suggest you instigate a Thomas Paine-like boomerang. Think of something you did in the past that constricted your spirit or squeezed other people's possibilities. Use that memory as a launching pad as you unleash a brilliant stroke in the name of abundance and expansiveness. Halloween costume suggestion: freedom fighter.
Verticle Oracle card Capricorn (December 22-January 19)
Thomas Paine was a zealous insurrectionary. He wrote incendiary pamphlets that helped ignite and sustain America's struggle for independence from Great Britain. Early in his life, however, he worked making women's girdles, which are among the most constrictive and oppressive garments in the history of the world. Do you think there was a connection between his two gigs? Like maybe his later struggle for liberation was an unconscious atonement for his youthful labors? That's my hypothesis. In the coming week, Capricorn, I suggest you instigate a Thomas Paine-like boomerang. Think of something you did in the past that constricted your spirit or squeezed other people's possibilities. Use that memory as a launching pad as you unleash a brilliant stroke in the name of abundance and expansiveness. Halloween costume suggestion: freedom fighter.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Dems strike back for Senator Clinton
Pals: Look who's talking
Rangel rushes to Hillary's side in cutting swipe at foe
BY HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sen. Hillary Clinton's pals rushed to her defense yesterday, blasting John Spencer's comments about her appearance and suggesting that maybe - just maybe - he shouldn't be throwing any stones.
"Before he made those comments, I never knew who the hell Spencer was. So at least he got his name in the paper," Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) said of the leathery former Yonkers mayor running to unseat Clinton.
"He could take the plastic surgery," Rangel added. "She is a good-looking gal; she doesn't need it."
Clinton, meanwhile, continued to laugh off Spencer's speculation that she's had work done on her face.
"I've earned every one of these lines and wrinkles - and I'm going to keep them," she said emphatically as she picked up some key endorsements from police unions on Long Island.
Spencer's ill-considered personal comments to a Daily News political columnist have garnered him more attention in the last two days than any attempt he ever made to discuss issues. He's been on national TV more in those 48 hours than in his entire prior career.
And the state Democratic Party kept the flap going by releasing a series of comments by prominent New York Democratic women trashing Spencer.
"John Spencer's comments about Sen. Clinton are an embarrassment to New Yorkers of every party," said former Rep.Geraldine Ferraro (D-Queens), who battled political sexism when she ran for veep in 1984.
"Does anyone think if John Spencer were running against a man he would be making comments about her appearance?" Ferraro asked. "I think New Yorkers know the answer."
"These were desperate statements from someone who is losing," Assemblywoman Annette Robinson (D-Brooklyn) said. "These personal attacks on her are beneath the dignity of a Senate race."
Meanwhile, Spencer spokesman Rob Ryan appeared to want to keep the story alive, too.
While Spencer initially said the story was "fabricated," Ryan tried a new tack, suggested that saying someone had "work" done could just mean hair and makeup.
Rangel rushes to Hillary's side in cutting swipe at foe
BY HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sen. Hillary Clinton's pals rushed to her defense yesterday, blasting John Spencer's comments about her appearance and suggesting that maybe - just maybe - he shouldn't be throwing any stones.
"Before he made those comments, I never knew who the hell Spencer was. So at least he got his name in the paper," Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) said of the leathery former Yonkers mayor running to unseat Clinton.
"He could take the plastic surgery," Rangel added. "She is a good-looking gal; she doesn't need it."
Clinton, meanwhile, continued to laugh off Spencer's speculation that she's had work done on her face.
"I've earned every one of these lines and wrinkles - and I'm going to keep them," she said emphatically as she picked up some key endorsements from police unions on Long Island.
Spencer's ill-considered personal comments to a Daily News political columnist have garnered him more attention in the last two days than any attempt he ever made to discuss issues. He's been on national TV more in those 48 hours than in his entire prior career.
And the state Democratic Party kept the flap going by releasing a series of comments by prominent New York Democratic women trashing Spencer.
"John Spencer's comments about Sen. Clinton are an embarrassment to New Yorkers of every party," said former Rep.Geraldine Ferraro (D-Queens), who battled political sexism when she ran for veep in 1984.
"Does anyone think if John Spencer were running against a man he would be making comments about her appearance?" Ferraro asked. "I think New Yorkers know the answer."
"These were desperate statements from someone who is losing," Assemblywoman Annette Robinson (D-Brooklyn) said. "These personal attacks on her are beneath the dignity of a Senate race."
Meanwhile, Spencer spokesman Rob Ryan appeared to want to keep the story alive, too.
While Spencer initially said the story was "fabricated," Ryan tried a new tack, suggested that saying someone had "work" done could just mean hair and makeup.
Jon Spencer is playing school yard tactics
Clinton foe: 'Whew' she was hideous before 'work'
The race for New York senator's now personal. GOP hopeful John Spencer has attacked Hillary Clinton's looks, telling a reporter he doesn't know "why Bill married her."
Clinton in '69 at Wellesley College.
Hillary Clinton's Republican challenger is getting personal and it's not pretty: He says the senator used to be ugly - and speculates she got "millions of dollars" in plastic surgery.
