China’s central bank has rolled out dozens of measures and promises intended to boost lending and support industries that have been battered by recent Covid outbreaks and lockdowns.
China’s Games: How Xi Jinping Is Staging the Olympics on His Terms
Defend Chernobyl During an Invasion? Why Bother, Some Ukrainians Ask.
U.S. and Russia Take More Measured Stance in Ukraine Talks
In the latest installment of Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook, Vladimir Putin measures the drapes (but neglects to read the room). http://nyer.cm/1E7FQ2F
Cold and Marooned in a Police State as Desperation Takes Hold
Almost a dozen migrants have died in recent weeks in the standoff between Belarus, a close ally of Russia, and Poland, a member of NATO and the E.U.
rooned at Mar-a-Lago, Trump Still Has Iron Grip on Republicans
Former President Trump loomed over the vilification of Liz Cheney, state efforts to restrict voting and a bizarre vote recount in Arizona.
The dramas cast into sharp relief the extent to which the nation is still struggling with his assault on a bedrock of democracy: election integrity.
In the Republican Party, objecting to former President Trump carries little political incentive and a steep price. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTrump Justice Dept. Seized Phone Records of 3 Washington Post Reporters
The records were part of an investigation into the publication of classified information in 2017, and would have required the approval of William Barr.
"Independent bookstores are suffering, and LGBT citizens feel marooned and abandoned."
This Best-Selling Author Explains Why She Won’t Boycott North Carolina
Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train, explains.
FOR.TN
A trove of nearly 2,000 gold coins is said to have languished at the bottom of the sea for about 1,000 years. It's the biggest hoard of gold coins ever discovered in Israel -- and it could lead to further archaeological finds. http://cnn.it/1DD8QYs
Alexander Payne's new film "Nebraska" may be a surprise. It is a modest, wistful indie film which maroons its characters in the unglamorous Midwest. It's shot in grainy monochrome, with no flashy camera-work, and no big-name Hollywood stars http://econ.st/1jAFLTd
In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots
By JOHN MARKOFF
“The Machine Age,” an essay written for The New York Times by Norbert
Wiener, a visionary mathematician, languished for six decades in the
M.I.T. archives.
So the general turned to his command’s government section, staffed in those first months of the occupation by many young idealists and intellectuals from Roosevelt’s New Deal era. Sirota was part of the subcommittee on civil rights and vividly recalls that feverish week in February 1946, when her familiarity with Tokyo, her research skills honed during the war years and her fluency in Japanese proved invaluable.
I feared being marooned amongst buffers and buffons, bucolics, butties, and Blimps.
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories,Second Edition, A. S. Byatt,, p.xv
Mississippi River Crests at Nearly 48 Feet in Memphis
Surging waters headed south to New Orleans. Will all the levees hold?
You say somewhere that, artistically speaking, you
prefer Lolita to all your other books. Has y our new
novel Ada superseded Lolita in your affection?
Not really. It is true that Ada caused me more
trouble than all my other novels and perhaps that bright fringe
of overlapping worry is synonymous with the crest of love.
Incidentally, speaking of my first nymphet, let me take this
neat opportunity to correct a curious misconception profferred
by an anonymous owl in a London weekly a couple of months ago.
"Lolita" should not be pronounced in the English or Russian
fashion (as he thinks it should), but with a trill of Latin
"l"s and a delicate toothy "t."
Family, friends and even strangers helped an Arkansas man, Russell Petty, protect his home from a cresting river using a moat and sandbags.
The Crest of Love (愛情の紋章)
Then he focuses his mind on his hand as he painstakingly describes the simplified outline of a plover. It’s not just any bird drawing he’s doing, though, but part of a family crest. Long an integral part of Japanese culture, these emblems were formerly in widespread use to mark people’s clothes, possessions and even buildings.
Click to enlarge
5 images available
measured
/ˈmɛʒəd/
adjective
- having a slow, regular rhythm."she set off with measured tread"
- (of speech or writing) carefully considered and restrained."his measured prose"
measure
/ˈmɛʒə/
See definitions in:
verb
- 1.ascertain the size, amount, or degree of (something) by using an instrument or device marked in standard units."the amount of water collected is measured in pints"
- 2.assess the importance, effect, or value of (something)."it is hard to measure teaching ability"
noun
- 1.a plan or course of action taken to achieve a particular purpose."cost-cutting measures"
- 2.a standard unit used to express the size, amount, or degree of something."a furlong is an obsolete measure of length"
Definition of crest
nounverb
Phrases
Derivatives
crestless
adjective
adjective
Crest
n.
