#Outsiders 2003 is right here and he has his modern suit on

[allovesthings]

Everytime I see a "Discowing was Dick unbridled rage era" I'm just kinda left baffled.

Because Discowing Nightwing is mostly the New Teen Titans era.. And while it gets angsty and dark and traumatizing..Dick is not a ball of anger and rage. I could see the argument that he is more broody than the modern version of Nightwing sometimes but he is very much not in his unbridled rage era there.

Even when he was slowly being brainwashed and mind-controlled, considering this slow process was a year in-universe, he mostly wasn't angry until we reach the almost end of the arc ?

[dwellordream]

“...First, let’s talk about materials. We can rule out a Steppe Nomad inspiration for any of this right off. The Eurasian Steppe is very large and covers a range of arid climates (that is to say, parts of it are colder, parts of it are warmer), but they all have spinning and weaving technology, by which the supple hairs of woolly animals, or plant fibers like linen, or cotton, or even natural protein fibers like silk can be fashioned into fabric which is more flexible, comfortable, breathable and temperature controlled than the raw leather we see in the show.

...there is a distinct lack here of lots of leather, except in the sort of things that lots of cultures use leather for (boots, fittings, saddles, bags, tents). Instead, clothing is mostly made out of nice, comfortable, breathable textiles, because of course it is. That is not to say, to be clear, that leather or hides or fur were never used – fur especially was used; merely that they were generally used to supplement clothing primarily made out of textile.

...Now Plains Native American clothing does make much greater use of animal skin as a clothing material, but there is an important distinction to be made here. The problem here is with the plasticity of the term ‘leather’ which can technically include a wide range of products, but in practice is understood to mean exactly what the Game of Thrones costume department and literally every piece of official artwork of the Dothraki understand it to mean, which is the product of tanning processes.

I am not an expert, but as far as I can tell, Native American clothing was not made in the same way; animal products were used in a process I have seen described as ‘brain tanning’ (rather than using chemical tannins) and the final product was then smoked. The result – which is often called ‘buckskin’ regardless of the animal source for the hide – is very different from the leather we see in the show.

This is, in terms of material, very clearly not what the ‘vests’ the Dothraki in the show are wearing. Buckskin would also be used to make trousers, as opposed to the “horsehair leggings” of Martin’s wording, which also strike me as deeply improbable. Haircloth – fabric made from horsehair (or camel hair) – is durable, but typically stiff, unsupple and terribly itchy; not something you want in direct contact with your skin (especially not between your rear end and a saddle), unless you just really like skin irritation. It is also a difficult material to get in any kind of significant quantity – and you would need a significant quantity if you intended to make most of your trousers out of it.

...Well that’s for materials, what about patterns? Once again, we can quite easily rule out anything steppe inspired. Again, the Eurasian Steppe is big and has lots of variety, but relatively long robes are generally the norm in terms of dress; where long robes were not worn (see our Scythian above), the common pattern was heavy sleeved garments and trousers with very complete coverage. A common example of the type of long robe-like garments is the Mongolian deel, a long sleeved robe or tunic which provides a lot of protection against the elements. In the case of elites – and Daenerys is, initially, mostly around elites – these could be made of expensive silk or brocade – but poorer versions might be made of wool.

...And there is good reason for these relatively high-coverage garments. Plains or Steppe peoples naturally tend to live on, well, plains and steppes – that is large expanses of semi-arid grasslands. The very nature of that terrain configuration produces fairly extreme seasonal temperature variations (that is, very hot summers and very cold winters) as well as extreme daily temperature variations (that is, hot days and cold nights) because such places are far from large bodies of water and also don’t have tree-cover, both of which serve to moderate rapid temperature changes.

Consequently, as anyone who has lived in a plains state in the USA (or on the Eurasian Steppe, though that is fewer of my readers, but for my brave handful of hits from that part of the world, hello and welcome!) can tell you, you need clothes that can be layered and which can be both warm in the winter and cool in the summer. For us moderns, we mostly do this by owning multiple season-specific wardrobes, but clothing is expensive in pre-modern societies, so multi-purpose garments, or garments that be layered, to turn a warm-weather outfit into a cold-weather outfit are important!

There’s no reason to suppose the Dothraki Sea would be any different: it sits at about the same latitude as King’s Landing so there is little reason to assume it would be warm all-year-round. Parts of the Eurasian Steppe stretch decently far south, sharing a latitude with northern Italy and Spain; nevertheless they do not enjoy the same Mediterranean climate because they don’t have the same exposure to the weather patterns created by the sea. The southern end of the Great Plains stretches down all the way into Texas, but still gets properly cold in the winter with temperatures regularly dipping below freezing in the winter despite the latitude. For a people who are camping and working outside all of the time, warm clothing is going to be a must.

...There is tremendous variety here, but I don’t think any of it could be aptly described simply as “Men and women alike wore painted leather vests over bare chests and horsehair leggings.” Now, if you looked hard enough could you find something that resembled Martin’s leather vests, bare chests and horsehair leggings somewhere in the clothing of Native Americans across two continents? Probably, but among the specific Native peoples that Martin cites as inspiration, it does not seem to be at all common. And if that description was wholly unconnected to anything in the real world, we might well stop there and conclude that, well this is just the ‘dash of pure fantasy’ that Martin was talking about (although as we’ll see, it is going to be quite a bit more than just a dash). But I don’t think we can stop there, because (removing the medallion belts) Martin’s description does adequately describe something that exists in the real world: Halloween costumes purporting to depict Native Americans.

...The vest-and-pants style of Native American Halloween costume seems to be rather rare now, but it was, at least to my memory, much more common in the 1990s, when A Game of Thrones was written (initial publication date of 1996). You can see them, for instance, on many of the background extras in the famous Thanksgiving scene from Addams Family Values (1993) and that vest style was also a part of the outfit for the also-quite-unfortunately-branded YMCA Indian Guides/Indian Princesses program (rebranded as the ‘Adventure Guides’ in 2003 after decades of Native Americans complaining about it) which was also fairly popular in the 1990s.

Now, I am not saying that Martin planned to construct his Dothraki out of Native American stereotypes and bad Halloween costumes. In fact, I am fairly confident he intended nothing of the sort. But in the absence of doing some effective research (and it is going to become increasingly apparent that at least effective research was not done) there was quite possibly nothing else to inform the effort other than what was ‘in the air’ of the popular consciousness. Of course the danger of those often simplistic public stereotypes is that people often do not know that they have them, assuming instead that the vague impression they have is essentially accurate (or at least, close enough for a regular person). And that’s a real problem because it reinforces the popular stereotype, especially given Martin’s reputation for writing more ‘historically grounded’ fiction. And that is a problem because…

The clothing that the Dothraki are described and visually shown wearing is clearly intended to convey things about their society. Returning to our visual comparison above, it is easy to see that the actual clothing of both Eurasian and American ‘horse cultures’ was often bright, highly decorated and generally eye-catching, featuring complex patterns and shapes. It was both nice looking, but also spoke to the humanity of the people that made it and their very human desire to look nice and have nice looking things. By contrast, the clothing of the Dothraki is presented as simple, rugged and unadorned.

...I want to stress this to make the point clear: people in the past liked to look nice! Much of the popular perception of pre-modern clothing assumes lots of dull, drab colors, undecorated or merely adorned with rough pelts, but this is almost entirely a Hollywood construction. The Romans didn’t exclusively dress in white (indeed, the toga candida, the white toga, was an unusually formal thing to wear, like a politician’s suit-with-flag-pin), medieval peasants didn’t wear drab brown (they dressed in bright primary colors mostly), and as I hope the historical pictures for this essay show, both steppe nomads and Plains Native Americans wore nice clothing with lots of patterns, color and decoration. These men next to Khal Drogo are his elite guard of ‘bloodriders,’ the companions of a ruler who wields tremendous power and wealth! And yet they have opted to wear mostly undecorated bland brown leather.

Just to underline this point, think about what a fine set of clothing communicates to an observer (for instance, one of Khal Drogo’s thousands of mounted warrior retainers who are present at this event). Imported goods, like metalwares (which nomads won’t generally be able to make themselves) or fine imported fabrics demonstrate not only trade contacts but also often that the leader has useful ties to foreign leaders (since such things were often gifts or tribute from foreign courts). Garments whose production, due to fine patterns, complex weaves, intricate beading or quillwork, would take many, many hours of production demonstrate that the leader has a lot of subordinate people in their household (in many cases, that would mean women), which both implies the ability to give these people as gifts (either in marriage or because of their non-free status) and also the access to resources (in this case herds of animals) needed to sustain so many people – in short, the sort of leader who can reward faithful warriors richly.

And of course a leader who outfits his closest retainers – his bloodriders, in this case – with such wares (especially expensive foreign metal military equipment) demonstrates both access to military capital and also the ability to reward his trusted lieutenants. In short, the Khal whose person and immediate retainers are decked out in finery looks like backing the winning side, which is a very important thing to assess as one of his warriors. So even if not one of Drogo’s men cares about their personal appearance at all, it is still politically important for them to dress for success.

Which then demands the question, looking at the very fine clothing of historical horse cultures that supposedly provided the inspiration for these Dothraki fellows: Where is the exquisite bead work? The fine quillwork? Where are the carefully made fringes? Where is the silk brocade? Where are the detailed, complex patterns?”

- Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture.”

[popculturebuffet]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1990 Review: Still Possesses Turtle Power After All These Years

Cowabunga all you happy people! I freaking love the Teenage Ninja Turtles. I grew up with it from Turtles in Time, which was my first video game, to the 2003 cartoon, which I covered the first three episodes of last month, and on to present day as I re-read the idw comics after finally reading the original eastman and laird run of mirage, and impatiently waiting for Shredder’s Revenge to come out after a LONG drout of no good TMNT games. I”m a fan of these heroes four, their dynamic as a family, the endless possiblities that come from it’s long history and ablitlity to go anywhere in any genre, and the wonderful goofy shit that happens when you have a franchise about mutant turtles learning ninjitsu from a rat and fighting a dude covered in knife covered samurai armor. 

So with me finally covering the guys after almost a year last month and with a new movie set to debut at some point this year, I had the bright idea to revisit the FIRST TMNT movie after way too many years of not watching it. This movie is anear and dear to my heart: When I first started getting into the boys big as a kid with the 2003 cartoon, I badly wanted more turtles. But back then it wasn’t nearly as easy to glom onto some more of the sewer shock pizza kings: Streaming sites with all the cartoons on them weren’t all that accesable, dvd’s were expensive for the 87 cartoon, Mirage wasn’t reprinting the comics in any meaningful way and my local comic shop didn’t have any at all and I could only play the SNES when my brother had it set up on occasion like at our Grandma’s farm. 

As you probably guessed though there was one exception: the original 1990 movie, which I got at Walmart for 5 bucks and haven’t let go of since. It was one of my first dvds and is still one of my most precious. Said film hit the spot just right as like my beloved 2003 series, it was a mildly goofy but still fucking cool adaptation that stuck closer to the mirage comics, even more than the 2003 series would, while taking a few queues from the 87 series. This film is as precious to me as the 2003 series and a with a brand new movie coming up, I figured it was the exact right time to dig into this classic: what makes it still good to this day, what’s fun to point and laugh at, and how the heck Jim Henson got involved in this. So join me under the cut as I take a look at my boys first theatrical outing and why I still love watching a turtle. 

No One Wanted To Make This: Before we get into the film itself some background. As usual I struggled a bit, but thankfully found some help in the form of this Hollywood Reporter article.  It’s a fascinating read worth your time, providing an oral history of the film from the people who worked on it. 

The film was the baby of Gary Propper, a surfer dude and road manager for the prop comic Gallagher, aka that guy who used to smash watermelons but now has instead opted to smash what little’s left of his career by being a homophobic douchenozzle. He found an ally in Showtime producer Kim Dawson who’d produced Gallagher’s special. I don’t think there will be more of an 80′s sentence than “Gallagher’s surfer dude agent wanted to make a teenage mutant ninja turtles movie”. Propper was a huge fan of the comics, and with Dawson’s help convinced Laird and Eastman to let them option it to studios. 

It may come as a shock to you but the road agent for a homophobic watermelon man and a producer at a niche cable channel wanting to make a movie based on an underground comic book about masked turtles at a time when the two most recent comic book movies were Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Howard the Duck, did not go well. Every door in Hollywood got slammed in their face, even Fox> Even the eventual backer of the film, Golden Harvest, a hong kong action film studio, took months to convince to actually back the film. 

Things did not get easier from there: The films writer Bobby Herbeck had trouble getting a story agreed on because Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s working relationship had deteroiated horribly from the stress so naturally the two could not agree on a damn thing and argued with each other. Peter Laird  made a tense siutation even worse by constnatly sniping at Herbeck and feeling he was a “Hollywood outsider infringing on his vision and characters”

Granted the script was apparently not great... but Pete still comes off as a pretnetious ass who views his weird indie comic as THE HIGHEST OF HIGH CALLINGS HOW DARE YOU SOIL IT. And continued to be kind of a prick like this throughout the rest of his time with the property. 

Thankfully the film found i’ts voice, vision and director in Steve Barron. Barron was a music video guy who knew the producers and while reluctant, eventually dove into the project rightfully thinking the film would need to be a mix of the mirage comics and 87 cartoon, keeping aprils’ reporter job, the turtles lvoe of pizza and their iconic color coding from the cartoon but adapting several stories from the comics as the backbone of the film. The guys liked barron MUCH better and things ran smoother. 

Barron also brought in one of the film’s biggest selling points and it’s most valuable asset: it’s triumphantly awesome Jim Henson costumes. Barron had worked with good old Jim on the music videos for Labyrinth, and while it took some convincing since the comics were violent as hell and that wasn’t Jim’s style, Barron eventually got him on board. This naturally doubled the budget, but given Henson’s costumes STILL hold up today and look better than the cgi used in the platinum dunes films... it was a good call. And this was brand new tech for jim, having to invent tons of new ideas and mechanisms just to make the things work, and said things still were absolute hell on the actors. Jim later ended up not liking the film for being too violent... which I find hilarious given how many muppets got eaten or blowed up real good on his show but regardless, I thank this legendary and wonderful man as without him this film WOULD NOT have worked. The costumes here look great, feel realistic, and you can’t tell the actors were dubbed much less horribly suffering in those suits. Much like Disney Land. 

The film would get picked up for distribution by New Line, and despite i’ts weird as hell origins and the long shot it had.. the film was a MASSIVE hit at the box office, owing to a combination of Batman 89 the previous year having proved comic book movies can work for audiences, the cartoon’s runaway sucess, and a massive marketing campaign. The film made it’s mark. So now we know how we got here let’s get into the film itself. 

What’s the Story Morning Glory?:

So the story for this one is largely cobbled together from some of the more notable arcs Eastman and Laird did before handing off the book to others full time as the stress of the company and the mounting tension with each other made it near impossible to work together on the book itself. 

To Save time i’m just going through what hte movie takes from the comics plot wise now to save me the trouble later:The movie takes elements from the first issue (The Turtles, Splinter and Shredder’s backstories, Shredder being fully human and the main antagonist, Shredder’s design and the final rooftop showdown that results in Shredder’s death), second and third, (April’s apartment over her dad’s old store and the turtles moving in when their home is ransacked and splinter has gone missing), the rapheal micro series (A tounge in cheek way of cashing in on the Mini-Series craze of the 80s, a one shot by modern standards and something that’s tragically been underused as an idea as only TMNT and MLP have used the idea at IDW, Raph meeting casey and their fight with one another), the return of shredder arc (One of the turtles being ambushed and mobbed by the foot and then thrown though a sky light (Leo in the comic and Raph here), the turtles being horribly outnumbered by them, Casey coming ot the rescue and metting the non-raph turtles for the first time, and them being forced to escape when the place goes up in flames), their exile to northampton (April writing in a journal, casey working on a car with one of the guys and one of hte guys looking over hteir injured brother), and finally, their triumphant return which was very loosely adapted as there are no deformed shredder clones and shredder not being dead yet in this version was not brought back by a colony of super science worms. 

So as for how this all comes together: Our story takes place in New York: A crimewave is high with muggings mysterious. There are a ton of phantom thefts going around and at most people have been seeing teens responsibile. And the police.. are at about this level of useful:

The only person doing something is April O’Neil, played by Judith Hoag. Hoag is easily the standout of the film, giving us a strong, confident woman with a wonderful sense of humor. She honestly might be my faviorite April O Neil, and given we’ve had some great ones with 2003, 2012 and Rise, that’s not something I say lightly. I honestly wish I’d recognized her in more stuff as she was both on Nashville and the mom in the Halloween Town films, and most recently was on the ScFy show the magicians. She’s a talented lady and i’m glad she’s still goin. 

April is a reporter for Channel 3 like the cartoon, though for some weird reason her boss from the cartoon is replaced by Charles Pennigton, played by Jay Patterson, whose currently dealing with his troubled son Danny, played by Micheal Turney. Pennington is horribly useless at both jobs: At work he tries to ease April off calling out Chief Sterns, who refuses to listen to April’s evidence gathered from japanese immigrants that the crimes resemble similar ones in japan in favor of trying to get charles to shut her up. Danny meanwhile is a member of the foot becase his dad thinks shouting out him and talking about him like he’s not there and generally being a dipstick will actually do anything to help him. 

I love the concept for the foot here. In addition to being a Ninja Violence Gang as always, they now recruit new members by finding kids without families or with troubled family lives and giving them a sense of family with the foot, and sweeting the bargin with a giant cave filled with arcade machines, a skate ramp and general late 80′s early 90′s kids goodies. Is it rediculous? Yes. Is it also clever as it gives Shredder an easy army of plausably deniable theives that he can pick the best out of to put in his elite that will be tirelessly loyal to him and him alone? Also yes. 

So April being public about this stuff gets her attacked, which naturally leads to our heroes coming in, first in the shadows and later directly when April wont’ give up on the case and Shredder sends some ninjas to go shut her up.. which he does weirdly as the guy jsut slaps her and tells her to cut it out like he’s on a domestically abusive episode of Full House. Raph saves her, and we get the turtles origin.. though weirdly they cut it in half. We get the ooze portion but Splinter’s past with Saki, Saki’s murder of his master and his master’s partern Tang Shen is left for later in the film and the fact Shredder’s saki is treated as a big twist despite the fact the biggest audience for the film would be kids... and kids would’ve been familiar with the cartoon where the giant brain monster routinely screeches out saki at the shredder. Maybe Barron just thought he was an alcoholic I don’t know. It just would’ve made more sense to have it all at once and let the audeince put it together. 

April becomes good friends with the turtles over a night of frozen pizza and camradrie, but the Splinters return home to find it ransacked, Splinter kidnapped by the foot, and are forced to Stay with april. Charles meanwhile tries to get April to backoff because he made a deal with the police to clear Danny’s record, without TELLING her any of this mind you, but I will save my rage on that little plot point for in a bit as Danny who he drug along sees the turtles and tells the Shredder. 

So we get the return of the shredder arc as Raph goes through a window, our heroes fight valiantly, and Raph’s friend Casey who he met earlier shows up, the two having bonded as all true friends do.. by beating the shit out of each other ending with raph shouting DAMNNNNNNN really big and dramatically into the sky for some reason. The Turtles and friends escape with an injured raph from April’s burning second hand store. She had a second hand store it was poorly established and only there because she had it in the comics. 

Our heroes retreat to a farm April’s grandma owned in Northampton, Massachutes, where Mirage was located at the time the original comics where they were exiled to the place were written and a location that has been a staple of the turtles ever since. The turtles slowly recover, lick their wounds, talk about who hooked up with who on gilligans island etc, before Leo connects with Splinter via meditation, who tells them to come back. Splinter also starts to connect with Danny and convinces him to swtich sides.. or at the very least squat in the boys old home. 

The boys return home, find danny, and prepare, Danny goes back and ends up giving away the Turtles are home.. but the turtles are ready and in an awesome sequence kick the fuck out of the foot squad sent for them with some well prepared steam vents. Casey goes to get splinter since Danny told them and with Danny’s help, finds him, since Danny found out they were gonna kill him. Casey beats up Tatsu, shredder’s right hand man, and they get him out. 

We get our final fight which is awesome up until the climax.. which is splinter casually tripping shredder with nunchucks and thier bloody history being kind of rushed and unsatsifying. Casey crushes shredder with a garbage truck, April gets her job back, more on that in a moment, she and casey hook up, and we end with the fucking awesome song T-U-R-T-L-E Power by partners in cryme. Seriously check it out it’s fucking triumphant. 

The song is just good.. cheesy? Sure but that’s half the fun. It’s the gold standard for movie theme songs for them and stacks up handily with the various animated series themes.. all of which slap. Okay... ALMOST all of which slap. Fast Forwards is aggressively medicore, which is doubly suprising to me since 4kids was REALLY damn good with theme songs. It was one of the three things they were best at along with finding VERY talented voice actors and setting japan based works in america because merica dammit.  

The plot is very solid: It skilfully packed half of eastman and laird’s run on TMNT into 90 mintues while adding things like April’s job at channel 9, the way the foot recurited kids etc. The plot flows well for hte most part and apart from one annoying subplot we’ll get to never has a moment that feel unecessary or dosen’t pay off later. And the stellar plot and fun pacing of it helps boilster the characters that do work... and help paper over the ones that are so thin the’yd fall down a grate...