"You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew," said John Spencer of Clinton's younger days.
"I don't know why Bill married her," he said of the Clintons, who celebrated their 31st anniversary this month.
Noting Hillary Clinton looks much different now, he chalked it up to "millions of dollars" of "work" - plastic surgery.
"She looks good now," he said.
Spencer's bizarre comments came during a conversation with a reporter seated beside him and his wife, Kathy, on the 10:30 a.m. JetBlue flight Friday to Rochester, the site of the race's first debate.
In the wide-ranging chat, he also declared that his GOP running mate, attorney general hopeful Jeanine Pirro, was going to lose.
Howard Wolfson, an aide to Clinton, who turns 59 Thursday, said the senator has never had plastic surgery. But he declined otherwise to respond to Spencer's comments.
But Spencer's words crossed a political line that he has struggled to avoid during his underdog campaign against the former First Lady, a politician who inspires strong feelings among fans and foes alike.
He has limited most of his official comments to criticisms of Clinton for her doubts about the Iraq war, her opposition to tax cuts and her presidential ambitions.
In fund-raising letters, he has used more openly hostile language, allowing Clinton's aides to portray him as "angry" and out of control.
But few of Spencer's comments have been outside American political norm - and none before Friday had touched on Clinton's private life or personal appearance.
During yesterday's debate, he said there's nothing personal about their differences.
"I happen to like Hillary Clinton," he said, even declaring she would make a "tremendous" Democratic presidential candidate.
His remarks on Friday, though, show just how personal this campaign is to Spencer, a Vietnam vet who has always seen this campaign through the lens of a war he fought in and the Clintons protested.
His comments on her appearance came during a sporadic conversation as Spencer checked out the television on the seat in front of him ("My man Columbo's on!") and then settled into reading The New York Times. (In his words, "Checking in on the enemy.")
Spencer, the former mayor of Yonkers, dwelt at length on the contrast between his direct, honest and unfiltered style - and what he sees as the phony, controlled and staged nature of much of American politics.
"What's the matter with ruffling feathers?" he asked at one point.
The remarks about Clinton's looks followed a conversation about Pirro.
With a New York magazine story about Pirro's troubled marriage open in his wife's lap, Spencer offered some sympathy for his GOP running mate.
"Very bright woman," he said of Pirro, whom he once accused of using her old post as Westchester district attorney to probe enemies and shield allies.
He blamed her recent problems on her reliance on handlers and consultants.
Spencer had less kind words for her husband, Al, whose crimes, misdemeanors and ill-timed remarks have dogged her campaign against Andrew Cuomo.
"S-A-D, sad," Spencer said of Al Pirro, saying his own status as a recovering alcoholic helped him understand what he called Pirro's egotism.
"He's like a 12-year-old," he said.
"And Andy Cuomo's going to win," Spencer added.
A spokesman for Jeanine Pirro did not immediately comment.
The race for New York senator's now personal. GOP hopeful John Spencer has attacked Hillary Clinton's looks, telling a reporter he doesn't know "why Bill married her."
Clinton in '69 at Wellesley College.
Hillary Clinton's Republican challenger is getting personal and it's not pretty: He says the senator used to be ugly - and speculates she got "millions of dollars" in plastic surgery.
"You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew," said John Spencer of Clinton's younger days.
"I don't know why Bill married her," he said of the Clintons, who celebrated their 31st anniversary this month.
Noting Hillary Clinton looks much different now, he chalked it up to "millions of dollars" of "work" - plastic surgery.
"She looks good now," he said.
Spencer's bizarre comments came during a conversation with a reporter seated beside him and his wife, Kathy, on the 10:30 a.m. JetBlue flight Friday to Rochester, the site of the race's first debate.
In the wide-ranging chat, he also declared that his GOP running mate, attorney general hopeful Jeanine Pirro, was going to lose.
Howard Wolfson, an aide to Clinton, who turns 59 Thursday, said the senator has never had plastic surgery. But he declined otherwise to respond to Spencer's comments.
But Spencer's words crossed a political line that he has struggled to avoid during his underdog campaign against the former First Lady, a politician who inspires strong feelings among fans and foes alike.
He has limited most of his official comments to criticisms of Clinton for her doubts about the Iraq war, her opposition to tax cuts and her presidential ambitions.
In fund-raising letters, he has used more openly hostile language, allowing Clinton's aides to portray him as "angry" and out of control.
But few of Spencer's comments have been outside American political norm - and none before Friday had touched on Clinton's private life or personal appearance.
During yesterday's debate, he said there's nothing personal about their differences.
"I happen to like Hillary Clinton," he said, even declaring she would make a "tremendous" Democratic presidential candidate.
His remarks on Friday, though, show just how personal this campaign is to Spencer, a Vietnam vet who has always seen this campaign through the lens of a war he fought in and the Clintons protested.
His comments on her appearance came during a sporadic conversation as Spencer checked out the television on the seat in front of him ("My man Columbo's on!") and then settled into reading The New York Times. (In his words, "Checking in on the enemy.")