- A usually ornamental tuft, ridge, or similar projection on the head of a bird or other animal.
- An elevated, irregularly toothed ridge on the stigmas of certain flowers.
- A ridge or an appendage on a plant part, such as on a leaf or petal.
- A plume used as decoration on top of a helmet.
- A helmet.
- Heraldry. A device placed above the shield on a coat of arms.
- A representation of such a device.
- The top, as of a hill or wave.
- The highest or culminating point; the peak: the crest of a flood; at the crest of her career.
- The ridge on a roof.
v., crest·ed, crest·ing, crests. v.tr.
- To decorate or furnish with a crest.
- To reach the crest of: crested the ridge.
- To form into a crest or crests: waves cresting over the seawall.
- To reach a crest: The swollen river crested at 9 P.M.
[Middle English creste, from Old French, from Latin crista.]
crest
[名]
1 ((通例単数形))（山の）頂上, 尾根；波頭.
2 《紋章》かぶと飾り.
3 （鳥・動物などの）とさか, 冠毛；（トカゲなどの）背の突起；（馬などの）首筋, たてがみ.
4 （かぶとの）羽飾り, 前立て；((詩))かぶと.
5 頂点, 絶頂, 最高［最上］のもの.
6 《建築》（屋根の）棟(むね)飾り.
7 《解剖学》（骨の）稜(りょう).
the crest of the ［a］ wave
得意［幸運, 成功, 人気］の絶頂.
━━[動](他)
1 〈山などの〉頂上に達する.
2 …に羽飾り［前立てなど］をつける；…の前立て［頂飾り］となる.
3 …の頂上をおおう.
━━(自)
1 〈波などが〉うねる, 高まる.
2 頂上に達する.Chinese scientists find Google invaluable, study says
Survey taken this month finds that most Chinese scientists depend on Google search
The LAT provides a nice summary of three executive orders signed by Obama yesterday to increase the transparency of the. executive branch.
The Katrina Effect, Measured in Gigs
Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times
Margie Perez, a blues singer, performs at Cafe Negril in New Orleans.
New Orleans
ON a recent sultry afternoon here, Tipitina’s — arguably the most famous musical haunt in a city famous for its music — is eerily quiet. This ramshackle, two-story yellow joint at the corner of Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas won’t start jumping until after dark, when Ivan Neville and his band, Dumpstaphunk, take center stage.
But upstairs, past balconies smelling of stale beer and cigarettes, past walls plastered with yellowed concert posters, musicians are working. Some edit concert fliers, tweak Web sites or research overseas jazz festivals; others get legal advice or mix audio and video; others simply chatter about who has found gigs and who is still struggling.
Since late 2005, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina tore through this city, more than 1,000 New Orleans musicians have become members of Tipitina’s three cooperative music offices. “I go in sometimes and all I’m doing is checking my e-mails,” says Margie Perez, an effervescent blues singer.
For Ms. Perez and others trying to rebuild fragile livelihoods as artists, grass-roots efforts like the co-ops have been a boon, helping them to replace lost or damaged instruments and sound equipment, arranging and subsidizing gigs and providing transportation, health care and housing. The Tipitina’s Foundation, the club’s charitable arm, has distributed about $1.5 million in aid; in all, Tipitina’s and other nonprofit groups have marshaled tens of millions of dollars in relief from around the world to help bolster the music business here.
But it remains to be seen how long a loose-knit band of charities can stand in for coordinated economic development in one of New Orleans’s most important business sectors. Although New Orleans is one of the country’s most culturally distinct cities, a large-scale recording industry never took root here, even before Katrina. Yet the informal music sector, the kind visitors find in clubs and bars, and large-scale musical events like Jazz Fest, is a mainstay of the city’s tourism business.
In fact, local authorities say, music and cuisine are the twin pillars of the tourism industry here; the leisure and hospitality businesses account for almost 63,000 jobs in the city and for about 35 percent of the sales taxes. Both of those figures are larger than those of any other business sector, including the energy industry.
Still, nearly two years after Katrina, there are fewer restaurants and bars offering live music, and the ones that do are paying less, musicians say. As the reality of the slow recovery has set in, fewer locals feel that they can afford cover charges or even tips, so clubs that used to have live music four or five nights a week have cut back to two or three.