Our Heroes, Villains and Annoying Middle Aged Guys:

Yeahhhh character is hit and miss here. Some are rather strong, others are the bare basics for the character their adapting and most are just to serve the plot but some work some don’t,  So let’s talk about it starting with our boys:

Raph is the most fleshed out of the turtles, being the main focus of the first 2/3 of the film, and having his anger be part of what SHOULD be a character arc, learning to temper it. And while granted MOST TMNT properties do this, to the point that Rise Raph is so loveable in part because his boisterous bruiser big bro attitude is a refreshing break from the usual grumpus we get. But at the time this hadn’t been done in every version but the 87 cartoon, so exploring it was valid.. but despite saying this should be a thing htey just forget about it and the most plot relevance he gets is going thorugh a window. He dosen’t really get a resolution.. his arc just kind of stops dead for the final half and it’s one of the film’s weaker points, one I only just now noticed on this rewatch. He’s still the most entertaining. 

Leo is the weakest of the turtles. He really lacks a personality here mostly just being leader and while his spirtual side is touched on, it’s  mostly a plot device. He’s just kinda the leader because he was in the comics to the point Partners in Cryme called Raph the leader. His role in getting taken out by the foot was taken by Raph, so he just has.. nothing to do for most of the film other than gripe at raph ocasionally and say orders. He’s probably the worst Leo i’ve seen outside of Next Mutation. I prefice that because after watching Phelous’ review it’s VERY clear those four are the worst versions of the characters, and no personality is still better than either having your team do nothing or yelling at them as your personality. I chalk this up to the Mirage Leo, and the mirage turtles to a poit being kind of bland. Not TERRIBLE characters, especially for the time, but not nearly as fleshed out or individualized as they woudl be in other adpatations, and with most traits LEo DID have, like his badassery flat out gone, he’s just.. nothing here. 

Mikey and Donnie are a double act here with both sharing a brain. Interestingly instead of his normal genius character, Donnie is Mikey’s best friend and the two simply trade jokes and schtick together. The two are interchangable.. but easily the best part of the film and a lot of the most memorable gags and lines, from Ninja Kick the Damn Rabbit! to “Do you like Penicllin on your pizza”, are from them. Thier there almost entirely as comic relief but it works, with both clealry being more modled ont he 87 cartoon turtles, a move that helps lighten the mood in darker moments. Their just genuinely charming and it’s intresting to see such a diffrent version of Donnie, and other incarnations, specifically the 2003 and Rise versions, would retain the sarcastic edge. 

Splinter is splinter. That’s about it, he’s peformed well and the puppet is amazing but he gets kidnapped a half an hour in and outside of influcencing Denny, more on that in a moment, and finishing Shredder he dosen’t do much but spout exposition. He’s not bad or anything, but he’s essentially a rodent shaped plot device. He was also puppeted by Kevin CLash, aka the guy who does Elmo. So there you go. 

April on the other hand.. is truly excellent. This might be my faviorite April. Judith’s april nicely blends the cartoon and mirage versions: She has the cartoons energy and job, but the comics sheer will and casual nature. Judith just oozes personality and her April is just a joy to watch, from her breezy chemistry filled interactions with the guys to her confrntation with Chief Sterns, knowing she’ll get thrown out by the asshole. She’s confident, and even when afraid dosen’t back down to her attackers and even helps out during the sewer ambush. I mean it’s a pot on the head but still it’s neat. She’s easily the best part of the flim and the most fleshed out of the cast. The worst I can say is they kinda shove her store from the comics, Second Time Around, in there for no other reason than it was in the comics: It dosen’t come up until it’s needed for the foot’s assault on her place. But overall.. she’s just fantastic to watch. 

Speaking of fantastic to watch, Elias Koteas is fantastic as Casey. Seriously he’s only second to the 2003 version in my eyes, getting the concept of a testorone filled average guy who decided to just go out and hit people with sports equipment after watching too much A-Team.. I mean that part of it’s not in this version but it’s implied, just right. Like judith, Elias is just really funny to watch and his big scenes, showing up just in time during the foot assault on april’s place and his fight with Tatsu are some of the best parts of the film, the former taken directly from the comics. This version isn’t without problems: His friendship with Raph, his most endearing aspect and one that has been carried throughout eveyr version Casey’s important, with the only exception so far being rise and we have a movie to fix that, is absent here. HE does save the guy, but they don’t really bond or anything. In fact he disappears for about half an hour after his big fight with Raph. But... again he’s just so damn entertaining, down to his JOSEEEEEEEEEEE Conseco bats (There was a two for one sale!).

Shredder is just a LITTLE better than splinter, if only because his actor projects a true aura of menace and I feel this version had some influence on the pants crappingly terrifying 2003 version. And the idea of the foot recurting teenagers like I said is a good one: He gives them home and a cause, they give him plausably deniable backup. And his fight with the boys in the climax is really awesome... the conclusion sucks but otherwise h’es okay. Not the deepest villian, but he has enough presence to be enjoyable.

His right hand man Tatsu, whose been adapted ocasionally since this and reimaigned as Natsu in the IDW comics, a female version, is also fine. He’s your standard grimacing goon but has enough presence to work. 

So that brings us to the penningtons. Charles, april’s boss at the station and his son Danny who’s joined the foot as he feels his dad dosen’t love him. Charles..is about as interesting and likeable as a dog turd and is the worst aspect of the film. No debate there, he just sucks. He sucks so hard he’s classified as a black hole.  The film wants you to see him as a put upon wokring dad whose frustrated with his son’s increased moodiness, skipping school and crminal undertakings and just wants to help him and loves him deep down. The problem is his actor’s delivery instead of concerned.. is just pissed. He just seems pissy and upset about the whole thing and comes off like he’s only mad about Danny doing this because he’s embarassing him and not because you know, it’s bad. When confronting Danny about stealing, he dosen’t consider MAYBE he’s part of a gang or needs help, but just wonders “Why are you stealing when I give you stuff”. Because, Dipshit, sometimes kids do crimes not because they need the stuff but because they WANT to, and because they want to act the fuck out. 

The most he does for the kid is agree to try and get April to back off the police when Cheif Sterns offers to let Danny go and not put him on record in exchange for it. The problem.. is this makes him even MORE unsympathetic. While I do get wanting to help your child, I do and it’s a sucky position... he again should be sympathetic.. but he handles the thing so badly it sucks. He just tells april to ease off, with no reason given, then fires her when she SHOCKINGLY dosen’t give up taking the guy whose refusing to take her hard work seriously or actually solve the crime wave problem to task for his shitty behavior as ANY person facing a shitty, corrput cop would. She just wants to hold him acountable and get him to actually do something. He clearly knows her on a personal level too as he talks about his issues with his son freely with her, something you don’t do with an employee unless their also a friend on some level. 

He could have TOLD april what was going on. She’d be furious at Stern’s naked corrpution and prioritizing shutting her up over actually solving crimes.. and thus put at least some of that energy into shutting him down or finding a way around it, going to the papers or something like that. Even in 1990 pre-internet, there were ways to get around Sterns blackmail and expose him so someone who’d actually do the job could get the job. Instead he just comes off as a selfish coward who rather than try and fight the guy blatantly abusing his power and using Charles own son as  barganing chip, goes along with it because it’s the easier option to simply bow to him instead of TRY and stop this. And it’s not like he’s even going after a beloved public figure or someone who could hide behind his rep: Sterns was blatantly failing a crime wave, April had called him out on his failrues and coverups multiple times. The public was against sterns.. finding out he tried to blackmail the media into shutting up about him would PROBABLY end him... I only say probably not because the public wouldn’t skewer him, but because police tend to escape consequences for blatantly murdering someone on a daily basis and Andrew Cumo is STILl mayor over in new york, the same city this movie takes place, 31 years later, depsite EVERYONE asking him to resign over a long history of sexual harassment and a more recent but still horrible history of hiding death numbers. I don’t doubt people being stupid enough to ignore this or the bilaws with cops being stacked enough for him to get away with it, but just because someone gets away with a crime dosen’t mean you shoudln’t try and go after them in the first place. Fuck. Charles. Pennington. 

Danny on the other hand is FAR more interesting and I think gets way too much flack when it comes to this subplot. Unlike his dad, whose dead weight, Danny is intresting: He provides a POV character for the foot’s MO in the film of taking in wayward teens, and his character arc is pretty engaging, slowly realizing the foot dosen’t care and that hte turtles are the good guys. HIs actor does a great job and while not the biggest presence, he’s not a bad addition to clan hamaoto and I wish other adaptations would find a way to use him. The pull between doing the right thing and his found family is a good struggle. My only real issue with his plot is the moviies flawed aseop about family. It tries to contrast shredder and his using the kids blatnatly with Splinter and Charles really loving their sons. And it works with Splinter and the kids because despite being a tad strict, Splinter clearly loves his sons and works with them to help them. The problem is ENTIRELY with Charles and Danny. As I said Charles love comes off as transasctional: He either thinks he can buy it or just expects it because he shot a bunch of goop into Danny’s mom after two minutes of disapointment. It dosen’t work with them because neither option is good for Danny. His father is neglectful, chooses throwing his jounralistic integrity out the window over talking to his son or his best friend about another way, and abrasive. Danny is no saint, he does do crimes, but it’s clearly a result of a shitty upbringing and the shredder and co actually offeirng him the love he desperatly craves. Danny goes to the foot because his dad is bad at his job but the film never adresses that and just expects Danny to go back to his dad because the plot says so. Danny would HONESTLY be better off with Splinter. No really. Sure he’d have to live in the sewers.. but he did so for a few weeks in the course of the movie. He’s fine down there. Splitner actually cares about him and took an intrest to him and knows how to raise a child. Let him become the fifth turtle. An aseop about family is not a bad thing: Loaded subject that it can be given how many outright abusive families exist, i’m one of the lucky ones who dosen’t have that issue, family is an important thing and can be a source of comfort and support. But this film tells you you should love and respect someone who does not love, respect or value you because he spent a minute in your mom’s vagina and that’s not how family should work and is outright dangerous to kids in an abusive situation. Love the film otherwise but fuck this aseop skyhigh. 

Final thoughts:

Overall though.. the film is bodacious. It’s funny, well paced, has an awesome cast, and outside of a certain bald asswipe... it’s a really good superhero film. Is it the best i’ve seen? Nope. Not even close and character wise most of them are as thin as a wet paper bag covered in ranch dressing. But it’s still a fun as hell with awesome corepgraphy, a killer soundtrack, seriously the soundtrack is damn excellent and only didn’t get it’s own section because I didn’t have enough to say and some of the best effects work i’ve seen in a film in the turtle suits. If you haven’t seen it I urge you to check it out: it’s a breezy 90 minutes, it’s on hbo max and it’s a shell of a time. Will I do the next film? 

We’ll see how this one does like wise and such, but I will be doing the rise film whenever it comes out this year. So look for that and keep possesing turtle power my dudes. If you liked this review subscirbe for more, join my patreon to keep this blog a chugging, comission a review if you have more turtle stuff you want me to cover, and comment on this. What do you think of the movie, what are your thoughts on the review, what can I do better, what other turtle stuff would you like me to cover/ Let me know and i’ll see you at hte next rainbow. 

[robertemeryofficial]

Behind the scenes with Stewart Copeland: Why dumb shit makes me happy (#1) - TRANSCRIPT

"If the only reason humans pro-create is Vivaldi, we would all be fucked…"  -- Stewart Copeland

In this inaugural episode of the new ‘Backstage with Robert Emery’ podcast, RDCE talks to Stewart Copeland, the founder and drummer of the British rock band 'The Police'. Stewart talks about why he attributes studying 'Mass Communication & Public Policy' to becoming one of the worlds most famous drummers, why one of his balls is called Ben Hur, and how he grew up not knowing his Father was a spy.

Stewart is an American musician and composer.  Apart from his most famous role as a rockstar, over the years he has produced film and video game soundtracks, written music for ballets, operas and orchestras, and in 2003 was inducted into the 'Rock and Roll Hall of Fame'.  

This whistle-stop tour of his life takes us through his nine years in The Police with Sting and Andy Summers, his solo projects as a composer, and his predictions of the status of orchestral and rock music in twenty years.

Listen Now

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or on your favourite podcast platform. 

Transcript

Hello, lovely people, and welcome to the inaugural episode of The Backstage Blog with me, Robert Emery.

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Hello, lovely people. Today I'm really excited to be having a chat with my friend, rock god and all-round crazy gentleman, Stewart Copeland. Stewart and I first met at a gig. He was hitting the drums as loud as he could to the soundtrack that he composed for Ben-Hur. Scarily, I was conducting the orchestra who were duelling with him. It was like a baked bean and a baked potato had forgotten which one was little and which one was large. From that moment I picked up the baton, I knew that not only is Stewart one of the world's greatest drummers, and not only does he compose like a modern-day maestro, but after 44 years in the music industry, he still has the passion and energy of an 18-year-old.

I'll be honest, it's my first time recording an interview with me being the one asking the questions, so please forgive me: like any good art, it’ll take a while to perfect. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy this worldwide whistle-stop tour of Stewart Copeland and his life.

Robert Emery: Okay, so welcome, welcome, welcome. I think the first thing I would like to talk to you about is your slightly crazy childhood because I'm pretty damn sure this has had an effect on what you've done in life later on. I've done a bit of reading and I know you were telling me–we're here somewhere in Europe doing Ben-Hur but we'll talk about that later. I know you were saying the other night about you had a very interesting childhood because, if I've got this right, you were born in the states, you grew up in Lebanon...

Stewart Copeland: You missed out a bit. Egypt.

Robert: Oh did I? Okay, Egypt. But then you went to boarding school in Somerset, then you're in a rock band, and then you ended up back in LA.

Stewart: A couple of steps missing there but fundamentally that’s the story, that's the arc.

Robert: It's a bit of a strange, unusual upbringing. What is the reason for that? How did that happen?

Stewart: My father was a diplomat, otherwise known as a spy. He was, during the war, in the OSS. His job was obviously the Nazis, but as the war was coming to a close, they realised that the Soviets were the real problem. And so even as they were finishing up winning the war together, the Soviets and the Americans, they were getting into the beginning of the Cold War. At that point, the energy from the Middle East was very important and so the CIA... As the OSS was morphing into this new thing called the CIA, my father was down in the Middle East and his job was to make sure that the oil came west to our factories rather than north to the evil empire.

To enact that mission, they imposed dictators upon the people such as when I was born, my daddy was away on business. I was born in Alexandria, Virginia, which is a suburb of the CIA. He was over in Cairo installing Gamal Abdel Nasser who ran Egypt actually pretty well for the Egyptian people. Across the Middle East, in Syria and the other countries, basically, their job was to keep a stable system. They were not interested in social engineering or in democracy; they were interested in stability. All the people of that generation, they were completely comfortable with the concept of dictators otherwise known as monarchs. The idea of absolute power. These people were... My father used to like to describe himself as amoral. He said he would never have anyone assassinated with whom he would mix socially, and I don't think he ever had anyone assassinated either but, you know, he was a storyteller. What did you ask me?

Robert: Just about your childhood. But did you know when you were growing up?

Stewart: That’s why I was there. No, I didn't know any of this growing up. In fact, it didn't seem exotic to me at all. In fact, it seemed to be lacking anything exotic because we didn't have TV and at the American school... I was in Egypt very young, but my memories really begin in Lebanon in Beirut and there was the American Community School. For a while, there was a rumour that in my generation, that's when the Saudis first started sending their young princes to get a Western education: the ACS in Beirut was the western school, the American School in Beirut. From my gen, it was the first time we started to see Arab kids, Gulf state kids, amongst the Westerners who were being educated there and Osama bin Laden was one of those.

Robert: Wow!

Stewart: Many years after me. Of course, if he'd been there when I was there, I would have kicked his ass. But we didn't have TV and the other American kids who had been home more recently would talk about this Xanadu, this fabled place called America. In fact, most people outside of America in my generation heard of America as the shining light on a hill where the streets are clean, and the people are, you know, everything works, and the systems are new and all this stuff, and... Then, gosh, there we were living in dusty old Beirut.

Of course, now looking back on it, I am so glad I grew up in dusty old Beirut. But then my father's best buddy, turned out to be a British double agent, name of Kim Philby, and his whole scene was kind of blown by that blow. My good buddy, Harry Philby, his dad disappeared one night. Two weeks later, he turns up in Moscow. True Blue English, he was recruited in Cambridge and was a mole and rose up in the Mi5 and there was three or four of them, I think. Anyway, my father had to ship his family out just like that. We were there for 10 years and then in a two-week period we are out of there.

I did one term in London, at the American School in London, but ended up in Somerset at Millfield. After that, I went to college in America and then came back to London where I met these other two guys.

Robert: So, it was after you went to the states and then you came back to London and that's where you met the other two guys as you call them. Okay, fine. But when did you start playing the drums?

Stewart: Hard to say. My father was a musician before the war. I’ve still got his trumpet; it's a 1942-con or something, I can't remember the year, I looked up the serial number. The fancy trumpet’s like the SG of its day. He only devotes two or three pages about his jazz life in his book but he played with both Dorsey brothers, Harry James, Glenn Miller–for him that's de��classé.

Robert: You grew up with music around you?

Stewart: When he started a family, he thrust musical instruments into all the kids and I'm the fourth child. By the time I came along, the house was full of abandoned instruments and I picked up all of them and I just was lost on all of them. My father spotted the tell-tale sign of a budding musician, which is “you can't get him to shut up.” Any kid that you have to say, “It's time for your piano practice,” don't waste your time or his time or her time. The tell-tale sign is that kind of autism... that you can't stop the kid, and I was on everything.

Trombone, I think, was the first lessons I had, but I couldn't get to the seventh position. But the buddy of mine had a catalogue, Slingerland drum catalogue, with pictures of drum sets which for me, I was like pictures of power, motors... Really, looking back now, as father of seven, I realise that the drum thing was partly because I was a very late bloomer. All the way through high school, even when I was 12-13, all my mates were growing faster. Their voices dropped, they started growing beards, they started turning into... and I was still that squeaky little kid.

The drums were power. Boom, bam, argh! Suddenly the squeaky little kid, now I'm a big silverback bastard motherfucker coming to eat your children. For a little 12-year-old who was this squeaky little 12-year-old, that was power. Looking back, adding up all the impressions and memories, I remember the first show–actually, the British Embassy Beach Club party at The St George Club. Janet McRoberts was there and I'm playing Don't let me be Misunderstood or an Animals’ or a Kink’s song or whatever, maybe House of the Rising Sun and there's Janet McRoberts on the dance floor with that look. And I thought, “Shit! Whatever this is, this is going to get me somewhere.”

Also, I remember at The American Beach Club, overhearing two of the 15- year-old girls talking. 15-year old girls are just like an impossible dream for a 12-year-old, you know, and they're talking about how Ian Copeland–who was the coolest kid in Beirut, by the way. He was the leader of the motorcycle gang, Ian Copeland was the coolest kid on campus. They’re talking, “Wow, I hear the Black Knights have got a new drummer. Oh, cool,” or hip or whatever. “Yeah, it’s Ian Copeland’s brother. Ian has a brother?” They’re talking about this mythical being, the new drummer in the Black Knights–is he cute? I’m standing there, I’m a little 12-year-old kid standing there with my ice-cream. These 15-year-olds are talking about Stewart Copeland as if it's somebody.

And so, these elemental, deep, crocodile-brain part of the drive, the emotional drive, are very powerful. My theory is that music is basically part of the procreative process of the human being. It's our mating dance. It's our mating ritual. As my mother the archaeologist would say, it's our plumage, and at that young age, particularly at adolescent age, music is so... With my kids, I see that music is so important to them. Here I do it for a living and I still wake up every day and can't wait to make more music but I can get through an hour without hearing music. My kids? It's the young mating dance. So that was a very powerful impulsion to playing drums.

Robert: So, you figured this is a very cool thing to do, you get lots of good attention for this and...

Stewart: Here’s is one more factor. My big brother Ian? Coolest kid on campus? Couldn't do it. Which was very unsettling because one of the American kids... What happened was the Black Knights’ drummer, his dad got shipped back to the states, the drums he was using which are borrowed or something like that were lying... And so they’re, “Well, let's get Ian. Let's get the coolest kid in the school to play the drums.” And he tried to do it and I could hear him in his room, the forbidden sanctuary. I could hear him trying to get it... then he’d roar off on his motorcycle and I’d sneak in on pain of death and I'd get on there, and I can do it. Wait a minute, that's not right, I must be doing it wrong for me to be able to do it what I heard him not able to do, my hero and older brother...

Robert: You didn’t have lessons?

Stewart: Immediately my father spotted, “Ah drums, great! Lessons!” And I had lessons at everything. The minute he spotted anything, “Lessons!” Yeah, right away.

Robert: Something definitely clicked with you with drums.

Stewart: Yeah and they stuck. The guitar kind of stuck, too. I played guitar all my life, never seriously, never took a lesson, never really developed anything beyond my favourite three chords. But those three chords? Ah, you can have a lot of fun on A, E and D. Throw a G in there, F sharp minor even.

Robert: Alright. The interesting thing for me though is that when I was growing up, I played the piano and I played the cello.

Stewart: Cello? Excellent instrument. A great blues instrument, by the way. You put that thing on your lap, play it like this, and it's a fantastic blues instrument.

Robert: But I couldn't do it. It didn't work for me. I just could not...

Stewart: The piano did, though, right?

Robert: The piano, I don't know why. I’d just sit there, play, it was easy, it just happened, you didn't have to think about it, I didn't really do any training to start with. It just happened. But cello, it did not happen. I could not get it to work. So did you try any instruments out when you were young?

Stewart: We’re going to have to work on a theory for that because pianotude you’ve got. That works for you. But two hands interacting to make one note seems to not work for you. I’m the other way around, see? Guitars, no problem. I can work on piano every day and I still can't play Mary Had a Little Lamb so you’ve got that gift.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah, but it's only piano. Piano conducting. But I tried many other things over the years, I tried clarinet for a while, couldn't do it, and it's just so concentrated what I can do with my music–what instruments. You sound like you're the sort of guy who can pick up anything, can give it a good damn go and have a bit...