Spencer, the former mayor of Yonkers, dwelt at length on the contrast between his direct, honest and unfiltered style - and what he sees as the phony, controlled and staged nature of much of American politics.
"What's the matter with ruffling feathers?" he asked at one point.
The remarks about Clinton's looks followed a conversation about Pirro.
With a New York magazine story about Pirro's troubled marriage open in his wife's lap, Spencer offered some sympathy for his GOP running mate.
"Very bright woman," he said of Pirro, whom he once accused of using her old post as Westchester district attorney to probe enemies and shield allies.
He blamed her recent problems on her reliance on handlers and consultants.
Spencer had less kind words for her husband, Al, whose crimes, misdemeanors and ill-timed remarks have dogged her campaign against Andrew Cuomo.
"S-A-D, sad," Spencer said of Al Pirro, saying his own status as a recovering alcoholic helped him understand what he called Pirro's egotism.
"He's like a 12-year-old," he said.
"And Andy Cuomo's going to win," Spencer added.
A spokesman for Jeanine Pirro did not immediately comment.
Spencer is a Jerk and behind by 70 points
At Least He Didn't Call Her a Lesbian
WCBS reports that Spencer told the Journal News of the debates, "As long as I don't call her a lesbian, I'm okay."
Unclear from the story whether he's denying that too, or not.
Also, check out the re-run of NY1's Inside City Hall tonight at 10:30 (if you missed its airing just now) to see Spencer concede that, well, um, he actually said the things he's claiming I "fabricated."
WCBS reports that Spencer told the Journal News of the debates, "As long as I don't call her a lesbian, I'm okay."
Unclear from the story whether he's denying that too, or not.
Also, check out the re-run of NY1's Inside City Hall tonight at 10:30 (if you missed its airing just now) to see Spencer concede that, well, um, he actually said the things he's claiming I "fabricated."
Opponent denies calling Clinton ugly
Yahoo News via AP ^ | Mon Oct 23 | MARC HUMBERT
Posted on 10/23/2006 7:59:49 PM PDT by indcons
Sen. Hillary Clinton's Republican challenger on Monday flatly denied telling a reporter that Clinton was unattractive when she was younger and suggesting she had had "millions of dollars" of "work."
John Spencer, a former Yonkers mayor, acknowledged talking to the reporter during a flight on Friday but said he didn't make the statements attributed to him in Monday's New York Daily News.
"It's a fabrication. I would never call Hillary Clinton ugly," Spencer told The Associated Press. "That's outrageous. I didn't do it."
The reporter, Ben Smith, told the AP that Spencer made the comments as Spencer, his wife and Smith sat together. He said he didn't tape-record the comments but did take notes.
"You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew. I don't know why Bill married her," The Daily News quoted Spencer as saying about Clinton.
Spencer said Clinton looks different now, chalking it up to "millions of dollars" of "work," according to the tabloid.
"She looks good now," he is quoted as saying.
Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson said Clinton has had no plastic surgery or similar appearance-enhancing work.
"Sadly, this is just the latest in a long line of insulting and offensive comments that John Spencer has made throughout his career, and it's unfortunate that he has chosen to run a campaign based on personal attacks," the Clinton aide said.
Polls have shown Clinton far ahead of Spencer in the Senate race.
In their second debate on Sunday, Spencer said he "liked" Clinton and that she would make a "tremendous" candidate for president, although he also said he would never vote for her.
The Clintons recently celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary. She turns 59 on Thursday.
Yahoo News via AP ^ | Mon Oct 23 | MARC HUMBERT
Posted on 10/23/2006 7:59:49 PM PDT by indcons
Sen. Hillary Clinton's Republican challenger on Monday flatly denied telling a reporter that Clinton was unattractive when she was younger and suggesting she had had "millions of dollars" of "work."
John Spencer, a former Yonkers mayor, acknowledged talking to the reporter during a flight on Friday but said he didn't make the statements attributed to him in Monday's New York Daily News.
"It's a fabrication. I would never call Hillary Clinton ugly," Spencer told The Associated Press. "That's outrageous. I didn't do it."
The reporter, Ben Smith, told the AP that Spencer made the comments as Spencer, his wife and Smith sat together. He said he didn't tape-record the comments but did take notes.
"You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew. I don't know why Bill married her," The Daily News quoted Spencer as saying about Clinton.
Spencer said Clinton looks different now, chalking it up to "millions of dollars" of "work," according to the tabloid.
"She looks good now," he is quoted as saying.
Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson said Clinton has had no plastic surgery or similar appearance-enhancing work.
"Sadly, this is just the latest in a long line of insulting and offensive comments that John Spencer has made throughout his career, and it's unfortunate that he has chosen to run a campaign based on personal attacks," the Clinton aide said.
Polls have shown Clinton far ahead of Spencer in the Senate race.
In their second debate on Sunday, Spencer said he "liked" Clinton and that she would make a "tremendous" candidate for president, although he also said he would never vote for her.
The Clintons recently celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary. She turns 59 on Thursday.
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