Conventions, typically a strong source of music gigs, are running at 70 percent of 2004 levels, but leisure travel remains far below pre-Katrina levels, according to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Over all, visitors generated $2.9 billion in spending in 2006, down from $4.9 billion in 2004, according to the bureau. About 3.7 million people visited the city in 2006, compared with more than 10 million in 2004.
Compounding the music scene’s slow revival is the challenge of tracking musicians — who are typically paid in cash and often hold down other jobs — in order to get them financial support. Habitat for Humanity, which is building what it describes as a “musicians’ village” in the Ninth Ward, initially struggled to find creditworthy applicants — just one instance of relief for artists failing to meet its mark.
“It’s kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” says Roland von Kurnatowski, who owns Tipitina’s with his wife, Mary. “New Orleans musicians are unique and if you try to mess with what makes them unique too much, it’s not a good thing. What they need is revenue opportunities.”
Economic development leaders for the city and the state of Louisiana praise the efforts of Tipitina’s at a time when governmental resources are strained. “With the demise of the venues and the lack of tourism, we’ve got to find a way to get people back to work,” says Lynn Ourso, executive director of the Louisiana Music Commission. “They’re putting these musicians to work on computers, showing how they can globally transmit and distribute — they’re teaching job skills.”
MR. KURNATOWSKI, 56, is an unlikely anchor of the local music business. A New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, he says he had never heard of Tipitina’s until he was asked to invest in the club in 1995. By then it was a beloved venue known for rollicking performances by locals like Dr. John and the Meters as well as touring acts like James Brown and Widespread Panic, but it had a spotty financial history. It was started by friends of the influential New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair as a place for him to play late in his career, but struggled under novice management and closed for a year in the mid-1980s.
Mr. Kurnatowski, a real estate investor who owns about 35 apartment complexes in the Gulf Coast region, had begun marketing storage units in a converted hotel as rehearsal space and thought that having a connection with Tipitina’s might lure musicians into renting. But the deteriorating club, facing new competition from the House of Blues, needed a new sound system and air-conditioning system. Mr. Kurnatowski agreed to make an equity investment; within a year he bought it outright for about $500,000.
He soon realized that he had neither the expertise nor the time to run Tipitina’s properly — especially because he was a morning person. “It’s a different routine,” he says. “It’s working nights, and it just wasn’t very practical.”
Intrigued by the club’s history and its intense following, he couldn’t bring himself to sell it. He also says that his other real estate investments gave him enough financial breathing room to think creatively about what to do with Tipitina’s. So, in 1997, he and his wife formed the Tipitina’s Foundation, which would begin to use the club, still for-profit, to serve the nonprofit mission of helping musicians. The move provided a rationale for holding on to Tipitina’s, even if it only broke even, and marked a return to the club’s early purpose of supporting the local music scene.
Its projects included an internship program for children wanting to get into the music business and a fund-raiser to buy instruments for local school bands. The first of its co-ops, a collaboration between the foundation and the city, opened in 2003. (Branches in Shreveport and Alexandria, La., opened later.)
The foundation could have easily fallen victim to Katrina’s devastation. Many of the city’s cultural organizations suffered extensive damage to facilities and had to cut their payrolls. Tipitina’s suffered only limited wind damage, and the foundation’s services were in demand. Many musicians lived in devastated neighborhoods like Gentilly and the Ninth Ward; those in other parts of town still lost instruments, amplifiers and CD collections to the flooding. Bands were scattered around the country, and some meager savings accounts were obliterated.
After Katrina struck in August 2005, Mr. Kurnatowski and the executive director, Bill Taylor, decided to try to reconstitute the foundation’s work. By late October, they had reopened the club and the co-op, both of which quickly became hubs of activity for musicians returning to town. A legal clinic that provided musicians with free help with contracts, copyright issues and licensing agreements became a popular service.
“Even if they lost everything, they still had their intellectual property,” says Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who runs the clinic. “You could see the look in people’s eyes: ‘This is all I have, this is my career, and I’m going to do everything I can to protect it.’ ”
For his part, Mr. Kurnatowski pledged to plow all profits from Tipitina’s, which scaled back its staff and eliminated guaranteed payouts to musicians, into the foundation. The club has cut its number of shows to four nights a week from six, but has seen total attendance and bar sales stay steady. Even so, Mr. Kurnatowski says, Tipitina’s operates on razor-thin margins: he says the club earned about $40,000 last year on revenue of about $500,000.