Stewart: Whether I can or not, I will pick up anything and give it a damn good go.

Robert: And you have lots of instruments at home?

Stewart: I have the world’s largest collection of the cheapest instruments money can buy. I got trombone, I got bassoon. I got timpani. I got clarinet, I got viola, I got violin. I got cello. I got baby cello, I got bass guitar, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, acoustic guitar, banjo. I got all kinds of instruments.

Robert: And you’ve tried them all?

Stewart: Oh, yeah. Well, I get on eBay, then I haven't got a mellophone. So, I get on there and I look for mellophones or euphoniums; I love brass instruments above all. In fact, today I played an Alpine horn which is 15 feet long and guess what? A- Extremely light, made out of bamboo or something. B- really easy to play. Doesn't require a lot of breath at all, it's like playing on a trombone. Very impressed out there... [Makes a trumpeting sound] You know, not that hard.

Robert: Let’s just rewind back in time a little bit. You formed this band called The Police. How long was it from your starting point to all of a sudden something happened where you just went sky high?

Stewart: It was incremental, but every step headlining the marquee felt like a stellar, “That's it. We've made it. That's it, we're done. We're there now!” And then the next step happens and like climbing a mountain you think there's the shoulder there and we just get to there and that's going to be the top of the mountain–you get there and there's more mountain. It was very much like that. But we did star for a good two years, where we were playing the clubs and all of our gigs pretty much were cancellations by the genuine article punk bands of the day. We were a fake punk band. We were using the punk haircut as a flag of convenience because really, it's all about the hairdo. The stance.

Sting and I were both on the cusp, born in the early 50s. We were the tail end of the hippie generation where so by the time we got into our teens and wanted to rock out and be young adolescents or young adults, it was old and stale. Even though we were steeped in it–he was in jazz and I was playing in Curved Air, kind of an art rock band–we were still the tail end of the last generation. It was all stultified and everything, along comes Johnny Rotten and the Punk-O-Rama, and suddenly it’s just “burn it all down, bring it all down.” Musically, I had nothing in common with that except the fact that I like raw aggression in music. I like it. It's comedic actually.

I liked all that and they were like children and so Curved Air was running its course as an art rock band, so no problem. Cut the hair, peroxided blonde, turn my collar up, and let's go punk. And we did but the critics *[18:59] spotted us in a heartbeat as not the real thing. But fortunately, all the real thing, The Clash, The Damned, Eater, The Jam, all these bands, they didn't know how to hire a truck or a PA. They were managed by one of their mates who didn't have a clue, and so most of The Police's early dates were cancellations by other bands. I’d get a call on a Thursday afternoon saying, “Generation X can't make it.” I can. I got a Rolodex, I know three guys with a truck, I know three guys with a PA, I can get that together, I can get out to Islington, pick up that truck, the PA. “Fred, the PA, can you make the date? Sure.” I can pull it together and get that. And so all of our dates were like “not Gen X”...

Robert: I'm going to pressure you on this because I know you say it's incremental and I know you say it's like climbing a mountain, but I still believe that there must be one ... There must be a gem somewhere, a little story, a little something happened which put you on that clear direction.

Stewart: Many.

Robert: What is it? What's the one that comes to mind?

Stewart: If I had to pick out one, it's hard to say the one that was the payoff of all that which would be Shea Stadium where the Beatles played. And when you play at Shea Stadium, that's officially you have conquered America and you're in the footsteps of The Beatles. That was pretty darned exciting and it turned out to be the best show ever. We were a pretty hot band but some nights just really went to another level and we amazed ourselves. Actually, we were pretty full of ourselves most nights, but that was a particularly good night. Our first stadium, too. Then we got sick of stadiums.

Robert: So that was your first stadium, yeah?

Stewart: I think so. It felt like the first anyway but then we got to the top and then stayed there for a couple of albums before we were right at the top. There was no sign of the... The ascent was on a straight line when we threw in the towel because we had that folly of youth. Well, actually it turned out not to be folly. It turned out to be wisdom in a way of, “I don’t need these guys.” Usually when you hear band members say that, you try and advise them against it. But in our case it actually sort of turned out to be a good thing that we threw in when we did. We never saw the other side, the inevitable other side of the parabola. And so when we picked it up 20 years later, our thing was still pristine.

Robert: Crazy. So, you've done many, many things in your life and you've achieved an awful lot and I'll talk about composing in a minute. But first of all, do you have something that you have not yet achieved?

Stewart: Conducting. Watch your back, mate! I've been advised no matter how gifted I think I am, how easy I think it would be, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. I'm already trying to establish myself as a real conductor.

Robert: Real conductor or...?

Stewart: A real composer. Throw in amateur conductor and the learning curve with that, and there's been a 30-year learning curve with writing for orchestra. I didn't pick this up overnight: I've been working at this and trying to figure this out for decades, and I'm sure conducting would be the same sort of journey. Which I would be really happy to make that journey. I'm in for the long haul on things. I'm good for the long mission. I conduct small-scale all the time–my singers, my soloist when I'm working in the studio, bringing the singers in, and I understand how to breathe for them and so that the indication... There's more than just there it's [breathing loudly] there. Those nuances and I understand the rhythm and I took a conducting seminar and I really enjoyed it. I did a movement of... What the hell was it? It was a big huge Bach movement or something. Not Bach... Anyway, it was fantastic.

Robert: How many players did you have?

Stewart: The musicians union sent about two or three chairs of violins, one of the brass. It was pretty skinny but all the different choirs were represented and it was really, really a lot of fun. The most fun part was that my reading’s much better now than it was then and putting the things in two, three, and... I just love that because the first lesson I’ve learned was the opposite of drumming where you groove and you are the groove and you feel the others... And there, you have to run ahead of the cart and you’re ahead. You’re not grooving with the band; you're pulling them. You're out in front.

Robert: I’ll do you a deal. The next time we do Ben-Hur, and we have time...

Stewart: Ben-Hur is hard.

Robert: Then I get you to conduct that, yeah?

Stewart: Let's do that. I will take you up on that with Tyrant’s Crush.

Robert: Okay.

Stewart: And you can play drums.

Robert: You don't want to see that. You absolutely don't want to see me play drums. I’ve tried before.

Stewart: You threw down the gauntlet.

Robert: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you said you wanted to conduct. I never said I wanted to play drums. I’m happy playing...

Stewart: What's the quid pro quo here then?

Robert: That I get to laugh at you conduct.

Stewart: Done. Deal. I’d love it. I mean, who's got rehearsal time with 60 highly-paid musicians?

Robert: Okay, so you're a very busy guy and you've achieved a lot, you've conquered a lot, you've had very different aspects of your career, which means that you are a very driven person. You must be a guy who gets...

Stewart: It doesn’t feel like driven.

Robert: No, but you are. You must be.

Stewart: Compared... To me, other people they talk about this thing which is probably just as much as a mystery to you. The strange word, the strange concept called “procrastination.” Can you imagine? I mean, how's it possible to watch TV when you’ve got a mission to do? It's not a matter of being driven, it's just a matter of “there's a mission to do–let's go do that.” TV is for when you haven't got a mission or any... Eating food or sleep is for when you haven't got a mission. It doesn't feel driven or anything, it's just like...

Robert: What are the tips or the tricks or anything that you do to keep yourself energised, to keep yourself going, to get up in the morning to go and do what you need to do? Do you have like a ritual you have every morning for breakfast, or do you...?

Stewart: Well, yes. At my age, I have a ritual for everything because the running repairs on this battered old frame... You just figure out that if I go to bed this time and if I eat that and do this and don't do that, I guess my day is going to be better–and you have all these rituals. But I don't think any of these rituals are connected to motivation. I learned very early in life that daydreaming is a critical activity, that daydreaming isn't just wasting time. In fact watching TV– I'd rather stare out into space and imagine some great fantasy that I get to play my drum for the huge orchestra and I get to write all the music myself! And it goes [triumphant tune] and it's really fantastic. Just imagining this and imagining this...

If you have a daydream that really sticks and you keep going back to it, and you fill in the details of it and to make the daydream work better, you start filling in the details... It has to be realistic so the details that you add need to be substantiated by, “the way I got to being able to play with that big orchestra was that I met this guy. How did I meet a guy? Because I was...” Actually, what you're doing is concocting a scheme as the daydream. If it's a really powerful one that really draws you and you keep chewing on it and going back to it, you're actually working up a plan. Like we get the band with just three guys in it and one of them's got to sing. I have the guitar and the bass player’s... got to be a singer because my singing is terrible. And it'd be great... Before you know it, your daydream is a mission.

Robert: Do you think that has any connection whatsoever with the fact that you're a very talented musician and you've got an amazing gut feeling about music? Do you think the two are interlinked in any way, shape, or form?

Stewart: My oldest brother Miles, he is driven. He's driven, and he has excellent musical ears, but did not get the gift of creating art himself. He is a brilliant receiver of art. He understands the Zeitgeist and he's picked hits and he's had hits after hits after hits that he's had. My other brother Ian as an agent, same thing. Neither of them can play. Ian, the coolest kid in school, tried to play the bass and he can just about, but he did not get that gift. The driven thing...

Robert: So you believe you it is a gift?

Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. It is a gift. I don't know where it comes from, I'm so grateful for it, I'm humbled by the fact that I was granted this. I kiss the ground beneath my feet that I've been granted this gift. I do not feel that I earned it. I do feel an obligation in a way to service it and to... It is such a gift that I feel that it would be a crime for me to let it languish in a way. I don't know where that idea came from. Maybe my daddy taught me that or something.

Robert: Okay. So we’re doing here, in Basel, Ben-Hur...

Stewart: And you are the big orchestra and I get to write the music!

Robert: You’re such a crazy guy.

Stewart: That only took me 64 years to get that.

Robert: You went from being a drummer, a rock star, into a composer. It's a bit of a strange leap. I can't really think of anybody else who has done that...

Stewart: Once again, it wasn’t a leap. It wasn’t A and then a B. It was A– I guess the biggest leap was I got an incoming phone call from Francis Ford Coppola who says, could I come down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he's prepping–rehearsing, shooting a movie–and would I come there and just kind of like hang out and talk music and concept and stuff? So I get down there and the cast at that time, they're all kids. Every single one of them has now won an Academy Award. Diane Lane, Matt Dillon, I’m so terrible with names... Laurence Fishburne, Mickey Rourke, all of them. Dennis Hopper, they've all... But they were just kids; that's a diversion.

Anyway, so he just wanted to talk music and I got in there. Okay, I'm a little bit obsessive, and I said great. We talked high concept and he had this idea that... the reason he called me is time ticking, I remember like high noon... I want this teleological, inexorable movement of time with rhythm concept. You know, I love concept. Daydream: the result, the produce, the fruit of daydreams.

Robert: So he called you because he realised that the rhythm was such an important part and...

Stewart: Because his 18-year-old son says, “Dad, you gotta call Stewart Copeland from the Police.”

Robert: Okay, and then...

Stewart: And he did and I got in there, we bonded and his deal is that he finds people that he just senses has something, and he gives them their voice. He doesn't direct them. Oliver Stone told me every single note, “What's that note mean?” But Francis, once he got a connection, you're on the wavelength, he just turns you loose which he did and I had to figure out myself how to score a movie. Which I played that one all myself and I played mallards and weird guitar parts and funny little sounds. For them, since I didn't know how you do it, I had to invent the wheel for myself which is another word for–others applied this term and I was happy to accept it–revolutionary. That's not how you're supposed to do it but it's still...wow, that worked.

But at one point he did turn around and say, “I need some emotion. I need strings,” and immediately alarm bells, he's going to get some schlock artist in here, who’s going to like string... Francis, I got that. Yeah, you're right. We need some strings.

Robert: And that was the first time you'd worked with an orchestra?

Stewart: Yes.

Robert: So, you threw yourself into it at the deep end?

Stewart: Oh no, I’ve played in the school band.

Robert: Okay, yeah, but I mean as a professional... You threw yourself into the deep end as a composer who...

Stewart: I had these chords that I had worked out and I can play them one at a time. Okay that chord, okay stop the tape. Okay, play that chord and when it comes to the next chord it's... Okay roll the tape... Bang! And I can do that kind of thing. So for strings, all I had was footballs. Holders [singing sound]. I didn’t know how to write anything else. So, the first question is I call up a contractor and he says okay how many strings would you like? I go, how many? I don’t know. Strings.

Robert: Just strings.

Stewart: Strings. How many is strings? He says, Well, two guys is strings but it’s going to sound like two guys. If you want like I guess what Francis wants is a big wash of emotion. I don’t know, I think we ended up with maybe a dozen-20 guys, something like that. Somebody else looked at the chords and put it on a chart properly and I'm going, Yeah, I remember that from school. I actually did learn in college–I was at the California School of Performing Arts where I learned figured bass harmony and the fundam...

Robert: Figured bass, the most boring thing in the world ever.

Stewart: That's as far as I got.

Robert: If anybody out there doesn't know what figured bass is, don't even bother trying to Google it.

Stewart: It's critical.

Robert: No, it's not. It used to be critical. It’s now very, very boring and confusing.

Stewart: No. But what it did tell me is to not just do a barre chord up and down the neck like that, like a guitarist would do, and it tells you that you can use inner voices, let everything move in a different direction, and so on and so forth.

I was in a music school with other kids who'd studied the piano since the age of seven and I was the runt of the litter. One day she said, “Okay everybody, here's your homework. Write 16 bars.” Well-voiced chords for 16 bar. I had a million tunes in my head so I figured out something that I already and figured out applying the rules that I’d learned in her class to something I already had and she goes to the class and she plays okay by Johnny and she plays Johnny’s piece. Yeah, very good. Okay, yeah, good. Okay, Stewart... You’ve got a parallel fifth there and you haven't really resolved that but it’s kind of interesting the way that doesn't resolve there and resolves here. Now, you're not supposed to do this here, but there's kind of that note there. This would be what I would teach next year.

Robert: I remember this from being a kid.

Stewart: Yeah, and she finally ends up with, “Stewart, this is an actual piece of music.” And that totally at the bottom of the class, everyone just... They can sight read, they've done their ear training... I was just trying to become... I was starting at college age to learn the fundamental building blocks of music where everyone else in class had started much younger. I might have started playing music very young, but understanding the building blocks, the DNA of it.

So, as long as I was there. When I went to University of California in Berkeley, I didn't get into the music school. They gave me the ear training test and they played eight bars of a tune and transcribe it. They play me an interval, identify it, all this stuff: fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. I studied instead, mass communication and public policy.

Robert: Mass communication and public policy!

Stewart: That's how I conquered the world.

Robert: Holy crap. Okay.

Stewart: Much more useful. If I had actually gotten into that music department at UC Berkeley, I would now be the timpanist in the Ohio Symphony.

Robert: Okay, so I'm going to try and back you into a corner here for something because you told me you've got a kind of philosophy about something. I forget what the phrase is that you use but something to do with being dumb.

Stewart: The dumb shit.

Robert: There you go. It’s the dumb shit. Okay. Can you just explain that?

Stewart: Well, artists, for instance, have very bad taste in whatever their art form is because we're slobs. The popular music, I hear it and I can dance. I don't mind it, I like it I guess. But what I really seek out are the things that are a little challenging that put a gimp on it that are .... I don’t mind pop music, I love it like everybody else. But what I seek out is something a little beyond and so I'll miss a hit.

My brothers... That's a hit! They can identify it and so on. I'm a little bit further out there. So, when I'm writing music or working on something, my manager will come and say, Stewart, that’s great but what's that? That's the best part! You see...Then like, you call it the best part–sounds like a wrong note to me. Oh. And I have to reconsider–it's the dumb shit. Actually that’s dumb ass. Sorry.

Robert: Dumb ass and dumb shit.

Stewart: Totally different things. Sorry, sorry, forgive me. I’m going to finish dumb ass first. So, he comes in with dumb ass in comprehending, unsympathetic to how many hours I've put into that artistic revelation. I need a dumb ass every now and then to come and pop my bubble and say, “I'm sure it's really on some intellectual plane, I hear what you're saying.” You need your bubble popped every now and then. Every artist needs some dumb ass, usually provided by spouses.

Robert: Okay. Yes. My experience...

Stewart: You get some dumb ass at home? Careful, careful, careful. Who’s in the corner now, bitch?

Robert: Yeah, you got me. Yeah, fair enough. She’s going to kill me.

Stewart: Let's talk dumb shit.

Robert: Dumb shit.

Stewart: Let's get into some dumb shit. A good example of dumb shit. I played the Letterman Show, big national American TV show and it's drum solo week. So I go in to play a drum solo and I have a piece of music that I wrote for a ballet, I work up a chart for the Tonight Show band and they're cracking players, those guys. We work up a thing and play, and I play my drum solo and at the end it took a lot of music to build that thing. Format, the piece of music, the writing, there’s the education writing, the charts that I practice. Years, a life in music went into making that thing–serious application, a vocation. And at the end of it... throw the sticks up there [swishing sound].

Well, go on social media, how'd that go down? It's all about the [swishing sound] Did you see how he threw the drumsticks? Yeah, wow, the drumsticks... That Copeland man it’s like he plays with these... the drumsticks!

It’s the dumb shit. No matter how much vocation went into every other aspect of that performance, it was the dumb shit.

Robert: It is the dumb shit that the audience identified.

Stewart: It’s something that stands out. I mean, I’m sure they were very impressed by everything else, they wouldn't have been impressed by the thing unless they were impressed by all the rest of it subliminally, but the thing that caught their eye and that they're talking amongst themselves about is that odd little piece of nothing, that throwaway little something.

Robert: Okay, so here comes the corner. You like the dumb shit, the audience likes the dumb shit, but you don't write music which is dumb shit. You write music which is not always easily accessible. It can be but not always. It's very intelligent music.

Stewart: You're answering your own question.

Robert: No, I'm not because I don't get it. If you know an audience likes dumb shit, why don't you write dumb shit?

Stewart: Here's the two things going on. Remember how here's the main stream of where everyone else and I'm kind of running parallel and not quite bull's eye level? That's me here, see? All the dumb shit’s here, see? Up here, trying to connect with that thing, occasionally I throw in some dumb shit and that's the connection. And I understand that my music is a little astringent for some, perhaps. What I find to be a comfortable easy place in musical atmosphere might be not... Sort of disturbing or not... People gravitate towards feeling good and what makes me feel good sometimes it makes other people feel sad.

Robert: But why are you not...

Stewart: As a professional film composer, I got pretty good at identifying exactly what chord has... You know, this is happy, that’s sad, this is happy sad, and this is sad. There's a big difference, believe it or not. Now, as a technician, I understand perfectly how to go for this emotion or that emotion but my personal taste is you describe it as being slightly off centre and I'm flattered. I take that as a compliment.

But the dumb shit is to drop the barrier, to break the ice, to welcome aboard... I use it as a way to break the ice. Instead of being alienated... Oh, that was weird. Oh, ha-ha-ha, that's kind of funny at least, or whatever. So, I’d be careful that I have first of all, I do my thing, then I get a little dose of dumb ass... Telling me, dude, this is like a little out there, and then reminded by dumb ass, then I go and apply some dumb shit.

Robert: And then it makes everybody happy.

Stewart: Well, it makes me happy. It seems to work. I've played my... I’ve used it in front of really adverse audiences and seemed to get a result.

Robert: You're so good at answering questions, I genuinely can't tell whether I managed to back you into that corner successfully, or whether you wriggled out of it. But I don’t care. You’re very good at it.

Stewart: That's the briar patch. Please don't throw me into the briar patch. No, not the briar patch. Oh, you're throwing me into the briar patch! No, no, no. Okay.

Robert: Tell me. 20 years’ time, what's the business going to be like? What do you think is going to be happening with orchestras, with pop, rock music? 20 years’ time, what would be your prediction?

Stewart: I don't know how orchestras will survive but I would say that they will probably be branded and that because they have a champagne quality that applies sophistication to a product, that they will be useful as... and hopefully government institutions will recognise the value of here's an art form, here's a body of our culture that cannot sustain itself commercially. It cannot. An orchestra, 60 guys or 90 guys or 110 guys, they cannot sustain themselves as a commercial enterprise. They need either private donations or government donations. Where’s the world going to be in 20 years? I would suspect that orchestras will be, as they are now, be vehicles of what they can do, which is impart dignity upon a product.

Robert: Okay, and what about rock, pop?

Stewart: It will always be here. It always has been, always will be. For rhythm... Simple EAD chords, all the revolutions of music. It’s all about the haircut, change the haircut, change the style of music, first you grow it long and then you cut it short. I remember my mom saying, “Stewart, why can't you have long hair like all the other nice boys and girls?” Because mine was like [scraping sound] peroxide. Everything about my outward appearance said, “Fuck you, I'm going to eat your children.” That was the intent. Whereas I was a little soft little...

Robert: Oh, you were a timid soul inside. Bless you. All right, so that's your prediction. Just jumping back a bit.

Stewart: Well, here's the thing. There will always be rock music because if there isn't rock music, there will not be sex, and if there is not sex, there will not be anybody. It’s a part of our natural process.

Robert: It is now, but what...

Stewart: It always has been.

Robert: Well, you say that, but what about when Beethoven was around?

Stewart: When Beethoven was around was not early.

Robert: Beethoven was the kind of rock music of his day. I mean, he was so challenging when he wrote some of his music, and I'm sure that would have been the element of it.