Other organizations also tried to put some financial muscle behind the local music business. The New Orleans Musicians Clinic paid musicians to play at the airport and offered $100 guarantees to musicians who could find gigs for themselves elsewhere. The Jazz Foundation of America also subsidized performances. The New Orleans Musician’s Relief Fund, a charity started by the former dB’s bassist Jeff Beninato, offered a temporary apartment to musicians. Renew Our Music, another relief fund, gave financial grants to musicians, while funds from Gibson Guitar and MusiCares, a charitable organization affiliated with the Recording Academy, helped buy scores of new instruments.
For artists dependent on support, such backing was invaluable.
Margie Perez, a former travel agent, had arrived in New Orleans just eight months before the storm. She returned to town in January 2006 to discover that her apartment in the Broadmoor neighborhood had been badly flooded. Determined to stay, she found other housing — for twice what she paid pre-Katrina — went to work cleaning damaged houses and started visiting the Tipitina’s co-op. She picked up work in different bands and this last spring was invited to sing with the pianist and producer Allen Toussaint at Jazz Fest.
Ms. Perez, 42, also has a part-time job at a clothing boutique and is training to be a tour guide; the music business here is still too anemic for her to depend on it for her livelihood. “You just get into as many projects as you can,” Ms. Perez says. “I’m in, like, five different bands and that’s kind of the case with a lot of musicians in town.”
Indeed, even as crowds come back, littering Bourbon Street with beer cans and daiquiri cups, musicians say they’re not seeing their incomes rebound. Wil Kennedy, a guitarist and singer who plays for passers-by in Jackson Square, says the situation is still “as bad as it was after 9/11,” with his tips down as much as 75 percent from the peak period before 9/11. In the clubs, guarantees of a minimum payout are now less common; many clubs offer musicians just the take at the door or a percentage of drink sales.
“They’ve kind of gotten used to getting the music cheap when people were so desperate they’d play for a sandwich and a $20 bill,” says Kim Foreman, secretary and treasurer of a local branch of the American Federation of Musicians, which has lost about 120 of its 800 dues-paying members. Poverty keeps many musicians living with substandard housing and health care, Mr. Foreman says.
Katrina left as many as half of the city’s roughly 5,000 working musicians marooned elsewhere, says Jordan Hirsch, executive director of Sweet Home New Orleans, an organization that provides financial support to musicians.
“A lot of people in Texas and Georgia and around the country want to be back, feel that their best economic opportunities are here, but just can’t get from A to B,” Mr. Hirsch says.
Others are scared off by the rampant crime and lack of basic services here, despite an economic need to be back in the Big Easy’s cultural stew. “Right now, New Orleans is not fit for my family,” says the Hot 8 Brass Band trombonist Jerome Jones, who has relocated to Houston with his wife and four of his five children. Mr. Jones, whose bandmate Dinerral Shavers was murdered here last December, says he plans to commute to New Orleans for gigs and band business.
IT’S an article of faith among New Orleanians that the music scene is an indelible part of the city’s appeal. But the city and state historically haven’t recognized the role that musicians and other creative workers play in driving tourism and improving the quality of life, advocates say. As a result, they say, the city and state have underinvested in the cultural sector of the economy.
“People don’t think of artists as a category of workers,” says Maria-Rosario Jackson, director of the Urban Institute’s Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program, which found that the city’s infrastructure for “cultural vitality” even before Katrina rated in the bottom half of the country’s metropolitan areas.
Figuring how “to translate that authenticity to economic development has been the challenge for all these years,” says Scott Aiges, who headed the city’s music office before Katrina and is now director of marketing and communications for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation, which owns Jazz Fest.
Just weeks before the storm, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu unveiled a new strategy for developing what was described as the “cultural economy.” Since then, the state has pushed through tax breaks for arts districts, musical and theatrical productions and sound recordings and made sure that events like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which provide work for many musicians, survived.
But a separate individual tax break for artistic earnings failed in the State Legislature because of concerns that it wasn’t fair to other working people, and other large-scale attempts have languished because of a lack of financing. In May 2006, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which was formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, recommended plowing $648 million into the cultural sector to create jobs, rebuild damaged facilities and open a national jazz center. But those ideas were shelved with the rest of the commission’s work, and subsequent, scaled-back proposals still await financing.