Stewart: I suspect that Beethoven was not the rock music of his day. I suspect that Beethoven was the pampered servant of rich people and their sophisticated sublimated carnal desires. But out there on the streets of his town, the people were dancing into the streets, not to Bach music. That's my suspicion, I just made that up. That’s going to be a guess. Your readers or your listeners will write in and say, No, no, no, not sex. But I'm sure popular music of his day would have been rhythmic and would have been dancing and would have given the male of the species and the female of the species an opportunity, an impulsion and an audio permission to thrust their pure dander at each other, and to display their genetic superiority through body motion inspired by music. That's what music is.

Mozart? Bach? Those are sophistications like many other of our crocodile- brain behaviours. Are sophisticated and turned into a high form; humans do this. We take fire and we turn it into a jet or the internal combustion engine. That's what we do to fundamental building blocks of physics, that's what we do. And the fundamental building blocks of our music, which is part of our libido, which is part of our mating dance, you can develop that and it turns out the combination of physics, the human mind and sex produces high forms of art. But that's not what's really going on. Those are like the caveman drew on the painting because he had... High art painting is not necessarily where it came from, but that throb, rock ‘n’ roll, Bach was not that. Bach was not rock 'n' roll. He's like the rock star of his time. That's his position in society but that's not the function of his music.

Robert: Yeah, but for instance, Paganini who of course...

Stewart: He was popular.

Robert: Yes, he was like the rock star of his time and he went bankrupt...

Stewart: And Mozart too, by the way, was in the streets and inspired by music the people were actually dancing to.

Robert: And Vivaldi Four Seasons, it's incredible music but...

Stewart: I'm surprised that they have any population in Europe at all. I'm surprised that they’re here... In fact, my whole theory, I'm just here begging to throw it all because I just made it up anyway as I was talking. Out the window. You see, Europe would be depopulated now if they were trying to procreate to the sound of Vivaldi. If that's the only reason humans procreate, is Vivaldi, we would have been fucked.

Robert: That's a brilliant quote. That's going to be the headline quote on this podcast. Great, okay, fine... Who knows, who knows? It’s a prediction about what’s happening in 20 years’ time...

Stewart: Get this. Who would have ever (thought) that the most effective music that gets right to the deepest part and releases all social training and everything and gives young males and young females of our species utter permission is a mechanised rhythm that comes from a machine. [EDM sounds] To the extent that it’s human is to the extent that it's less effective in releasing the libido and permitting these behaviours that would be utterly unacceptable without the presence of a strong beat.

In fact, people standing in a room, they’re not interested in procreating. There's music going but they're not even thinking about it. Their body’s moving to it. There's more to it than meets the eye. There's something deeply physiological, something evolved very deeply in our human behaviour.

Robert: Okay. And you yourself, you live quite a simple life, you don’t have a big empire with 100 orchestrators and...

Stewart: No. I don't have an engineer. I used to. All the people of my generation, their work day begins when the engineer shows up and when the engineer “got to go home to see my family,” then the artist, that's the end of his working day.

Robert: And this is kind of a bit of an ethos of yours, is keep it small, keep it to yourself.

Stewart: Absolutely. The Police was three guys and it was designed that way. I wanted this... Let it be three guys. And I have my own record company that I did my gosh darned self... What's the cheapest studio in London? Pathway, an eight-track studio. Well, let's go there, and I call the guy and I chisel him down. Yes, strip it back and strip it back so that you've got manoeuvrability is the main thing.

Robert: But do you not think though, if you have more people working with you, collaborating, working for you, that you can achieve more in life because more people are doing the stuff that you don't necessarily need to do?

Stewart: Actually, that has been someplace that I'm getting to. I am in the process of arriving at that happy place where I can give it up. All during my young Pac Man years and adulthood, I've always been very greedy of artistic “boss hood.” I want to play every instrument myself, and I want to record everything myself, and I want to mix it myself, and I don't want anything to happen with me out of... I got to be in it, I want to be into everything. The video-I want to make the video, and the video should be like this and it should be... Just like the idea of not owning every aspect of it is kind of alien.

But now with the passage of time, I've discovered that like a producer is really cool because all I have to do is do this and then he has to clean up the tapes and figure it out and do all this stuff. I've learned to give it up, to let other people play with the ball, and the results can be really good. In a band, you collaborate. I'm not talking about a band collaboration because there, it's a corporate identity and I feel that I don't have to do everything in the band, but the band has to do everything. The band has to decide on the album cover, the band has to decide what the video is going to be about. We're not going to have anybody tell us what to... And so in a band, it's a corporate identity. The band is me, it's my band, even though there's two other guys who call it their band. For each of us, it's my thing.

The thing that I will never have, even as much as I'm prepared to give it up artistically, I will never acquire an empire. I have no need and no desire for an empire. I look at fellow composers who have built empires, some very effectively. One of my erstwhile competitors, Hans Zimmer who’s a big film composer and he does incredible work...

Robert: He’s Swiss, of course. Swiss.

Stewart: Is he?

Robert: Yes.

Stewart: Of course, is he? I always thought he was German or Austrian but okay, Swiss. He has an empire. He has 10 guys. He learned to give it up. I don't have to write every bar. Or he writes the theme and I don't have to apply it to this unit, apply that theme to... I can have somebody do it for me, then check it. Then when he's done all the donkey work–of here's the start time, there's the art time, this is the BPM that lands on the chord and does all the... The craftsmanship part of it. He’s written a tune and that’s the art. Then the craftsman applies it to the scene and then the artist comes by and says, okay that works but you know what I'm going to do... And so he gets all the fun part.

But he has to give it up and let other people do it. He has to hire those guys and to hire those guys, he needs an empire, and to feed an empire, he doesn't actually go and get to be an artist as much as I would need to be. He has to take a lot of meetings, he has to get every action picture that's being made, he needs to get that work to sustain his empire. He can't like take a job every now and then like an independent... Like when I was doing that, I was independent. A job every two months would feed my family. He needs every movie being made, he needs to have like three or four Triple A action pictures in his studio being made at all times, or else having that Empire...

Robert: And that doesn’t interest you.

Stewart: In one sense, you can turn things over and like that. On the other sense, running the empire. There's a difference between having an empire and having a collaboration, and letting the creative ball, letting other people play with the ball sometimes.

Robert: Okay and one of your balls, of course, is Ben-Hur, the reason why we’re here. You wrote the music for the live performance that happened and launched at The O2 Arena a few years ago and now you've set it to play and run with the edit you did for the 1925 film. Do you have any other projects and films that you would like to do that? Have you ever seen another silent movie and you’ve thought, I'd love to score a film and... Or is Ben-Hur such a special thing for you that that's the one that's...

Stewart: Well, Ben-Hur came and got me. It was an incoming call to score as a hired gun composer, to score a stage production of Ben-Hur. I did that, the show ran its course. A huge, huge behemoth of a show. Started in The O2 Arena in London and it ran its course. And then I wanted to do the concert and so I found the 1925 film and that became a different journey. It's sort of like it came for me. I didn't select that film.

But other films, I've looked at some other films by Fred Nibler the director, but there’s just such a... It's such a huge... It took three years and it was kind of fun and I could easily do another one. Not right away, because I'm having too much fun with Ben-Hur. I mean, I haven't finished playing Ben-Hur yet. I also write opera, in year three of an opera that I'm writing for Chicago in Long Beach. I'll get around to do another film one day, I suppose.

Robert: Okay. All right. So, last thing. I’m 32-33 actually. I can’t even remember my own age now.

Stewart: You're bit young to be lying about your age, pretending you don't know how old you are.

Robert: What advice would you give somebody like me who is hungry, relatively young, passionate about what I do, and I want to make sure that when I'm a little bit older that I'm still hungry, passionate about what I do? What general sage advice would you give me, because I know you’re like a grand papa...

Stewart: Stu-daddy!

Robert: Stu-daddy! Do you have anything that you look at me, you’ve worked with me now for the past week...

Stewart: Well, I would say having worked over the last week, I would say that you have a couple of gifts that will take you where you want to go. You also have a surfeit of energy which takes you into empire building, we have discussed this. For your viewers, there's a backstory here: I've been lecturing this young man about casting aside the empire and getting on with the music because you don't want to end up like a man who I respect deeply but do not want to be like Hans Zimmer. Where he spends all his time in meetings, having to do the “not music” part of the enterprise.

I would say that at your age, you've got energy to burn, so go ahead build an empire. But I suspect that one day you will start getting that empire out of your life. There’s been a couple of times we've been on the streets, we were on the Swiss Riviera the other day and you're walking around the streets and you're on the phone dealing with something. I don't know what you were dealing with, but it looked important. Without an empire, I don’t have anything to deal with. I'm enjoying the day. [He whistles]

Robert: Very chilled.

Stewart: There you are, young man, young Pac Man.

Robert: Can that be my nickname from now on for you? You just call me Pac Man.

Stewart: Yeah

Robert: I like that. That’s very retro.

Stewart: Well, I have sons, several who are older than you.

Robert: You have seven children.

Stewart: I have seven children.

Robert: Boy.

Stewart: Yeah. Four boys and then three girls, and I'm proud to say that some of my sons are also Pac Men.

Robert: Yeah. So you like Pac Man?

Stewart: Well, that's what I try to raise them to be. At this age, from 25 to 35, that's your chance. Take no prisoners, just remorseless, just bite off as much as you can get and do it while you've got no baggage and just you know... Fight, scramble and then there will come a point where you want to put down roots and take it a bit easier, and that's called midlife crisis.

What the crisis is all about is you realise that that's the peak. That's where your youthful vigour got you and the rest of your life is the result of that 10 years span. That 10 years is setting up what the rest of your life will be. I would say, you asked for a piece of advice, focus your attention on the things that you know you'll still want to be doing–which apply to your gift, not to your acumen.

Robert: Okay. Well, I'll see you tonight on the stage.

Stewart: Absolutely.

Robert: Thanks, mate.

Stewart: We’re going to rock the house.

Robert: Thank you very much.

Stewart: In your bare feet.

Robert: Yeah.

Robert: Hey, it's me again. Sorry to bug you but as this is a new podcast, I need your help.

If you enjoyed listening to the fun I had with Stewart and you'd like more, then please head over to thebackstageblog.com, sign up and receive the next podcast directly to your inbox. It's also crucial that you get as many friends on and off social media to take a listen by sending them a link to the show.

Now, remember, this episode is brought to you with the help of Lat_56, the smart, sharp and efficient baggage company. So, until the next time, appreciate the music and the musicians will appreciate you.

Show notes

Stewart's Father, Miles Copeland Jr., is a spy [03.51]

Key points from Stewart’s childhood [04:45]

His father’s best buddy was Kim Philby, a double-agent. [07:20]

Stewart took up drums partly because he was a late bloomer. [10:03]

Why he believes that music is part of the procreative process of the human being. [12:07]

When his father spotted his talent, Stewart was signed up for drum lessons. [14:00]

The Police was modelled as a punk band and enjoyed huge success after Shea Stadium. [17:02]

A grand aspiration: Stewart would love to conduct a large orchestra. [22:00]

Stewart and Robert strike a deal for the next Tyrant’s Crush performance. [24:04]

The biggest leap from drummer to composer happened when Stewart got a phone call from Francis Ford Coppola. [29:15]

How he failed to get into the music school at University of California, Berkeley. [35:19]

A lesson in Stewart’s philosophy of the dumb shit and the dumb ass. [36:10]

Stewart’s prediction for the music industry in 20 years’ time. [42:16]

Another theory: without rock music, there will not be sex. [44:06]

If the only reason humans pro-create is Vivaldi, we would all be fucked. [47:03]

Stewart has no desire for an empire. [51:10]

Selected links from the episode

thebackstageblog.com

Miles Copeland Jr.

Kim Philby

The Police

The Black Knights

Ben-Hur

Francis Ford Coppola

Shea Stadium

Tyrant’s Crush

Hans Zimmer

Lat_56 

Books, Music and Videos that feature Stewart Copeland

Strange Things Happen: A life with The Police, polo and pygmies - an autobiography from Stewart covering everything you need to know

Dare to Drum - a story of the rock star composer teaming up with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Ben Hur live by Stewart Copeland - a CD performed by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra

Orchestralli (+ bonus) - a 2 disk set of Copeland performing in concert with a select group of classical musicians on tour in Italy

Gizmodrome - a record of Copeland’s latest band, featuring Mark King (Level 42), Adrian Belew (ex King Crimson, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Talking Heads) and Vittorio Cosma (PFM and Elio e le Storie Tese).

The Police: Everyone Stares - The Police Inside Out - DVD filmed on Super-8 giving an insider’s view of the band’s rise to fame and eventual split.

Related & Recommended Posts

[frustratedcastingdirector]

The Times (UK) 10/16/2003

Alex O'Connell goes weak-kneed in the presence of Mark Ruffalo, the anti Hollywood star of In the Cut If there was such a thing as a textbook outsider, Mark Ruffalo would be one. Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge and, well, Buffy, he is in a netherworld all of his own. Metaphorically speaking, Ruffalo sits on a park bench in the middle of an LA traffic island staring into the smog while most of Tinseltown is vrooming down the highways talking about their Japanese advertising campaigns and what happens if you smoke right after Pilates while on the Atkins. We meet in a hotel in Park Lane, in a suite which has more chintz than a Chelsea draper's. Still, Ruffalo cuts through the frills and fancy, like a pair of industrial shears. To be frank, the furnishings don't get a look-in. His face is soft and crumpled like a baby boxer, his hair is a pile of Italianate curls tousled to unstyled perfection, his eyes are the same lazy, deep brown as his pinstripes. On the soulless hotel interview circuit, Ruffalo is as refreshing as the cold shower I should be having. He doesn't try, he hasn't rehearsed answers, he doesn't care if he says something that might make his agent twitch. Give the man a part in one of the films of the year! (Oh, he's already got one.) A respected theatre actor and director in America but relatively unknown here, barring a star role in the playwright Kenneth Lonergan's film debut You Can Count on Me (2000), Ruffalo is about to ease into the mainstream. The Wisconsin boy has two movies out in the next few months, both in The Times bfi London Film Festival. The first, My Life Without Me, is a drama about a woman with a terminal illness, in which he stars alongside the Canadian actress Sarah Polley. The second, and the biggie, is Jane Campion's cop thriller, In the Cut, the festival's Opening Night Gala. Adapted from the novel by Susanna Moore, the film features Ruffalo as Malloy, a hard nut homicide detective who begins an affair with Frannie, an ethereal New York academic (Meg Ryan). While Malloy is out chasing killers, she's sticking Post-it Notes scrawled with her favourite words on the wall. Ryan is good. Ruffalo is even better as the cop whose incestuous cityscape consists of dives, crime scenes and the odd sweaty mattress. At 35, Ruffalo has taken long enough to get where he is. Partly it was bad luck, he says. Three years ago he was diagnosed with a brain tumour after he finished filming The Last Castle with Robert Redford. "It naturally slowed everything down," he says, in his old-world drawl. "It was taken out immediately and it was benign, but it was a year of being out of work and reassessing. When you're young and you start getting on as the 'hot new thing', you can lose sight of what you are doing it for, and I was starting to get a little disappointed with acting. It made me reassess. Also, they go in there and tinker and you feel like you'll never be the same and, quite frankly, I didn't know if I still had my talent after that." The script for In the Cut arrived eight months after his illness. Campion asked him to lunch and she gave him the good news between courses. Initially, he was concerned about how to make what could easily have been "just another cop role" his own. "We've seen this a thousand times, more, probably," he says, "and it's been done very well by many people." Eventually he located his point of real interest. "There is some part of Malloy that wants more from his class than just where he is at in life. There is some curiosity for fineness and beauty." Research involved trailing Manhattan's cop bars and knocking back whiskey with the guys. "It took a lot of bourbon and cigarettes to get to the point where people were actually being truthful." One of the most talked about elements in the film is the nude sex scene between him and Ryan, her first in a long career. It's erotic and integral. But, boy, wasn't that, well, a pressure? "It was never comfortable," he says, shifting in his chair. "When we had known each other for three months, it was still uncomfortable, people standing around all the time...I'm married ... "I mean, I was really nervous," he laughs, "and when you're nervous it's hard to affect, erm, confidence." Did you have a thing that you did? "A technique? Well, Jane gave me The Woman's Orgasm and a bunch of books and videotapes. At one point she tried to give me an anatomy lesson on the vagina, which frankly brings up all kinds of defensive feelings in a man: 'I know what I'm doing! Why are you telling me that? Let me show you!' And that was funny, seeing myself react like that." Did he read them? "Yes, I did read them. I definitely learnt." He admits that the film's unbalanced relationship dynamic (cop/academic) probably would not work in real life. Luckily Ruffalo has no such personal concerns, as he is married to an actress, Sunrise Coigney. It's fairytale stuff: he saw her in the street, knew she was The One, and had to figure out how to meet her. She has a small part in In the Cut. Ruffalo is unusual in that he is a Hollywood actor with a very definite life outside Hollywood. It has a lot to do with his background in theatre. After moving to San Diego at 13 he uprooted to LA at 18 to study at the Stella Adler theatre school. His big break was in Betrayed by Everyone, a chunk of This is Our Youth which was made into a one-act play at a festival in LA in 1995. There began his great friendship with its writer, Kenneth Lonergan, who later invited him to audition for This is Our Youth, his play about indulged youth in the 1980s. "Since then we've been close friends," Ruffalo says. "We were both struggling in the theatre and then we both did the film You Can Count on Me and it launched our careers." These days he runs an LA theatre company, Page 97, and has written a play and a film of his own. In fact he even turned down a bunch of big studio films, including a part in The Core, because, well, it just didn't suit. And of his considerable freezer of turkeys (he's been in 28 movies, most of them poor to dreadful) he is charmingly self-mocking. Houdini -the biopic? "That is good compared to some of them," he laughs. "I don't network, I see it as kind of crass. There is just this cliquey scene in LA. I don't think that casting directors ever discover anybody, they are just told about somebody by somebody else. I'm sure there are 1,000 people like me out there who have worked really hard and done the plays and the work that really counts, but there is a lot of hyperbole in LA and the focus is in getting to places where you can be seen and get 'famous' and then all the work follows." In fact recently he's even been working on a novel, called Him, which sounds like self-parody or The Outsider Pt 2. "It's about a man who doesn't fit into the modern world," he says with a smirk. Stage, screen, plays, novels, what's it going to be? Unless he makes his mind up, doesn't he risk turning into Ethan Hawke? He sighs, a deep Ruffalo sigh. "They're gonna throw dirt on you at the end of this game, man," he says. "And I don't think you can be too careful at the cost of your life. At the end what do you have but the life you lived?" Quite. CV: MARK RUFFALO AMERICAN HISTORY Born in Wisconsin in Nov, 1967. He moved to San Diego at 18, then to LA where he studied at Stella Adler. NEW BEST FRIEND Playwright Kenneth Lonergan. Ruffalo was in This is Our Youth. MY FAVOURITE WIFE Actress Sunrise Coigney, whom he fell for in the street. UNBEARABLE LIKENESS OF BEING Compared to Marlon Brando and James Dean -"But he had no work ethic," says Ruffalo of the latter. TOPSY TURKEYS Windtalkers (2002); A Fish in the Bathtub (1999); There Goes My Baby (1994).

Article corrections: Ruffalo’s family moved to Virginia Beach, VA when he was 13;Lonergan did not invite Ruffalo to audition for “This is Our Youth,” Ruffalo had to nag him into letting him audition for it; The LA theatre company is called Page 93 not 97; and it was Marlon Brando with no work ethic.

[arts-culture-honours-programme]

“My Red Homeland”: Jewish Contemporary Art

Anna Nesterenko 

“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them”

-Mark Rothko

Shooting into the Corner, Anish Kapoor 

In many cases, especially connected to the migration and living among the foreign ethnicities, as it is happens widely with the Jews through history and nowadays, categories of ethnicity and nationality serve as principles for organization of life and social contacts. While these categories are socially constructed, they have objective consequences for access to important resources - including housing, political resources, and opportunities in the labor market (Chong, 2011).

These processes occur both outside the community and inside, when its members distinguish themselves from the rest during the interactions, even with the strangers, (Tavory, 2010). Drawing up such boundaries is based on the ascription and evaluation specific characteristics, which are considered to be significant to the group of people or in our case, the group of art (Barth, 1969). According to Bourdieu, these symbolic and cultural factors are very important in the social construction, as far as they contribute to building a hierarchy in society and allow certain agents to occupy a dominant position that can result in symbolic violence - the imposition of their cultural and symbolic practices (Bourdieu, 1984). When it comes to the art, what is considered to be national is always really a question of social boundaries, that can be described as the “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices and even time and space” (Lamont & Molnár, 2002). However, the attempt to make a certain homogenous image ends in failure because in reality the concept of “national” in reality is always heterogeneous.

Jerusalem, Moshe Mizrachi

In the past, in spite of the doubts about the theoretical possibility of Jewish, acuteness of this question contributed to its unexpected rise in the XX century, when Jewish identity became an increasing concern in the visual arts (Silver & Baskind, 2011). At this time avant-garde Jewish groups, each with its own concept, arose throughout Europe, finally freed from the political oppression: the artists gathered, argued on this topic, founded magazines and exhibitions devoted to Jewish art in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw.

In other words, it was the process of national self-ascription that was accompanied by an explosion of both reflection on this topic and Jewish artistic creation. The names of Marc Chagall or Chaim Soutine are widely heard, but many of the artists who participated in this process (for example, cubist Max Weber in America or avant-gardist El Lissitzky in Russia), later became classics of European modernism, even though their Jewish dimension usually remains understudied, as far as for some of them the passion for avant-garde art reflected a break with Jewish ancestry and Judaism, especially due to the ideology of atheism in the Soviet Union (Orlov, 2008).

Book cover for "Chad Gadya", El Lissitzky

Sabbath, Max Weber

In the XX century, several approaches emerged to how to express the Jewish contribution to art. One of them, which is popular now in Israel, is an exhibition based on the presence in the work of Jewish artists of the “Jewishness” – their very own experience that is the personal history experienced by the artist as a Jew. This story can either enter creativity directly - for example, as the experience of the Holocaust, - or it can also somehow indirectly affect the choice of scenes or style in some complicated way.

Svayambh, Anish Kapoor

“He was antisemitic and I'm Jewish. Who cares?”

-Anish Kapoor on Wagner

In the February of this year the winner of The Genesis Prize, the so-called "Jewish Nobel Prize", which “recognises individuals who have attained excellence and international renown in their fields and whose actions and achievements express a commitment to Jewish values, the Jewish community and the State of Israel”, was announced Anish Kapoor - a British sculptor of Indian-Jewish origin (The Guardian, 2017). Kapoor said that he would donate a million dollars of the prize to help the refugees: “As inheritors and carriers of Jewish values it is unseemly, therefore, for us to ignore the plight of people who are persecuted, who have lost everything and had to flee as refugees in mortal danger” (The Guardian, 2017).

And canceled the rewarding of the Prize because the celebration is “inappropriate” in the face of the war in Syria “on Israel’s doorstep” (The Jewish Chronicle, 2017).

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954, in family of Hindu and  Iraqi Jewess. His mother’s relatives are Jews, immigrated to India from Iraq in the 1920s. In 1978, his first exhibition was held in London at the Hayward Gallery. Ten years later, he is already an acknowledged artist, a prizewinner at the Venice Biennale, a laureate of the Turner Prize. In September 2009 Kapoor became the first artist whose personal exhibition was organized in The Royal Academy of Arts during his lifetime (The Jewish Chronicle, 2017).

To set an example, of the modern artist suited into the third approach who express his own stories as the Jew, I would like to focus on him and explore the way he represents it in his artworks and how it is perceived by the both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. Analyzing a number of interviews with Kapoor and the reviews, we can distinguish several main frames used in order to evaluate him and his artworks: the view from within the Jewish community on Kapoor as a Jew, in the first place, regardless of the positivity or negativity of the review; the frame that focused on the artworks themselves; and the one that explore his personal views, mostly political, including ones that are embedded into the artworks.

 The authors and magazines, mostly connected to the Jewish community, such as The Jewish Chronicle, Jewcy, Haaretz, Jewish.ru, etc. prefer to focus on the Jewish origin of the Kapoor and emphasize it: “Most notoriously, in 2015, his work at Versailles was defaced several times with anti-Semitic graffiti, and when Kapoor elected to not remove it to highlight underlying problems, a right-wing politician successfully sued to force him to cover up the vandalism” (Jewsy, 2017). 

Anish Kapoor, Dirty Corner

Kapoor himself, while not denying the importance of the Jewish question, tries to avoid discussions about the influence of his origin and especially religion on his art:

“-…And you are part Jewish. Were you formally taught these things, were they formally or casually talked about in the family conversation?

-…But my parents were fastidiously a-religious. So while some of this was around, its much more that I feel that the symbolic world, which I insist is the nub of a problem for an artist like me, is latent in most actions I would wish to make as an artist. And the work is to find that latent content” (The John Tusa Interviews, 2003).

This is especially noticeable in publications related to the outrage on the part of Jewish society, when Kapoor were developing a design of sets for the new Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde: “And many of my Jewish relatives and friends say: ‘How can you?’ Honestly, in the end, one somehow has to put that aside” (Jeffries, 2017). He responds to all these criticism: “In the end, who cares if the artist is a nice person?” (Jeffries, 2017). For him, some practical actions are obviously more important, he actively expresses his views on the pressing issues of our time, both personally and in his art.

Thus, other more independent authors focus mostly on his views in the art itself. Such as the support for refugees or protest against the policy of Tramp, when Kapoor altered one of the posters created in the 1974 for the performance “I Like America and America Likes Me” of the artist Joseph Beuys. Kapoor placed his portrait on the poster and changed the title. In his version, it sounds like: “I Like America and America Doesn’t Like Me”. He says: "I call on fellow artists and citizens to disseminate their name and image using Joseph Beuys' seminal work of art as a focus for social change. Our silence makes us complicit with the politics of exclusion. We will not be silent" (ArtDaily, 2017).

Anish Kapoor, I like America and America doesn't like Me

The exhibition “My Red Homeland” in the The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow also caused a debate about its insert meaning. Because of the current political situation in Russia and strong associations between the red colour and history of the country, a lot of local visitors were looking for the some kind of the hidden message. However, Kapoor states that, “the works point in certain directions, but they’re not prescriptive in their meaning. I think that means that they allow for a possible openness of interpretation and that can be responsive to the time in which the work is shown. It’s not incidental that I’m showing My Red Homeland here in Russia. In one way it’s slightly naughty, and in another way, I quite like the idea of engaging with the questions” (Small, 2017).

Anish Kapoor, My Red Homeland

Nevertheless, even if for the artist the question of his cultural affiliation is open, in his artworks Kapoor emphasizes that the most important things are to be hidden in sight and that a work of art is not a finished form, but an ongoing process.

Above all these issues, in the case of Kapoor, there is still the effect of the social boundaries can be seen, as far as for the reviewers from Jewish community, the emphases of his Jewishness is a subconscious way to claim him authentic and draw the boundary between his art and the rest. At the same time, the definition of the essence of Jewish art no longer has priority over artists and works of art, as we also can see on the example of Anish Kapoor. Art should not be reduced to the biographies of its producers or be analyzed only with respect to the intended audience or limited religious community. 

References:

Anish Kapoor recreates seminal artwork in anti-Trump protest. (2017). ArtDaily. Retrieved from: http://artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=93455#.Wed8DGi0OMo

Anish Kapoor. Artist. Jewish. Color Renegade. (2017). Jewcy. Retrieved from http://jewcy.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/jewish-artist-anish-kapoor

Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference. London: Allen & Unwin (‘Introduction’).

Bourdieu, P. (1984) [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chong, P. (2011). Reading difference: How race and ethnicity function as tools for critical appraisal. Poetics 39 (1): 64-84.

Conversations with Artists, Selden Rodman, New York Devin-Adair. (1957). p. 93.; reprinted as 'Notes from a conversation with Selden Rodman, 1956', in Writings on Art: Mark Rothko (2006) ed. Miguel López-Remiro.

Gutmann, J. (1961). The "Second Commandment" and the Image in Judaism. Hebrew Union College Annual, 32, 161-174.

Hesli, V., Miller, A., Reisinger, W., & Morgan, K. (1994). Social Distance from Jews in Russia and Ukraine. Slavic Review, 53(3), 807-828.

Jeffries, S. (2017). Anish Kapoor on Wagner: 'He was antisemitic and I'm Jewish. Who cares?'. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/08/anish-kapoor-on-wagner-he-was-antisemitic-and-im-jewish-who-cares.

Lamont, Michèle & Virág Molnár. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual

Orlov, A. (2008). First There Was the Word: Early Russian Texts on Modern Jewish Art. Oxford Art Journal, 31(3), 385-402.

Prize ceremony for Anish Kapoor cancelled because of Syrian suffering (2017). The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved from: https://www.thejc.com/news/israel/prize-ceremony-for-anish-kapoor-cancelled-because-of-syrian-suffering-1.437797.

Review of Sociology 28 (1): 167-195.

Silver, L., & Baskind, S. (2011). Looking Jewish: The State of Research on Modern Jewish Art. The Jewish Quarterly Review, 101(4), 631-652.

Small, R. (2017). Anish Kapoor Colors Russia Red - Interview Magazine. Interview Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/anish-kapoor-jewish-museum-and-tolerance-center [Accessed 18 Oct. 2017].

Tavory, I. (2009). Of yarmulkes and categories: Delegating boundaries and the phenomenology of interactional expectation. Theory and Society, 39(1), 49-68.

The Guardian. (2017). Anish Kapoor condemns 'abhorrent' refugee policies as he wins Genesis prize. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/06/anish-kapoor-condemns-abhorrent-refugee-policies-as-he-wins-genesis-prize.

The John Tusa Interviews, Anish Kapoor. (2003). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ncbc1

[middlerice79-blog]

The Lost John D. Wendel Mansion - 442-444 Fifth Avenue

To the rear the Wendel carriage house can be seen.  The ample side yard is to the right.  from the collection of the CUNY Graduate Center Collection, Murray Hill

Johann Gottlieb Wendel began his career as a fur merchant with partner John Jacob Astor.  The close relationship between the two led to Wendel's marrying Astor's half-sister, Elizabeth.  And like Astor, Wendel invested his profits in Manhattan real estate, multiplying his fortune.

Johann and Elizabeth had one child, John D. Wendel, who took over his father's real estate business when he died.  Elizabeth Astor Wendel died on November 28, 1846, leaving her son a vast amount of Manhattan real estate.

John D. Wendel and his wife, Mary Ann, had seven children--six daughters (Rebecca, Augusta, Josephine, Henrietta, Georgiana, Mary and Ella) and one son, John Gottlieb Wendell II.  

Despite what The New York Herald called his "immense wealth," Wendel was notoriously frugal.  The New York Times would later say that he "let his contractor draw the plans [of his mansion] to save the architect's fees."  

That mansion, at No. 442 Fifth Avenue on the corner of 39th Street, was completed in 1856.   The up-to-date Ango-Italianate house sat on a rusticated brownstone base.  Three stories of red brick rose to a hipped roof atop a bracketed cornice.   Two sets of French doors at the second floor facing Fifth Avenue opened onto stone balustraded balconies.

Despite Wendel's wariness not to waste money, the family enjoyed the lifestyle of wealthy Victorians.  Records show seven servants in the 20-room house.  And on March 1, 1860 The New York Times noted that "Mr. John D. Wendel and family have arrived from Paris."  Their summer estate was at Irvington-on-Hudson, near George Merrit's impressive "Lyndenhurst."  

It was there, on September 12, 1876 that the Wendels' eldest daughter, Henrietta Dorothea died.  The funeral was held in that house the following day.  The New York Herald announced that the funeral would begin "on arrival of the 2 P.M. train from Grand Central depot.  Carriages will be in waiting."

One month later John D. Wendel died, also at the summer estate.  The New York Herald, on November 30, commented "Mr. Wendel was one of the very few survivors of the class of United States merchants whose frugal industry, exact business habits and unswerving integrity will soon be without a living representative."

Mary and her six surviving children--all unmarried--continued to live in the Fifth Avenue mansion.  Possibly because of her husband's famous frugality, little inside had been changed since the house was opened in 1856.

In 1893 the neighborhood around the exclusive Union League Club, on Fifth Avenue and 21st Street, was rapidly becoming commercialized.  The members began searching for a new location further uptown and on October 11 the New-York Tribune reported "It has a hope of getting the northwest corner of Thirty-ninth-st...where the widow of John D. Wendel lives, and adjoining which is a vacant lot."   The Site Committee would have to keep looking.  Mary was not interested in selling.  And the "vacant lot" was no such thing--it was the Wendels' garden, by now an exquisitely valuable piece of Midtown property.

Mary A. Wendel died on the evening of March 30, 1894.  Her son, John Gottlieb Wendel II, did not open the house for her funeral, as would have been expected, but held it at the Madison Avenue M. E. Church.  It may have been a hint of things to come.

While each of the girls received $340,000 in stocks, John inherited the bulk of the $10 million estate.  A month earlier The Evening World had reported on John's wealth, unaware of course of his pending inheritance.  His personal worth was already estimated at $1.5 million, his annual income at $75,000 and his "daily income" at $205 (the daily income would equal about $7,350 today).

While his father had been frugal, John G. Wendel was miserly.  And he controlled his five sisters tyrannically.  Terrified that the family fortune would be diluted, he refused to allow them to marry, and put an end to entertainments and most outside socializing.

The New York Times later explained that he "taught them they must not marry or dissipate their stewardship and that publicity was demeaning."  

Wendel's eccentricities went beyond his control of his sisters.  According to Daniel Okrent in his 2003 Great Fortune, he was "something of a paranoid: fearful that disease could enter his body through his feet he stomped around in a custom-made, mutant form of platform shoes, their inch-thick gutta percha soles extended by fenders reaching another full inch in either direction."

If his mother had allowed any concessions at all to modernity at all, he stopped that.  The mansion became a time capsule.  The furnishings were not updated, his sisters' wardrobes grew out of style, mended and re-mended as necessary, and modern conveniences like electricity were disallowed.  (Luckily plumbing had been installed early on in the history of the house.)

A zinc-lined bathtub (with shower) was state-of-the-art when installed.  from the collection of the New York Public Library

Although he said it was his lack of confidence in the police that caused him not to report a robbery in the mansion; it was more likely that he simply did not want strangers coming in.  In either case, when the family closed the house to go to Irvington in 1894, he left caretaker Samuel McKinney to watch over it.  When they returned "it was locked up and McKinney had disappeared.  A quantity of cash and bonds had also vanished," according to a newspaper.  

Years later, on June 8, 1899, The New York Times wrote "When John G. Wendel lost $6,000 in cash and bonds from his home, 444 Fifth Avenue, nearly four years ago, he exhibited less anxiety over the matter than he might have been expected to feel."  The matter would never have been discovered had McKinney not beaten his wife, Rosa.  In retaliation she went to the police and told all.

In January 1899 47-year-old Georgiana Wendel tried to break free of her brother's iron grasp. She escaped to the Park Avenue Hotel.  Apparently to hide her tracks, she checked out on Sunday night, January 22, but retained the key.  The New York Times reported that she "returned quietly" and "having the key in her possession, went to her room without saying anything to the hotel people."

When the suite was given to another guest the following afternoon, she was discovered.  Her brother had her deemed insane and sent temporarily to Bellevue Hospital.

Georgiana was then removed to the Irvington-on-Hudson house where she was in effect held prisoner.  The feisty heiress did not give up easily, however.  She communicated with two friends, Mrs. F. W. Mack and Mrs. Maurice J. Sullivan.  They obtained a writ of habeas corpus to have Georgiana appear in court "to be examined as to her mental condition," according to The New York Times on September 6, 1900.  But she did not appear.

The article noted "Both Mrs. Sullivan and Mrs. Mack had visited the Wendel Residence in Irvington on Aug. 22, but were not allowed to have an interview with Miss Wendel, although she spoke to them from an open window.  The women say they think she is perfectly sane, and that she is restrained of her liberty by her relatives."

The attorneys of John Wendel presented an application to the court stating that Georgiana "is incompetent to manage herself and affairs by reason of loss of memory and understanding."

Judge Smith Lent said he saw no reason why Georgiana had not been brought in for examination.  Wendel's lawyer responded "They do not dare to produce her here!"

Lent ordered her to be produced in court the next day.

When Georgiana did not show up, Judge Lent took the court to the Wendel house in Irvington.  The Times reported "She declared that she was restrained of her liberty by her brother, John G. Wendel, who wanted to get her money."  But sadly, when Wendel testified that he had not seen his sister for nearly two years, Georgiana was deemed "undoubtedly suffering from delusional insanity."

In the meantime, John's peculiarities affected his Manhattan neighbors to the rear.  No. 1 West 39th Street, next to the Wendel carriage house, was owned by Neville P. Jodrell and his wife.  In the spring of 1900 they began remodeling the old brownstone into a modern, American basement plan residence.  The architects included windows on the side wall that opened onto a shaft for ventilation.  Wendel suspected they secretly wanted views into his house.

He retaliated with a wall.  On May 12, 1900 The Times reported he had hired architects J. B. Snook & Sons to erect a foot thick, eight-foot wide wall that would rise about 28 feet "to be build right up against the Thirty-ninth Street house in front of the windows."

Both No. 1 West 39th Street and John Wendel's retaliating wall were gone in 1932 when this photograph was taken.  from the collection of the CUNY Graduate Center Collection, Murray Hill

John would have to refocus his attention from spying neighbors to his relentless sister, Georgiana before long.  She had managed to get the verdict of insanity upset "on the ground of irregularity" and now, in September 1901 she sued her brother, claiming that he had not distributed their father's estate in accordance with the will.  She wanted her rightful share.

Seen at around the time Georgiana sued her brother, the mansion retained its balconies and shutters.  The former garden has fallen into neglect.  photo by Brown Brothers

Georgiana escaped to Europe where she was still living in 1907 when she finally capitulated.  The New York Times reported "A reconciliation was effected.  Miss Georgiana returned willingly to the family roof."

On November 25, 1906 the Colorado Herald Democrat reported on the family's bizarre anachronistic lifestyle.  The article told of the last unimproved lot in the Fifth Avenue business district, the Wendel's former garden, now neglected and barren.  "To the south of the vacant lot stands an old-fashioned red brick house of the type that belonged to the Fifth avenue grandeur of bygone days."

The journalist continued, "Land in that neighborhood is worth more than $10,000 a front foot, and yet this lot has a high board fence around it and lies entirely idle."  Brokers, he said, "were ready to give $600,000" for the lot.  But the Wendel sisters would not give up the garden lot, because, for one thing, it was the only spot where Toby, their dog, could romp.

The far-away publication was not the only one noticing the strange behavior of the mansion's occupants.  The New York Times remarked "Because of his aversion to automobiles and other modern improvements [John Wendel] became known as 'The Hermit of Fifth Avenue.'"

Around 1912 Rebecca Wendel became only sister to successfully break free.   Despite what a newspaper called her brother's "violent opposition," she married clergyman Luther Arthur Swope.  "Thereafter John Wendel discouraged his sisters from going to church," said The Times.

Ella, Georgiana, Mary and Josephine, continued to live in the the antiquated mansion, obeying John's rules.  The New York Times later commented “The sisters dressed in styles of many years ago, lived frugally and simply, and persisted in hanging the family washing in the back yard in defiance of neighbors’ protests," adding that they “never ride in a street car and never in their lives have they been in an automobile.  They never shop in the fashionable district, for things are too expensive there.  They buy all their groceries and supplies in the inexpensive little shops over on Sixth Avenue and make their purchases personally, seldom letting them be delivered but carrying them home themselves and paying for them with cash.  They are quick to see bargains and watch for them like the poorest housewife.”

Josephine died in the spring of 1914, her $3 million estate being divided among her siblings.

John G. Wendel died a few months later, on November 30, leaving an estate valued at $55 million, according to The Real Estate Record & Guide on December 5.  He left control of the family estate in the hands of Rebecca.  Mary became the financial executive for the three sisters in the Fifth Avenue house.

In reporting on John's death The Times said "He lived as simply as a $25 a week clerk with his two [sic] sisters in his big square house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street."  There was no telephone, no electric lights, no conveniences inside.  Not even a sewing machine for mending the clothing.

On February 28, 1915 The New York Times again described the house of the Wendel sisters.  "In Winter only the first two floors and the basement are habitable, because the old furnace does not carry heat well above the second floor."  It mentioned that in the side yard was "an old tree and a dog house, with a turf that has not been cut in thirty years.  There, after dark, so that no prying eyes can spy down from neighboring buildings, the sisters take their exercise."

"With them are two old women servants, and the five old women live curiously oblivious of the New York of the moment.  The riot of fashion, extravagance, joy, mirth, sin crime, pride, and ambition which flows past them on the avenue constantly seems not to have affected them at all."

Self-isolated, the aging women rarely had visitors.  "Of social life the old house has absolutely none.  No outsider has dined there in years.  With a few of the old New York families the Wendels still retain friendly relations, and on very rare occasions they receive a call, but as they never return these calls, and as they rarely call on any one themselves, their visitors become each year fewer and fewer."

Oddly enough, years later The Times would mention "There was very little exchange of affection between the sisters who lived in the same house.  They simply spent their lives side by side."

In October 1922 Mary Eliza Astor Wendel died at the Irvington-on-Hudson estate.  Other than bequests to servants, her $15 million estate was divided among her sisters.

Ella and Georgiana continued on as always.  Their lawyer, Charles G. Koss, explained "They simply wished to live alone with their servants in their old home surroundings, and they lived just like anybody else."  That assertion was arguable.

In 1929 Georgiana was stricken with influenza which developed into pneumonia.  She died on January 18 at the age of 79.  Her death was only discovered by the public when her sisters filed for the administration of her estate.   Not long afterward The Times described No. 442 Fifth Avenue saying, "it has never been changed.  The dining room, parlor and library, it is said, are scrupulously kept in the exact condition in which they were left by the builder of the house, John Wendel."

While everything inside the house remained unchanged, by the late 1920's the balconies had been removed, most likely for safety reasons, and the Fifth Avenue enframements shaved off.  Wendel Family Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Drew University Library

Developers were disheartened when it was announced that “Miss Ella V. von E. Wendel, an elderly woman and worth many millions, will live alone with the old family servants and carry on the traditions of the Wendel family in the old rusty brick mansion at Thirty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue.” 

The 20th century did not change Ella Wendel's wardrobe.  Wendel Family Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Drew University Library

On July 20, 1930 Rebecca A. D. Wendel Swope died, leaving Ella the sole surviving sister and the end of the Wendel line.    Newspaper readers were somewhat shocked, although surprisingly so, when her entire estate was left to the 80-year old Ella with nothing at all left to charity.  

One of the most bizarre chapters in New York's social history was about to close.  Eight months after Rebecca's death, 78-year-old Ella Virginia von E. Wendel suffered a stroke.  She died in the Fifth Avenue house a week later, on March 13, 1931.   Her massive estate had made her the equivalent of a billionaire today.  The Times reported "The real estate accumulated in the name of Wendel is now valued at more than $100,000,000 and the only living creature that was close to the last holder was a French poodle named Tobey."  