New Orleans “needs some anchors around which the economy can begin to rebuild, and arts and culture are an obvious one,” says Holly Sidford, a principal at AEA Consulting in New York, which developed the recommendations for the commission’s cultural subcommittee at the request of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. “But without investment, really deliberate and coherent investment, that won’t happen.”
Ernest Collins, the city’s executive director for arts and entertainment, says of the commission’s recommendations, which Mr. Nagin endorsed: “That was a very large price tag. And needless to say, we don’t have that money.”
Leaders of nonprofit groups and organizations like Tipitina’s say they are resigned to filling the void left by the public and private sectors as long as they can. Mr. Aiges, whose group owns Jazz Fest, is using receipts from the event to add new festivals, build an Internet-based system that will allow musicians to connect with talent coordinators and potential licensees, and put on a networking event for musicians during next year’s festival. Sweet Home New Orleans is compiling the first database of local musicians, which should help it to distribute relief faster and more effectively, and hopes to get part-time work for them in other businesses.
Next month, the Tipitina’s Foundation will release a new CD honoring Fats Domino, with proceeds from it earmarked for resurrecting his music publishing company and opening a co-op near the singer’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward.
But musicians say they wonder if New Orleans will ever nurture their careers the way it once did. The Hot 8 Brass Band, which was featured prominently in Spike Lee’s documentary film “When the Levees Broke,” is concentrating on touring elsewhere in the United States and abroad — even if that might mean missing Mardi Gras — so it can play for outsiders. Outsiders, say band members, seem to value them more than their hometown.
“They make you feel how valuable you are to New Orleans,” says Raymond Williams, a trumpeter for the band. “I feel like maybe the city should treat musicians in the same way.”
levee
- [lévi]
[名]
1 堤防；土手；《歴史》埠頭(ふとう), 波止場.
2 あぜ, 土手.
━━[動](他)〈川などに〉堤防［土手］を築く.
gig (PERFORMANCE) 1926年的新字
noun [C] INFORMAL
a single performance by a musician or group of musicians, especially playing modern or pop music:
This week the band did the last gig of their world-tour.
gig
verb [I] -gg-
Gigging around the London clubs helped the band develop their own sound.
noun [C]
1 a part of something larger:
Immunology is a branch of biological science.
One branch of their family (= One group of relatives) emigrated to Brazil.
In the US, the president is part of the executive branch of the government.
2 one of the offices or groups that form part of a large business organization:
I used to work in the local branch of a large bank.
She's a branch manager.
Take the forms into your local branch office.
in·val·u·a·ble (ĭn-văl'yū-ə-bəl)
adj.
Of inestimable value; priceless: invaluable paintings; invaluable help.
invaluableness in·val'u·a·ble·ness n.
invaluably in·val'u·a·bly adv.
(mə-rūn')
tr.v., -rooned, -roon·ing, -roons.
- To put ashore on a deserted island or coast and intentionally abandon.
- To abandon or isolate with little hope of ready rescue or escape: The travelers were marooned by the blizzard.
- often Maroon
- A fugitive Black slave in the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries.
- A descendant of such a slave.
- A person who is marooned, as on an island.
[From French marron, fugitive slave, from American Spanish cimarrón, wild, runaway, perhaps from cima, summit (from runaways' fleeing to the mountains), from Latin cȳma, sprout. See cyma.]
maroon[ma・roon2]
- 発音記号[mərúːn]
[動](他)〈人を〉孤島に置去りにする；((通例受身))孤立させる, 閉じこめる.
━━(自)
1 奴隷状態から逃げ出す.
2 ((米南部))ピクニックに行く, キャンプ（旅行）をする；ぶらぶらする.
━━[名]
1 （西インド諸島・ギアナの山中に住む）逃亡奴隷；その子孫.
2 孤島に置去りにされた人.ma·roon2 (mə-rūn') n.
A dark reddish brown to dark purplish red.
[French marron, chestnut, from Italian marrone.]
- hone
- [名]1 （かみそり用の）砥石(といし).2 《工具》ホーン.━━[動](他)1 〈技能を〉磨く.2 …を砥石でとぐ.
Kim Gordon Looks Back
By KEVIN MCGARRY
The Sonic Youth singer and bassist reflects on New York in the mid-'90s.bassist
[名]低音歌手；ベースギター［コントラバス］の奏者.- bass • ist
- 発音
- béisist
- bassistの変化形
- bassists (複数形)
Definition of languish
verb
[no object]
沒有留言:
張貼留言