In accordance with John G. Wendel's distaste for publicity, there was no crepe hung on the door (nor had there been at the time of his or the other sisters' deaths).  Her funeral was held on March 16.

Little remained of the venerable mansion on December 5, 1934.  from the collection of the New York Public Library

Four years later the Art Deco S. H. Kress & Co. flagship 5-and-10-cent store was completed on the site.  That magnificent structure was demolished in the mid-1980's to make way for Republic National Bank tower.

The glass-and-steel structure towering above the former Knox Hat Building sits on the site of the Wendel mansion.  photo by Nicolson & Gallowy

A door-sized bronze plaque memorializing the Wendel mansion was removed from the Kress Building and installed in the new structure.

Source: http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-lost-john-d-wendel-mansion-442-444.html

[pantysleep64-blog]

The Lost John D. Wendel Mansion - 442-444 Fifth Avenue

To the rear the Wendel carriage house can be seen.  The ample side yard is to the right.  from the collection of the CUNY Graduate Center Collection, Murray Hill

Johann Gottlieb Wendel began his career as a fur merchant with partner John Jacob Astor.  The close relationship between the two led to Wendel's marrying Astor's half-sister, Elizabeth.  And like Astor, Wendel invested his profits in Manhattan real estate, multiplying his fortune.

Johann and Elizabeth had one child, John D. Wendel, who took over his father's real estate business when he died.  Elizabeth Astor Wendel died on November 28, 1846, leaving her son a vast amount of Manhattan real estate.

John D. Wendel and his wife, Mary Ann, had seven children--six daughters (Rebecca, Augusta, Josephine, Henrietta, Georgiana, Mary and Ella) and one son, John Gottlieb Wendell II.  

Despite what The New York Herald called his "immense wealth," Wendel was notoriously frugal.  The New York Times would later say that he "let his contractor draw the plans [of his mansion] to save the architect's fees."  

That mansion, at No. 442 Fifth Avenue on the corner of 39th Street, was completed in 1856.   The up-to-date Ango-Italianate house sat on a rusticated brownstone base.  Three stories of red brick rose to a hipped roof atop a bracketed cornice.   Two sets of French doors at the second floor facing Fifth Avenue opened onto stone balustraded balconies.

Despite Wendel's wariness not to waste money, the family enjoyed the lifestyle of wealthy Victorians.  Records show seven servants in the 20-room house.  And on March 1, 1860 The New York Times noted that "Mr. John D. Wendel and family have arrived from Paris."  Their summer estate was at Irvington-on-Hudson, near George Merrit's impressive "Lyndenhurst."  

It was there, on September 12, 1876 that the Wendels' eldest daughter, Henrietta Dorothea died.  The funeral was held in that house the following day.  The New York Herald announced that the funeral would begin "on arrival of the 2 P.M. train from Grand Central depot.  Carriages will be in waiting."

One month later John D. Wendel died, also at the summer estate.  The New York Herald, on November 30, commented "Mr. Wendel was one of the very few survivors of the class of United States merchants whose frugal industry, exact business habits and unswerving integrity will soon be without a living representative."

Mary and her six surviving children--all unmarried--continued to live in the Fifth Avenue mansion.  Possibly because of her husband's famous frugality, little inside had been changed since the house was opened in 1856.

In 1893 the neighborhood around the exclusive Union League Club, on Fifth Avenue and 21st Street, was rapidly becoming commercialized.  The members began searching for a new location further uptown and on October 11 the New-York Tribune reported "It has a hope of getting the northwest corner of Thirty-ninth-st...where the widow of John D. Wendel lives, and adjoining which is a vacant lot."   The Site Committee would have to keep looking.  Mary was not interested in selling.  And the "vacant lot" was no such thing--it was the Wendels' garden, by now an exquisitely valuable piece of Midtown property.

Mary A. Wendel died on the evening of March 30, 1894.  Her son, John Gottlieb Wendel II, did not open the house for her funeral, as would have been expected, but held it at the Madison Avenue M. E. Church.  It may have been a hint of things to come.

While each of the girls received $340,000 in stocks, John inherited the bulk of the $10 million estate.  A month earlier The Evening World had reported on John's wealth, unaware of course of his pending inheritance.  His personal worth was already estimated at $1.5 million, his annual income at $75,000 and his "daily income" at $205 (the daily income would equal about $7,350 today).

While his father had been frugal, John G. Wendel was miserly.  And he controlled his five sisters tyrannically.  Terrified that the family fortune would be diluted, he refused to allow them to marry, and put an end to entertainments and most outside socializing.

The New York Times later explained that he "taught them they must not marry or dissipate their stewardship and that publicity was demeaning."  

Wendel's eccentricities went beyond his control of his sisters.  According to Daniel Okrent in his 2003 Great Fortune, he was "something of a paranoid: fearful that disease could enter his body through his feet he stomped around in a custom-made, mutant form of platform shoes, their inch-thick gutta percha soles extended by fenders reaching another full inch in either direction."

If his mother had allowed any concessions at all to modernity at all, he stopped that.  The mansion became a time capsule.  The furnishings were not updated, his sisters' wardrobes grew out of style, mended and re-mended as necessary, and modern conveniences like electricity were disallowed.  (Luckily plumbing had been installed early on in the history of the house.)

A zinc-lined bathtub (with shower) was state-of-the-art when installed.  from the collection of the New York Public Library

Although he said it was his lack of confidence in the police that caused him not to report a robbery in the mansion; it was more likely that he simply did not want strangers coming in.  In either case, when the family closed the house to go to Irvington in 1894, he left caretaker Samuel McKinney to watch over it.  When they returned "it was locked up and McKinney had disappeared.  A quantity of cash and bonds had also vanished," according to a newspaper.  

Years later, on June 8, 1899, The New York Times wrote "When John G. Wendel lost $6,000 in cash and bonds from his home, 444 Fifth Avenue, nearly four years ago, he exhibited less anxiety over the matter than he might have been expected to feel."  The matter would never have been discovered had McKinney not beaten his wife, Rosa.  In retaliation she went to the police and told all.

In January 1899 47-year-old Georgiana Wendel tried to break free of her brother's iron grasp. She escaped to the Park Avenue Hotel.  Apparently to hide her tracks, she checked out on Sunday night, January 22, but retained the key.  The New York Times reported that she "returned quietly" and "having the key in her possession, went to her room without saying anything to the hotel people."

When the suite was given to another guest the following afternoon, she was discovered.  Her brother had her deemed insane and sent temporarily to Bellevue Hospital.

Georgiana was then removed to the Irvington-on-Hudson house where she was in effect held prisoner.  The feisty heiress did not give up easily, however.  She communicated with two friends, Mrs. F. W. Mack and Mrs. Maurice J. Sullivan.  They obtained a writ of habeas corpus to have Georgiana appear in court "to be examined as to her mental condition," according to The New York Times on September 6, 1900.  But she did not appear.

The article noted "Both Mrs. Sullivan and Mrs. Mack had visited the Wendel Residence in Irvington on Aug. 22, but were not allowed to have an interview with Miss Wendel, although she spoke to them from an open window.  The women say they think she is perfectly sane, and that she is restrained of her liberty by her relatives."

The attorneys of John Wendel presented an application to the court stating that Georgiana "is incompetent to manage herself and affairs by reason of loss of memory and understanding."

Judge Smith Lent said he saw no reason why Georgiana had not been brought in for examination.  Wendel's lawyer responded "They do not dare to produce her here!"

Lent ordered her to be produced in court the next day.

When Georgiana did not show up, Judge Lent took the court to the Wendel house in Irvington.  The Times reported "She declared that she was restrained of her liberty by her brother, John G. Wendel, who wanted to get her money."  But sadly, when Wendel testified that he had not seen his sister for nearly two years, Georgiana was deemed "undoubtedly suffering from delusional insanity."

In the meantime, John's peculiarities affected his Manhattan neighbors to the rear.  No. 1 West 39th Street, next to the Wendel carriage house, was owned by Neville P. Jodrell and his wife.  In the spring of 1900 they began remodeling the old brownstone into a modern, American basement plan residence.  The architects included windows on the side wall that opened onto a shaft for ventilation.  Wendel suspected they secretly wanted views into his house.

He retaliated with a wall.  On May 12, 1900 The Times reported he had hired architects J. B. Snook & Sons to erect a foot thick, eight-foot wide wall that would rise about 28 feet "to be build right up against the Thirty-ninth Street house in front of the windows."

Both No. 1 West 39th Street and John Wendel's retaliating wall were gone in 1932 when this photograph was taken.  from the collection of the CUNY Graduate Center Collection, Murray Hill

John would have to refocus his attention from spying neighbors to his relentless sister, Georgiana before long.  She had managed to get the verdict of insanity upset "on the ground of irregularity" and now, in September 1901 she sued her brother, claiming that he had not distributed their father's estate in accordance with the will.  She wanted her rightful share.

Seen at around the time Georgiana sued her brother, the mansion retained its balconies and shutters.  The former garden has fallen into neglect.  photo by Brown Brothers

Georgiana escaped to Europe where she was still living in 1907 when she finally capitulated.  The New York Times reported "A reconciliation was effected.  Miss Georgiana returned willingly to the family roof."

On November 25, 1906 the Colorado Herald Democrat reported on the family's bizarre anachronistic lifestyle.  The article told of the last unimproved lot in the Fifth Avenue business district, the Wendel's former garden, now neglected and barren.  "To the south of the vacant lot stands an old-fashioned red brick house of the type that belonged to the Fifth avenue grandeur of bygone days."

The journalist continued, "Land in that neighborhood is worth more than $10,000 a front foot, and yet this lot has a high board fence around it and lies entirely idle."  Brokers, he said, "were ready to give $600,000" for the lot.  But the Wendel sisters would not give up the garden lot, because, for one thing, it was the only spot where Toby, their dog, could romp.

The far-away publication was not the only one noticing the strange behavior of the mansion's occupants.  The New York Times remarked "Because of his aversion to automobiles and other modern improvements [John Wendel] became known as 'The Hermit of Fifth Avenue.'"

Around 1912 Rebecca Wendel became only sister to successfully break free.   Despite what a newspaper called her brother's "violent opposition," she married clergyman Luther Arthur Swope.  "Thereafter John Wendel discouraged his sisters from going to church," said The Times.

Ella, Georgiana, Mary and Josephine, continued to live in the the antiquated mansion, obeying John's rules.  The New York Times later commented “The sisters dressed in styles of many years ago, lived frugally and simply, and persisted in hanging the family washing in the back yard in defiance of neighbors’ protests," adding that they “never ride in a street car and never in their lives have they been in an automobile.  They never shop in the fashionable district, for things are too expensive there.  They buy all their groceries and supplies in the inexpensive little shops over on Sixth Avenue and make their purchases personally, seldom letting them be delivered but carrying them home themselves and paying for them with cash.  They are quick to see bargains and watch for them like the poorest housewife.”

Josephine died in the spring of 1914, her $3 million estate being divided among her siblings.

John G. Wendel died a few months later, on November 30, leaving an estate valued at $55 million, according to The Real Estate Record & Guide on December 5.  He left control of the family estate in the hands of Rebecca.  Mary became the financial executive for the three sisters in the Fifth Avenue house.

In reporting on John's death The Times said "He lived as simply as a $25 a week clerk with his two [sic] sisters in his big square house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street."  There was no telephone, no electric lights, no conveniences inside.  Not even a sewing machine for mending the clothing.

On February 28, 1915 The New York Times again described the house of the Wendel sisters.  "In Winter only the first two floors and the basement are habitable, because the old furnace does not carry heat well above the second floor."  It mentioned that in the side yard was "an old tree and a dog house, with a turf that has not been cut in thirty years.  There, after dark, so that no prying eyes can spy down from neighboring buildings, the sisters take their exercise."

"With them are two old women servants, and the five old women live curiously oblivious of the New York of the moment.  The riot of fashion, extravagance, joy, mirth, sin crime, pride, and ambition which flows past them on the avenue constantly seems not to have affected them at all."

Self-isolated, the aging women rarely had visitors.  "Of social life the old house has absolutely none.  No outsider has dined there in years.  With a few of the old New York families the Wendels still retain friendly relations, and on very rare occasions they receive a call, but as they never return these calls, and as they rarely call on any one themselves, their visitors become each year fewer and fewer."

Oddly enough, years later The Times would mention "There was very little exchange of affection between the sisters who lived in the same house.  They simply spent their lives side by side."

In October 1922 Mary Eliza Astor Wendel died at the Irvington-on-Hudson estate.  Other than bequests to servants, her $15 million estate was divided among her sisters.

Ella and Georgiana continued on as always.  Their lawyer, Charles G. Koss, explained "They simply wished to live alone with their servants in their old home surroundings, and they lived just like anybody else."  That assertion was arguable.

In 1929 Georgiana was stricken with influenza which developed into pneumonia.  She died on January 18 at the age of 79.  Her death was only discovered by the public when her sisters filed for the administration of her estate.   Not long afterward The Times described No. 442 Fifth Avenue saying, "it has never been changed.  The dining room, parlor and library, it is said, are scrupulously kept in the exact condition in which they were left by the builder of the house, John Wendel."

While everything inside the house remained unchanged, by the late 1920's the balconies had been removed, most likely for safety reasons, and the Fifth Avenue enframements shaved off.  Wendel Family Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Drew University Library

Developers were disheartened when it was announced that “Miss Ella V. von E. Wendel, an elderly woman and worth many millions, will live alone with the old family servants and carry on the traditions of the Wendel family in the old rusty brick mansion at Thirty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue.” 

The 20th century did not change Ella Wendel's wardrobe.  Wendel Family Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Drew University Library

On July 20, 1930 Rebecca A. D. Wendel Swope died, leaving Ella the sole surviving sister and the end of the Wendel line.    Newspaper readers were somewhat shocked, although surprisingly so, when her entire estate was left to the 80-year old Ella with nothing at all left to charity.  

One of the most bizarre chapters in New York's social history was about to close.  Eight months after Rebecca's death, 78-year-old Ella Virginia von E. Wendel suffered a stroke.  She died in the Fifth Avenue house a week later, on March 13, 1931.   Her massive estate had made her the equivalent of a billionaire today.  The Times reported "The real estate accumulated in the name of Wendel is now valued at more than $100,000,000 and the only living creature that was close to the last holder was a French poodle named Tobey."  

In accordance with John G. Wendel's distaste for publicity, there was no crepe hung on the door (nor had there been at the time of his or the other sisters' deaths).  Her funeral was held on March 16.

Little remained of the venerable mansion on December 5, 1934.  from the collection of the New York Public Library

Four years later the Art Deco S. H. Kress & Co. flagship 5-and-10-cent store was completed on the site.  That magnificent structure was demolished in the mid-1980's to make way for Republic National Bank tower.

The glass-and-steel structure towering above the former Knox Hat Building sits on the site of the Wendel mansion.  photo by Nicolson & Gallowy

A door-sized bronze plaque memorializing the Wendel mansion was removed from the Kress Building and installed in the new structure.

Source: http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-lost-john-d-wendel-mansion-442-444.html

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/travel/is-this-the-coolest-resort-in-las-vegas/

Is this the coolest resort in Las Vegas?

Las Vegas (CNN) — One of the historically hippest hotels in Las Vegas is about to kick off a whole new era of cool.

The Palms Casino Resort, a 1,365-room property on Flamingo Road west of the Las Vegas Strip, soon will debut more than $690 million worth of additions and renovations, including new accommodations, restaurants, bars and nightlife, as well as a multimillion-dollar collection of art.

Those millions of dolllars in improvements are designed to make the hotel a hit once again, to recapture the glory days of the early 2000s when reality television shows filmed upstairs, celebrities were as common as blackjacks on the casino floor and every visit to Vegas included a stop at the Palms.

In short, when the new resort brings in performers such as Cardi B, Alicia Keys and Travis Scott to kick off its grand opening weekend on April 4-7, the new owners hope to party like it’s 2001.

Those owners, brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, purchased the property for $312.5 million from TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners in May 2016 and started renovations the following year. By the time the spa opens later this year, the ultimate price tag is expected to exceed $1 billion — a number many consider to be the most expensive refresh in Vegas history.

“It’s a big bet, but a calculated one,” says Jon Gray, who started at the Palms as assistant front desk manager in 2005 and now serves as general manager for the entire resort. “With everything this property has going for it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Palms was even cooler than it was before.”

Sweet digs

The Kingpin Suite features two bowling lanes, a four-person bunk-bed and a price tag of $15,000 per night.

Clint Jenkins for PALMS

From the very beginning, when George Maloof and his family built the resort and opened it in 2001, one of the biggest draws at Palms was its large-format rooms. The Fantasy Tower opened with over-the-top options including a suite with two bowling lanes, another with half a basketball court and multi-story villas with hot tubs cantilevered over the side of the tower.

Popularity spiked in 2002, when one of the suites also served as the backdrop for the twelfth season of MTV’s breakout reality show, “The Real World.”

Recent renovations have taken many of these one-of-a-kind accommodations to new levels. The suite with the bowling alley — the Kingpin Suite — now features a berth-style four-person bunk bed and original artwork that evokes the 1996 film, “Kingpin.” The suite with the basketball court — the Hardwood Suite — has three Murphy beds that emerge from a wall in the gym, a locker room and a loft-style game room. These suites are $15,000 and $20,000 per night, respectively.

The boldest suite of them all: It’s the two-story, 9,000-square-foot Empathy Suite, designed by British artist Damien Hirst in collaboration with Bentel & Bentel. This spectacular space includes two bedrooms, a private massage room, a fitness area, ample living space, heaps of original artwork and one of those cantilevered tubs. The price tag to stay there: $200,000 per weekend.

Even standard hotel rooms have been spruced up as part of the renovation, with new decor from Avenue Interior Design, floor-to-ceiling windows, walk-in showers, original contemporary artwork and 65-inch flat-screen televisions.

Eating it up

The Bistecca Florentina at Vetri Cucina is on the 56th floor of the Ivory Tower.

Courtesy Palms Casino Resort

Another aspect of Palms 2.0: A slew of top-quality restaurants from award-winning chefs such as Marc Vetri, Michael Symon and Bobby Flay.

Symon’s place, Mabel’s BBQ, is the most accessible of the bunch, with half-pound plates of smoked meat for less than $20 a pop. One popular sandwich option is the chopped brisket burrito, which wraps up brisket, onions, salsa verde, Fritos and cheddar sauce in a flour tortilla. More adventuresome eaters gravitate toward crispy pig tails and ears.

The restaurant also has a private supper club named Sara’s that operates like a speakeasy. Because the menu there features meat-heavy French-American cuisine, Symon has dubbed it a “meateasy.”

Vetri Cucina, on the 56th floor of the Ivory Tower, is in intimate 80-seat space with floor-to-ceiling views of the Strip. The menu comprises handcrafted pastas and rustic Italian cuisine such as sweet onion crepes with white truffle fonduta, and Swiss chard gnocchi with brown butter and shaved ricotta. The appetizer of foie gras with pastrami seasoning redefines decadence. For dessert, pistachio flan with milk chocolate gelato is gooey and delicious.

The restaurant represents the first time in 20 years that owner Vetri has replicated the concept of his eponymous Philadelphia eatery. For him, the opportunity simply was too good to pass up.

“Most Vegas restaurants are huge productions; mine is small, intimate, and exactly how I like to do it back home,” he says. “Add to that the fact that we’re on the 56th floor of a resort that is jumping every night, and it’s a pretty exciting time.”

Other new dining options include Scotch 80 Prime, a steakhouse with a dedicated whisky program led by Scotch Master Cody Fredrickson; Send Noodles, a Pan-Asian ramen bar; A.Y.C.E., a buffet organized by flavor and technique instead of cuisine; and Greene St. Kitchen, which features shareable plates. Shark, a seafood restaurant from Flay, and Tim Ho Wan, a local outpost of the famous Hong Kong dim sum house with the same name, are expected to open later this year.

Party central

No resort in modern-day Vegas is complete without a standout party scene, and Kaos, the new dayclub/nightclub at Palms, is unique for a variety of reasons.

For starters, the two-level, 73,000-square-foot dayclub has plenty of places to swim and splash — two main pools (including one with a giant sculpture from Hirst) and 16 private cabana pools. There’s also a seasonal dome that allows the pools to be open year-round, and a retractable glass wall that separates the dayclub from the rest of the venue.

The nightclub, which measures about 29,000 square feet, blends an old-school theater with video screens and other modern technology to create an experience that changes with each song. Part of this technology is a rotating 360-degree DJ booth—Marshmello and Skrillex are two of the DJs who have signed deals to perform over the next few years.

The technology extends beyond the club and up the side of the Ivory Tower in the form of an LED wall, which will stream live shots of the dayclub and nightclub to the outside world, allowing outsiders to get a sense of what they’re missing.

Inside the resort, tucked away near the elevator banks in the Fantasy Tower, another night-time destination has a completely different vibe.

This spot, Mr. Coco, is a luxury cocktail lounge from renowned mixologist Francesco Lafranconi, and pairs exquisite hand-crafted cocktails with live music from a Steinway baby grand piano. Mr. Coco also offers a special Aperitivo Hour that highlights a variety of world-wide aperitifs with more than 30 vermouths and fortified wines.

Art abounds

Finally, no look at the new Palms would be complete without focusing at least briefly on the property’s art collection, which is remarkable for its size, value and diversity.

At last check, the resort displayed pieces from renowned artists such as Hirst, Andy Warhol, Todd James, Jason Revok and Dustin Yellin, to name a few. There’s a Banksy in Greene St. Kitchen and works from Jean-Michel Basquiat in a private dining room at Scotch 80 Prime.

A multimedia piece from Keegan Gibbs and Olivia Steele welcomes guests at the check-in desk with the slogan, “Wish You Were Here!” Some of those same guests walk right past a giant Takashi Murakami acrylic painting on the way to the Fantasy Tower elevators.

Many of these pieces come from the Fertittas’ personal collection. Others, such as a cartoonish mural from DabsMyla in a secret staircase connecting Vetri Cucina to a private lounge and a street-art banner from Felipe Pantone near the entrance to The Pearl theater, were commissioned for the resort.

Another piece done especially for Palms: “Till Death Do Us Part” by Guatemalan-American artist Joshua Vides. This cartoonish chapel is an Instagram-worthy, 800-square-foot black-and-white altar at which lovebirds actually can wed.

Perhaps the most iconic art pieces at Palms are the most visible. British artist Benedict Radcliffe’s neon-orange wire-frame Lamborghini Twin Turbo Countach is “parked” in the main valet, while Hirst’s “The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded),” a triptych that comprises a 13-foot-long tiger shark divided into three parts and suspended in formaldehyde, looms ominously atop the bar in the center of the casino.

This latter sculpture is the first thing visitors see after walking in the front door. In many ways it’s a metaphor for the new Palms itself — bold, intriguing, captivating and most definitely cool.

Matt Villano is a writer and editor based in Healdsburg, California. He has covered Las Vegas since 2003, and he has updated and written 11 guidebooks about the city.

[thepointstudios]

10 essential films for today’s political climate

While drifting off to sleep last night, thoughts scattered between today’s errands and what has been going on here in the States over the past year, I put together a list of some films that have touched me deeply and seem fairly topical today.

Note: Some of these are NOT easy to watch.

1. For understanding the tension between the Muslim world and the West:

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1967) dir by Gillo Pontecorvo

This film focuses on tensions between native Algerians and the occupying French forces during the Algerian War (1954-62). It touches on colonialism, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and a clash between different ways of living.

The best aspect of this film is the way it depicts everyone involved. It does its best to humanize both sides, developing their motivations, societies, and ideals. Never does it criticize or glorify anyone. Instead, it looks to understand where people are coming from and why they make the decisions they do.

The result is an experience where one sympathizes with the people involved and becomes enraged that such a situation exists in the first place! Such a way of perceiving humanity is essential to finding mutual understanding and is every bit as applicable today as it was in the late 1960s.

The Battle of Algiers is available on disc through the Criterion Collection: https://www.criterion.com/films/248-the-battle-of-algiers And streaming through YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play

2. For understanding the tension between races in America and the Black Lives Matter movement:

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) dir by Spike Lee

This is the original film about modern race relations and the consequences of our own prejudices. It highlights the anger harbored over injustices, including those that are unintentional, the lack of trust between those that are different, and the extent of police brutality long before Ferguson brought it to the national discussion.

Do the Right Thing is available on disc through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Do-Right-Thing-Ossie-Davis/dp/B000ICXQTC And streaming through YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play

3. For understanding the tension between corporate America and those who have been laid off:

UP IN THE AIR (2009) dir by Jason Reitman

Underneath the story of love and loneliness, underneath the story of finding one’s way in a new job, there is the story of the modern economic climate. Corporate America is seeing well paid guys in suits lay off those who’s jobs won’t exist anymore. The people being fired will have their lives completely upended with little chance of making that kind of money again, news so difficult to deliver that an outside company takes care of it. The fact that such a company exists is a good indication of the extent of the problem.

Up in the Air is available on disc through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Up-Air-George-Clooney/dp/B00337KM2S And streaming through YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play

4. For understanding the decisions of a military superpower and the moral grey area surrounding them:

THE FOG OF WAR: ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S. MCNAMARA (2003) dir by Errol Morris

This is a very honest film. McNamara tells his life as he sees it without bragging or apologizing, without claiming anything he has done was either right or wrong. McNamara simply tells you his decisions, why he made such decisions at the time, and what he has learned looking back on them. It’s a sobering film to watch with the weight of atrocities carried out by the US, but it’s even more troubling wondering if we’d do anything differently given a second chance. War is not easy.

The Fog of War is available on disc through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Fog-War-Robert-McNamara/dp/B0001L3LUE And streaming through YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play

5. For understanding the dangers of fake news and the propaganda machine:

A FILM UNFINISHED (2010) dir by Yael Hersonski

A glimpse into the Nazi propaganda machine, the unfinished film in question is a documentary on the Warsaw Ghetto. It was designed to lie to the German people about the quality of life of Polish Jews. Hersonski’s documentary shows like no other the dangers of falsifying history and manipulating public opinion by delivering fake news.

A Film Unfinished is available on disc through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Film-Unfinished-Alexander-Beyer/dp/B004EI2NWM And streaming through YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play

6. On dissension and the power of the press:

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (2005) dir by George Clooney

This film highlights exactly why we need a free press. When the government silences ideas like they did in the McCarthy era, a free press can be an important tool of dissent. This is every bit as applicable to today’s political climate as it was to the 1950s.

Good Night, and Good Luck is available on disc through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Night-Luck-Widescreen/dp/B000E1NXJ0 And streaming through YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play

7. A cautionary tale on the product of fascism:

STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) dir by Paul Verhoeven

Buried beneath the cheesy romance and horrendous violence is political satire. The soldiers are all products of a brainwashed society where continuing the fight is what drives them. They don’t think for themselves. They don’t see their enemy as anything more than evil. They are even given a chance for redemption, but they don’t learn anything. They continue the fight. In that manner, this is a very depressing film.

Starship Troopers s available on disc through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Troopers-Jake-Busey/dp/0767802659 And streaming through YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play

8. A cautionary tale of inaction to fascism:

SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1979) dir by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Salo is infamous for being one of the most obscene films ever made. It’s brutal and shocking and devistating. This I expected coming into it. What surprised me the most was how beautifully it was shot and how poignant its message was.

The whole film is a metaphor for a fascist state. It shows how absolute power in the hands of a few (the adults) leads to insanity. But more interesting is the how the others (the children) behave themselves. They are essentially divided into one of three groups at random. The guards follow orders and seem immune to the depravity around them. The perpetrators (chosen for their “gifts”) seem honored to get to do such awful things. And the victims are silent. They don’t talk. They don’t speak up against anything. They encourage each other to shut up an go along with it. And when they are caught breaking rules, they turn on each other. They sell each other out for their own safety, which eventually costs them everything. 

The film is a warning, equating fascism with depravity. Left alone fascism will rape your entire country, force you to eat sh*t, and then take your very life away.

Salo is available on disc through the Criterion Collection: https://www.criterion.com/films/532-salo-or-the-120-days-of-sodom And I really couldn’t find a (legal) stream of this one.

9. For the worst that has fascism has brought the world:

SHOAH (1985) dir by Claude Lanzmann

This is the most important film I’ve ever seen. I’d go as far to say that it is required viewing for all of humanity! No film has ever shaken me as hard or as deeply as Shoah.

Lanzmann’s journey to understand how this could have happened is exactly what was needed to be put to film. Lanzmann comes at the topic from every angle he possibly can. It consists of interviews of survivors, bystanders, and even perpetrators! It’s the most thorough investigation into the Holocaust that has ever been made.

Shoah is a testament to the worst of what humans are capable of. Inaction due to ignorance, hatred, fear or any other reason lets this happen. And it is up to humanity to never forget and never let it happen again. Shoah is available on disc through the Criterion Collection: https://www.criterion.com/films/27968-shoah And streaming on Sundance Now: https://www.sundancenow.com/shoah---the-first-era-part-1/documentary/2314995

10. And finally a ray of hope in light of all this:

THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940) dir by Charles Chaplin

This is probably the least well made film on this list. It is far from Chaplin’s best and makes light of a lot of Hitler’s organization before the full extent of it was known.

However, the final speech at the end is easily one of the greatest speeches ever made. Those 4 minutes make the whole thing worth it. Those 4 minutes are so inspiring and lovely that I will put them as required viewing for all humanity!

You can skip the film if you want, but watch the speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1fMvLbE85E

[chevd-blog]

My Top 100 Favorite Albums of All Time (Part 5: 20 - 11)

20. Hand. Cannot. Erase. – Steven Wilson (2015)

For his fourth solo release, Steven Wilson took inspiration from the real-life story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a young woman who passed away in her London flat in December 2003 and remained undiscovered for more than two years, even despite having family and friends, and having left her television on at the time of her passing. The album follows the story of a fictional woman heavily based on Vincent, ending with her abrupt disappearance. With a stylistic nod to prog pioneers like Rush and Yes, as well as the powerful guest vocals of Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb, Hand. Cannot. Erase. serves as a poignant examination of the isolation and alienation of modern urban life.

Prime cuts: "Home Invasion / Regret #9", "Routine"

  19. Absolution – Muse (2003)

Bolstered by the success of the lead single "Time Is Running Out", Absolution is the album that first gained Muse major mainstream recognition as a band to watch. There aren't many hints of their later excessive, over-the-top tendencies here— though "Butterflies & Hurricanes" does contain a piano section which aptly demonstrates Muse's appreciation of classical music. Instead, this is one of Muse's more low-key and easy-to-listen efforts, demonstrating the prowess of a band that could be content with crafting hauntingly beautiful melodies ("Sing for Absolution", "Blackout", or "Ruled by Secrecy" all come to mind), or simply shredding (as on "Stockholm Syndrome"). Sometimes, less is more, and simplicity is just better.

Prime cuts: "Stockholm Syndrome", "Butterflies & Hurricanes"

  18. Core – Stone Temple Pilots (1992)

At the beginning of their musical career, Stone Temple Pilots was another in a lengthy list of bands that benefitted from the exposure afforded them by the Seattle grunge explosion in the early 1990s. They spent years dogged by accusations of sounding a bit too much like Pearl Jam, before they eventually managed to develop a more distinctive voice that distanced themselves from anyone else. That isn't to say that their early material is bad, though; on the contrary, their first album, Core, is hands down my favorite of theirs. I don't think of it as derivative, either; rather, I appreciate it for what it is. Like most of the alt-rock at the time, there is a dim, dingy feeling about it— but it's all channeled through a sunny production, reflective of their San Diego roots. There's more California here than Washington. That makes for an album which is oddly upbeat about being grungy, which I find rather appealing.

Prime cuts: "Plush", "Wicked Garden"

  17. The Downward Spiral – Nine Inch Nails (1994)

There is no album that encapsulates my high school years quite like The Downward Spiral. Which probably says something terrible about me, because— with all due respect to Trent Reznor, but let's be honest here— this is a seriously fucked up album. This album is what it sounds like to slowly be driven into the ground, day by day, until you are ground down into little more than a cold, numb machine made of rotting meat, just begging for the sweet release of death. This album is how it sounds to gradually become an automaton, going through all the motions, but truthfully no longer giving a fuck. This is nihilism incarnate. And I've been on that brink myself, more times than I can count, driven by a sense of alienation from the hostile outside world, and it never gets any easier. But at least through the rough patches, I've had The Downward Spiral to reflect my turmoil. When I first encountered this album, I immediately adopted "Heresy" as my personal anthem— a song that expressed perfectly to my repressive Bible Belt surroundings just how I felt about their precious 'Good Book'. I buried all my vulnerabilities and my pain beneath a mechanical visage, as modeled in "The Becoming", and I grew a thicker skin. I gravitated to this album, and (at least in my head) eventually embodied this album, specifically out of spite; I recognized it as everything the religious conservatives hate about our culture, and I had no greater desire at the time than to piss off a world that had rejected me. I'm happy to report growing out of that phase of my life, for the most part. I still have occasional episodes where I stare longingly into the abyss, and ponder jumping in. But the power this album has had, to take the chaotic tempest of negative emotions inside of me and give them form, is awesome. Ironically, I think this album has actually prevented me from following through on several occasions, just by allowing me to work through my angst and get all of that built-up poison out of my system in a constructive way. Now that's power.

Prime cuts: "Closer", "Hurt"

  16. Altered State – Tesseract (2013)

Following the departure of lead singer Dan Tompkins, Tesseract went through a period of searching for the right person to replace him, beginning with Elliot Coleman's short-lived turn at the microphone, but ultimately settling on Ashe O'Hara. Perhaps it was kismet that it was during O'Hara's time in Tesseract that Altered State was recorded, as the new voice also heralded a new direction. O'Hara's silken voice was obviously best suited for clean vocals; all of Tompkins' guttural screaming went right out the window. That made emulating peers like Periphery essentially impossible, which also provided the band with an opportunity to reinvent themselves, tighten their sound, and be more adventurous (such as on the track "Of Reality: Calabi-Yau", where they underscore their blend of palm-muted heavy metal with the extremely unexpected wail of a saxophone, and actually pull it off). Consisting of four multi-song suites (Of Matter, Of Mind, Of Reality, and Of Energy), the album also contains extremely dense metaphysical lyrical material to match its heightened musicality. In combination, all of these new circumstances result in Altered State being nothing short of a miraculous metamorphosis for the band— Tesseract in a literal altered state.

Prime cuts: "Of Matter: Proxy", "Of Mind: Nocturne"

  15. Mer de Noms – A Perfect Circle (2000)

Mer de Noms is a cryptic album, in the same way that Tool albums generally are. Furthermore, this is the only album of A Perfect Circle's where I really feel there's an apt comparison, if not in sound, then in attitude. Setting aside the music for a moment— can we talk about how much I geeked out over the band actually inventing their own arcane-looking alphabet to use in their liner notes? I was a nerdy teenager at the time I obtained this album, and being a lover of puzzles, naturally I decrypted it and then adopted it for my own use for encoding secret messages in my notebooks. But, I digress. What makes the music so interesting here, after listening to Tool for so long, is Maynard's voice being channeled into music with a completely different energy. Tool is logical, cerebral, and quite masculine; APC is much more of an emotional experience. That goes even for the harder-edged songs like "Judith", where Maynard's cry of "Fuck your God!" is intended less as a slight toward religion in general than as a frustrated outburst from a person who had watched his devout mother paralyzed in an accident when he was a child, and who was astounded that such a trial did not cause her to lose her faith. With nearly all of the song titles being names (hence the album's title, which translates to "sea of names" in French), much of the puzzle presented by this album comes from familiarity with the eponymous subjects; some are Biblical or legendary, while others are somehow personal connections to the band. But regardless of how much the listener may know about the myth of Orestes, the music is still a reward unto itself.

Prime cuts: "Judith", "Orestes"

  14. Ten – Pearl Jam (1991)

You know how certain songs are attached to memories or sensations so strongly, that you can't hear them without replaying those other associations in your head? Pearl Jam's Ten is like that for me. Yes, the entire album. It's an album that makes me feel the cool, crisp autumns of northern Georgia where I grew up, and see the leaves turning, and smell the hickory smoke of roadside boiled peanut vendors. It's an album that I see in dark reddish colors— maroon, sienna, burgundy. When I listen to "Black", I remember staying home from school for two weeks in 2001 due to a bad case of pneumonia, and the flannel blankets, and spending my daytime watching old episodes of SNL from the early 90s. When I listen to "Garden", I remember quiet, rainy nights in my on-campus apartment during my first year of college, just sitting in the dark after my roommates had gone to bed, drinking a cold glass of milk while watching the rain dance and glitter in the outside light with the windows narrowly slatted. When I listen to "Jeremy"— well, of course, that song makes me remember how terribly I was bullied all through middle school and ninth grade, and how reliant I was on that song to help me through one of the most miserable times of my life. (Seriously. This is another album I credit with literally keeping me alive.) I know none of this is concrete or tangible to anyone else but me, but… this is something that frustrates me about lists like this when music journalists write them. By the nature of their publication, they can't focus on the intangible impressions they get, because they're supposed to write about universally-appreciable things. In this case… I can't do that. Everyone already knows it's a goddamned brilliant album. But these impressions, and the way they make me feel— they're so strong here that they're basically half of the album's appeal to me, as far as I'm concerned. This is just an album that I've known so long, that it is deeply ingrained in me.

Prime cuts: "Jeremy", "Alive"

  13. Master of Puppets – Metallica (1986)

I was introduced to Metallica (and heavy metal itself) in ninth grade by a classmate of mine named John. On one fateful extended class field trip to Mentone, Alabama, for a trust-building workshop, John lent me his copy of Master of Puppets to listen to during leisure time. I didn't know it at the time, as I sat on my cot in that cabin in the forest and listened to my Discman, but there was absolutely no better album to initiate me to metal. It was revelatory. Up to that time, I was still finding my taste. I had never heard music so hard-edged, or drumbeats so fast, or guitarwork so intricate before. And 8-minute songs? Being a prog rock fan who now routinely listens to songs two to three times that length, it's funny to think about in retrospect, but when I was that age, my attention span wasn't used to anything longer than 5 minutes. I was used to the stuff being played on the radio at the time— stuff like Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray. It should be a testament to how much of an earthshaking experience it was for me, that I still even remember the trip to Mentone (which was otherwise pretty forgettable, honestly). When I got back to Georgia, one of the first things I did was buy my own copy. There are eight songs here, and not a single weak one among them. Lars Ulrich's drums are on point. Kirk Hammett's guitar is on point. The lyrics, and James Hetfield's vocals, are on point. To this day, I still get goosebumps listening to the opening of "Damage Inc.", or the instrumental "Orion" as it slows down into a more laidback tune, led by the incomparable bass grooves of the late Cliff Burton. And in addition to being technically impressive, it was a cathartic album, too; this was the album that first allowed me to tap into my inner adolescent rage, and to release it. "Fuck it all and fucking no regrets", as they say. Wherever you are, John… thanks.

Prime cuts: "Master of Puppets", "Battery"

  12. Superunknown – Soundgarden (1994)

It's sad for me to write this now, still only a few months out from Chris Cornell's passing. He was a hero to me when I was a teenager, and this was my first encounter with his music. First I got into Nirvana, then Pearl Jam, and then gradually I got into Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. Out of all the releases between the four of them, Superunknown is and probably always will be my personal favorite, even over Nevermind and Ten. The combination of Cornell's unearthly voice and Kim Thayil's guitar stirred something inside me that the others just couldn't quite reach. Maybe it's because, at the time, Soundgarden had been together longer than the other three bands, and they were able to reap the rewards of knowing and playing with each other for a longer time. Whatever the reason, it just felt (and still feels) to me like one of the most musically mature albums to come out of the whole grunge scene. And the sad thing is, I think a lot of people pay attention to it because of "Black Hole Sun" being such a gargantuan hit, and undersell the rest of the album. There are lesser known songs here, like the title track, or "Fresh Tendrils", or "Like Suicide", that are absolute sparkling gems. To listen to those songs, and to know now that the moment has passed, and that chemistry can never be truly replicated again with Cornell gone… it's really disheartening. But at least they left behind one hell of a masterpiece.

Prime cuts: "Black Hole Sun", "Superunknown"

  11. The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd (1973)

Did you really expect me to leave this one off my list? Pink Floyd has been showing up on my list with a fair amount of frequency, and I saved the best one for last. I mean, it's almost ridiculous how clichéd it is to talk about this album as an example of a musical tour de force. It's practically to the point where I can just say the words "great album", and this will be one of the ones that people automatically think about. And as I sit here writing, trying to come up with something to say to rationalize my choice, I realize— there's probably no other album in my life which has served more as a soundtrack to the truly awesome moments. I've painted to this album, and felt the invigorating high of inspiration. I've synched it up with The Wizard of Oz, not once, but twice. I've played it while taking a breathtaking car ride through Badlands National Park in South Dakota. I've listened to it while watching a total solar eclipse. There's no other album that fits these kinds of experiences as well. It's an album that compresses time with its mellow nature, and causes 42 minutes to disappear so rapidly you can scarcely understand where they've gone. It's an album that simultaneously makes you feel insignificant, as a tiny human in a grand cosmos billions of lightyears and aeons large, and important, as someone fortunate enough to bear witness to the splendor of the universe. In short, about as close to perfection as an album can aspire to be.

Prime cuts: "Money", "Time"

At last, we’re down to the final 10. Which ones made the cut? Find out the first half tomorrow, with Part 6, featuring #10 - #6!

[adoranymph]

So. I wanted to keep up a momentum of positivity up given current world circumstances, which means I figured it was time I expressed and explored my love for family tropes in stories, found or otherwise.

They say you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. On a genetic level that’s indisputable, but what if apart from that, your friends are your family? I just love that stuff, personally. Actually, I love stories that examine and enrich family bonds in general, biological or not. And today, I’d like to share a few (a fair few) of them with you, if for no other reason than to try and spread around some warm-fuzzies instead of other, nastier things.

If we’re talking a specific, earliest moment that I recall having a strong reaction to a family bond, I’d have to say it’d be after reading what became my favorite installment in the Harry Potter series, Prisoner of Azkaban. I specifically remember thinking, “Aw, Harry finally has an adult in his life he can see as family.” I mean, yes, the Weasleys were already there in his corner, but Sirius Black had a more personal connection to Harry’s parents that gave this sense of him being able to connect more with the family he’d lost with what little connection he had gained that was left. And yeah, include Lupin in that too, while we’re at it.

And that love for that trope has just grown more with time with the amount of media that I’ve consumed. Found families, blood families, families struggling, families coming together, I eat that up with a big hot fudge sundae spoon. For as long as I can remember, I’ve tailored 99% of my stories around these types of plot points, perhaps with more intensity after having lost my own parents. If only because my fulfillment from it always comes from wanting to see more stories that feature family and family bond themes. Moreover, the opportunity to experience them in fictional contexts offers differing perspectives on family and what family means to others. Which I also enjoy.

With the Fate series, for example, starting with Fate/Zero, the respective relationships of father-and-son in Kiritsugu and Shirou Emiya (which honestly gave me Harry Potter and Sirius Black vibes even though theirs is a relationship far different from what’s here), and father-and-daughter in Kiritsugu and Illya (which I melt at for the sake of being a father-daughter relationship) was the initial thing that most had me immediately hooked, in addition to the concept of historic and legendary heroes from across time coming together in the modern era for a battle royale for the Holy Grail. With all of that though, and everything else great about Fate/Zero (which is, yeah, everything), you have a shoe-in for what still stands as my favorite anime. Although the family moments are minimal, not just in Zero but in its sequel Stay Night as well, the moments themselves are powerful enough to stand out and be effective in spite of that. More than that, but they’re written so well, they transcend any tropiness they would have had in the hands of another creator. Zero in particular.

I think part of that comes from how much Fate and the Type-Moon universe seem to emphasize how broken the family relationships of mages and those related to the supernatural are, which in turn makes the ones that still manage to radiate love all the more precious. Especially in terms of Kiritsugu, his wife Irisviel, and their daughter Illya. Not wanting to repeat myself too much, I’ll distill it down to this: the fact that Kiritsugu’s relationships with them is tailor-made for tragedy might, on paper, seem almost contrived, but it’s Kiritsugu’s character, and Irisviel’s too, that highlight how dearly they love each other, throwing any contrivances about it out the window.

You can read more about it in my Type-Moon post. Suffice to say, I could talk about this stuff for hours, days even perhaps, and that’s just about Kiritsugu’s family. There’re also the Tohsakas and the Matous who all have their varying degrees of screwed-uppedness that still manage to produce people who are loving and caring in their own ways, from child abandonment as a result of a skewed view of fatherhood to just straight-up abuse. Which unfortunately brings to light more twisted examples of my beloved father-daughter trope that really gets under my skin, not unlike a very cold example of this in V. A. Schwabb’s This Savage Song and the unfortunate fact that the main heroine’s father never grew to love his daughter despite his wife’s reassurances that he would. Which is just sad without having to go into much further detail.

Same with Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)/ Fullmetal Alchmeist: Brotherhood. That franchise had the audacity to take my most beloved family trope, the father-daughter relationship, and mangle it (literally as well as figuratively now that I think about it) with the arc of State Alchemist Shou Tucker and his daughter, Nina. Desperate to keep his State Alchemist license, he uses his daughter Nina and their pet dog Alexander in an alchemic experient to create a talking chimera, by fusing the two of them together into one being, making for one of the most equally horrific and tragic scenes I’ve ever seen.

And yet again, these perversions of family are no less enjoyable than those of ones built far more genuinely and conventionally on love and care. Both are satisfying in their own way, to see not only places where love lives, but also places where we know love should live but doesn’t, which makes us, the readers, or the audience, want all the more to scoop these characters up and give them the hugs they deserve.

Funimation

Funimation

Not to say that Fullmetal is all about broken families. In fact, it’s more about the functioning ones that still manage to get torn apart. First you have the main plotline of the Elric brothers, Edward and Alphonse (Ed and Al). They committed the taboo of “human transmutation” in their attempt to resurrect their mother from the dead. For committing this taboo, they pay a heavy price: Ed, literally an arm and a leg, and Al, his entire body, leaving his soul to remain tethered in the living world by nothing more than a blood seal on a suit of armor. The brothers struggle with their efforts to set things right, and along with what happens to Nina, encounter their estranged father, though in the 2003 version the character arcs that form in those vary to those in the Brotherhood reboot.

In both versions though, their meeting Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes and his family, his wife Gracia and daughter Elecia, plays out the exact same tragic way, resulting in one of the worst sucker-punches of a death, and anyone who’s seen the show(s) knows what I mean. There’s even something of a family (if a dysfunctional one) in that of the homunculi (villainous ones in this case, unlike the homunculi in the Fate series). They might be named for the Seven Deadly Sins, but in their respective incarnations between the 2003 version and the reboot version, they develop in various ways, due in no small part to their relationships with each other. And part of what makes a family, in my experience, is nurturing the character of those with whom you are close with your own relationship to them. Hence why blood ties aren’t all that make a family, and why the concept of found families rock.

An anime I just finished recently, March Comes In Like a Lion, a pretty chill show, but still very emotionally engaging, (and chill is a high priority on what I’m looking for right now, which shouldn’t be surprising–save of course for my catching up on Season 3 of Castlevania), involves a young boy, Rei Kiriyama, roped into the fate of becoming a shogi prodigy when he loses his parents and little sister and is taken in by a shogi family as a foster son. The father was a friend of his father’s, but unlike his father, pursued the profession of playing shogi seriously, and unfortunately he was one of those fathers who meted out his affection to his children based on how good they got at the thing he was good at.

Which brings out the dark side of the found family, when Rei proves to be far more talented than either the daughter or the son of that family. He begins to see himself as “in the way”, as the daughter in particular takes her anger with her father out on him, sometimes in violent ways. This is further complicated by the fact that in his early formative years he appeared to have developed a crush on her despite the way she treated him, and continues to treat him throughout the majority of the anime.

Thankfully, where the story starts is with Rei, now in high school and now living on his own as a pro shogi player prodigy, and the relationship he’s developed with a family of threes sisters who just recently lost their mother. With them, he finds all the wonderful things a family can be, certainly the standard to which all found families should measure up to. He finds love and warmth that he’d not only been starving for, but had taught himself not to even hope to expect in his life going forward. An affirmation of where love can be found, not always with blood, and not always with where you thought you’d find it, which will never fail to be an incredibly moving thing to me.

The struggles of a young pro shogi player interlaced with the interpersonal struggles of the characters both inside and outside of the world of shogi, was incredibly satisfying on the emotional palate. I loved it, and it was definitely getting me through this difficult time at present, along with how much keeping in touch (without touching) my own family and friends has been. It’s one of those shows that shares both such dark struggle and passionate triumph and hope, and I’m glad that I chose now of all times to get around to watching it (though initially I chose it because it was the month of March, and it’s called March Comes In Like a Lion so ha ha).  Regardless, while I can’t speak for the manga as I haven’t read that, I recommend the anime to anyone who’s interested, and who’s anxious right now and needs something to binge in this time of self-isolation and still get the warm-fuzzies.

Incidentally, Rei is among a small group of fictional characters, all of who have hit particularly close to home with me. He’s almost a boy version of me: his introversion, his experiences with depression (some of the thoughts he had circling in his head while struggling with that were, a lot of times, verbatim the same as the ones I’ve had, which gave me chills if nothing else), the fact that he had to learn how to “survive” school not because school itself was hard, but just because of the ostracizing social structure, that he lost his blood family and went to live with another, that he wraps himself up in something to cut off the pain that everything else causes him (with him it’s shogi, with me it’s writing)–these things all resonated with my own experiences of losing and regaining family. So much so that at this point, I’ve set aside an idea for doing a separate post on his character. You know, when I get to a few more of the hundreds of other post drafts I have on the backburner.

The shounen anime Kimestu No Yaiba takes the traditional shounen trope of “main character loses whole family to tragedy and that sets him on the hero’s journey he probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise”, and creates what I’d consider the most emotionally engaging shounen I’ve ever watched (and this coming from the same young lady who got herself hooked on Fairy Tail after putting it off for months and months because she told herself she’d never fall into the “shounen trap”). Not only is it done by the godly studio ufotable who put Fate on the map with Fate/Zero, scored by one of my most favorite composers, Yuki Kajiura, but it also features one of the most emotionally engaging shounen fights I have ever seen, and that primarily comes from its focus on the family bond between the main protagonist, Tanjiro Kamado, and his sister-turned-demon, Nezuko, and how searching in the memories of his father, he rediscovers a technique to use that helps him survive a fight that would have otherwise killed him and his sister both.

Fruits Basket (both the original anime adaptation from 2001, and the the reboot coming out now) takes the concept of a family curse and examines how that affects certain of its members, and the ripple effect that comes from one outsider–a young girl grieving the death of her mother–deciding to befriend him through that anime “quirk of fate”. The curse itself being certain members of the family turning into animals of the Chinese zodiac when under stress or…hugged by a member of the opposite sex. Classic. And at first, yeah, is it a bit silly, but then you see how it’s affected those members of the family born with the Zodiac spirits of this curse. Like how one of them has to pretend that he isn’t his mother’s son, because his mother was horrified by the fact that the first time she held her child, he turned into a rabbit, and so, to ease her suffering, she had her memories of her having giving birth to him erased. Which gives credence to the idea that any idea can work, as long it’s executed well. Whether an idea unique will mean nothing if the idea itself is executed poorly.

And the criminally underrated anime film, Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms, tells a fantasy story of a young woman who follows the emotional arc of discovering what it means to be a mother. Maquia, one of a race of immortal people called the Iorph, is separated from the rest of her kind after a  mortal human kingdom attacks them for their power. Alone upon her escape from capture, she comes across a mortal human family who’re all dead, save for their newborn baby boy, and she takes it upon herself to raise the boy as his mother. Along the way she learns what it means to be a mother, the pain that comes with watching a loved one grow old and die and leaving you behind. To say that I felt things in that story would be grave understatement. And it comes from a place of genuine familial emotion: the film’s director and writer, Mari Okada, drew from her own relationship to her own mother.

Even in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the idea of the found family and the idea of family in general isn’t lost on its writers, particularly in regards to Guardians of the Galaxy, which touches not only families, but family abuse. Never mind that it involves people from alien worlds, cyborg assassins, and the like,  it still manages to have a very human resonance. And of particular note is a part of Natasha Romanov’s character arc, and how much she had come to view the Avengers as a family, while at the same time trying to repay the debt of all the lives she’d taken by saving lives instead. Which results in interactions like the very touching sort of brother-sister banter between her and Steve Rogers (that’s right, a male-female pair I don’t actually ship).

In the world of books, The Girl at Midnight, and Daughter of Smoke and Bone both involve found family subplots and explore those in their own creative ways.

We have Echo in The Girl at Midnight, raised by a group of bird-ish people called Avicen, and she gets to live in the attic of a library (lucky), and play a little with the magic she otherwise wouldn’t have gotten to if she hadn’t ended up adopted into her situation. I’m nearly finished with the sequel, The Shadow Hour, and we did get a glimpse of the life she had before: she’d run away from her birth mother, who was an abusive drunk to her daughter, which hurts on the very fundamental fact that we are born in the world with the idea hardwired in there somewhere that our mothers are supposed to love us unconditionally, and certainly never hurt us. It hurt me in my own way too, as my father was an alcoholic, and while he wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t abusive either, just more of a lost soul, I suppose, which can carry its own problems trying to function as a parent.

While I wasn’t too keen on the vision Echo has of her past characterizing her mother as the sort of abusive drunk you’d find…eh…like, in an amateur play, it could be argued that the idea was that the vision was based on her memory of her mother, and thus her perception of her at the time. Which was yeah, a mother who spouted nothing but verbal abuse at her daughter and hit her, and for seemingly no reason. And later on, when she discusses it with one of her close friends, not only does her friend tell her that it’s not from whom we are born that defines us, but also that even if her mother had her complicated reasons for why she was the way she was as a parent, the simple fact that’s irrelevant, and there’s never a “good” or “justifiable” reason to hurt a child. That it’s one’s own makes it all the more saddening.

For Daughter of Smoke and Bone, we have another eccentric waif in Karou, raised by a family of people called “chimaera” (not like the ones from Fullmetal Alchemist, these are a mishmash of different animal parts, sometimes human parts too). It too involves a complicated sort of father-daughter relationship that unfortunately seems to have ended in tragedy (I’ve only finished book one), as the slowburn story meticulously reveals that our heroine is being hidden to keep her safe from a threat that stems from a grand, epic, interdimensional war between chimaeras and angels. Last I saw, it looked like the father figure was probably dead, and unfortunately he and Karou hadn’t parted the last time they saw each other on the…best of terms, to put it mildly. Like with Kiritsugu Emiya’s estrangement from his daughter Illya in Fate, this one too hurts in that same, “what could have been, but never will be” way.

Then you’ve got a graphic novels like Saga, written by Brian K. Vaughn and illustrated by Fiona Staples (published by Image Comics), which, again, I was drawn to merely on the premise of it being about a male and female of two different alien races on opposing sides going AWOL together and ending up having a baby daughter along the way. I haven’t got too much into graphic novels aside from this and Monstress (also published by Image Comics), written by Marjorie Liu and illustrated by Sana Takeda (which deals with dead mother and mother-daughter issues against a very dark fantasy setting), but from what I’ve read so far, that premise has delivered as far as emotionally anchoring me to the story is concerned. Couple forced to flee for their lives + newborn introduced to the situation = my interest.

And that’s basically what it boils down to, beyond merely it’s emotional fulfillment for me. Apart from the family and friends I have found in my own life, it’s one other way I can regain something of what I lost in the passing of my parents. Even more than that, it’s a way for me to process it, after initially refusing to process it at all, especially when it comes to my own writing. In some ways, the novel I’m currently working on, the crux of which involves a father-daughter relationship, is a wish fulfillment of my own for the difficult months I spent with my father, between when my mother died and then when he himself died. Which even here is something that’s difficult for me talk about so straightforwardly, so the catharsis I get from writing about these things is far more valuable and useful to me. Even the deconstructional value of the dysfunctional versions of any parent-child relationship, not just father-daughter ones.

Exploring these themes both in writing and reading nurtures feelings and reinforces how important those feelings are. Found families in particular can be a lense through which we can begin to view people who are not related to us by blood still as kin, if only for the fact that we all are human. Family themes engender hope, even in the case of dysfunctional families, and it’s moving to see families who work to earn each other’s love as well as love unconditionally, depending on circumstances. Especially when death and danger threaten to tear those bonds apart, only for those bonds to emerge stronger than ever.

In times like these, don’t forget those you care about the most, or even those who you know who don’t receive as much care as they should, and reach out if you can (and thanks to the internet, reaching out remotely isn’t out of the question). The simple act of looking out for someone else is one of the most beautiful things about being human in my opinion, more so that it’s not even an exclusively human thing, which serves to draw we humans closer to each other. It’s a precious thing, and losing that would be a tragedy indeed in the long run. So as I press onward with this thing called living from day to day, I’ll keep seeking new family dynamics that inspire me with joy, with sorrow, and with hope. Particularly the hope that I’m not the only one who finds value in seeking these out in stories far and wide, and learning from them, and taking them sincerely to heart.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make sure I’m keeping up with the currently running Kakushigoto, incidentally an anime about a father who draws adult manga and tries to keep the nature of his profession a secret from his young daughter. Hijinks and heartwarmingness I’m sure are in store. In the meantime, also enjoy this very emotional Fullmetal Alchemist AMV, as well as a revisit to the “Shelter” music video by Porter Robinson. Because fathers and daughters.

  Family Bonds So. I wanted to keep up a momentum of positivity up given current world circumstances, which means I figured it was time I expressed and explored my love for family tropes in stories, found or otherwise.

[thisdaynews]

How Kamala Harris Charmed the 1 Percenters

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-kamala-harris-charmed-the-1-percenters/

How Kamala Harris Charmed the 1 Percenters

SAN FRANCISCO—In the summer of 1999, in the monied Napa Valley north of here, a bejeweled bride rode sidesaddle on a speckled horse into what the press would label “the Bay Area’s version of an outdoor royal wedding.” The lavish nuptials of Vanessa Jarman and oil heir Billy Getty—replete with red carpet, hundreds of flickering votives, and “a fair amount of wine,” according to one deadpan attendee—featured a 168-person guest list stocked with socialites and scions, philanthropists and other assorted glitterati.

This coterie of the chosen included, as well, a 34-year-old prosecutor who was all of a year and a half into her job in the San Francisco district attorney’s office. And she wasn’t just some celebrity’s all but anonymous plus-one. She was featured in the photo coverage of the hot-ticket affair, smiling wide, decked out in a dark gown with a drink in hand.

Story Continued Below

“Kamala Harris,” the caption read, “cruised through the reception.”

Well before she was a United States senator, or the attorney general of California, Harris was already in with the in-crowd here. From 1994, when she was introduced splashily in the region’s most popular newspaper column as the paramour of one of the state’s most powerful politicians, to 2003, when she was elected district attorney, the Oakland- and Berkeley-bred Harris charted the beginnings of her ascent in the more fashionable crucible of San Francisco. In Pacific Heights parlors and bastions of status and wealth, in trendy hot spots, and in the juicy, dishy missives of the variety of gossip columns that chronicled the city’s elite, Kamala Harris was a boldface name.

Born and raised in more diverse, far less affluent neighborhoods on the other side of the Bay, Harris was the oldest daughter of immigrant parents, reared in a family that was intellectual but not privileged or rich. As a presidential contender, running against opponents who openly disdain elites and big money, she has emphasized not only her reputation as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor but also the humbleness of her roots—a child of civil rights activism, of busing, “so proud,” as she said at the start of her speech announcing her candidacy, “to be a child of Oakland.”

Her rise, however, was propelled in and by a very different milieu. In this less explored piece of her past, Harris used as a launching pad the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society, navigating early on this rarefied world of influence and opulence, charming and partying with movers and shakers—ably cultivating relationships with VIPs who would become friends and also backers and donors of every one of her political campaigns, tapping into deep pockets and becoming a popular figure in a small world dominated by a handful of powerful families. This stratum of San Francisco remains a profoundly important part of her network—including not just powerful Democratic donors but an ambassador appointed by President Donald Trump who ran in the same circles.

Harris, now 54, often has talked about the importance of having “a seat at the table,” of being an insider instead of an outsider. And she learned that skill in this crowded, incestuous, famously challenging political proving ground, where she worked to score spots at the some of the city’s most sought-after tables. In the mid- to late ’90s and into the aughts, the correspondents who kept tabs on the comings and goings of the area’s A-listers noted where Harris was and what she was doing and who she was with. As she advanced professionally, jumping from Alameda County to posts in the offices of the district and city attorneys across the Bay, she was a trustee, too, of the museum of modern art and active in causes concerning AIDS and the prevention of domestic abuse, and out and about at fashion shows and cocktail parties and galas and get-togethers at the most modish boutiques. She was, in the breezy, buzzy parlance of these kinds of columns, one of the “Pretty Thangs.” She was a “rising star.” She was “rather perfect.” And she mingled with “spiffy and powerful friends” who were her contemporaries as well as their even more influential mothers and fathers. All this was fun, but it wasn’t unserious. It was seeing and being seen with a purpose, society activity with political utility.

Because three years after the Getty wedding, in mid-2002, Harris called Mark Buell. She knew him because Harris was friends with his stepdaughter, Summer Tompkins Walker, the daughter of Susie Tompkins Buell, the major Democratic donor. Harris told him she wanted to run for district attorney. At first, Buell was skeptical, he said recently when we got together for dinner at an old Union Square haunt called Sam’s; he considered Harris “a socialite with a law degree,” he explained over salmon and sauvignon blanc. The more Harris talked, though, the more impressed he became. By the end of their conversation, Buell offered to be her finance chair. His first piece of advice: To knock off an incumbent in what would be a nasty, three-candidate fight, Harris was going to need to raise an early, eye-popping amount of money. Buell saw her friends, people he knew, too, as an asset to deploy. “So we put together a finance committee that primarily was young socialite ladies,” he told me. The group included Vanessa Getty, by then one of Harris’ closest pals, and Susan Swig—head-turning surnames in the city’s choicest circles. Buell’s directive: “I said, ‘No one has ever raised more than $150,000 for a D.A.’s race, totally. I want this group to raise $100,000 by the first reporting period.”

Outfitted in sharp designer suits and strands of bright pearls, Harris kickstarted her drive to become San Francisco’s top cop—in its ritziest, most prestigious locale. Predominantly white Pacific Heights—hills upon hills, gobsmacking views of the Golden Gate strait, mansions built and bought with both new tech money and old gold rush cash—is home to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom and others, one of the country’s foremost concentrations of politicians and their patrons. Including the Buells. In late 2002, this became the campaign routine, Buell recalled: “Thirty to 50 people in a room … cocktails … a nice introduction by the host.”

And then?

“Kamala would make her pitch.”

And then?

“We’d go around with the bag and collect the money.”

“A well-qualified prosecutor with a lot of ties to the Pacific Heights crowd, Harris should have no trouble raising money,” theSan Francisco Chroniclenoted that November, and so it was: By the close of the calendar year, Harris had raised $100,560—nearly 23 percent of which came from the three ZIP codes of Pacific Heights. It’s a roster of early donors that reads like a who’s who of the city. “That crowd really got her started to be taken seriously,” Buell said.

These people who seeded the start of Harris’ political career got something in return as well. “You always had the feeling that she was going somewhere,” Dede Wilsey told me. Wilsey is a stalwart fundraiser and a philanthropist, the widow of real estate bigwig Alfred Wilsey, and a Republican who nonetheless is a Harris supporter and friend. “You might want to go along for that ride, too.”

Harris, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story, put her headquarters in the Bayview, a poor neighborhood six or so miles south of Pacific Heights and a world away, and she would earn the backing of a swath of the city’s black, Chinese and LGBT leaders. But in January of 2003, she also was on the cover of theNob Hill Gazette, the monthly paper of record of San Francisco society—one of the faces in a collage of people deemed to be the crème de la crème.

Harris, said theGazette, “may be our next D.A.”

Eleven months later, it was true.

***

“… Kamala Harris, an Alameda Co. deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life,” Herb Caen wrote in his column in theSan Francisco Chronicleon March 22, 1994, making public her romantic relationship with Willie Brown, who was still married (albeit long estranged), 30 years older than Harris and by then approaching a decade and a half into his unprecedented reign as speaker of the California State Assembly. “She’s a woman, not a girl,” Caen continued in his signature three-dot style. “And she’s black …” Beyond the wince-worthy language, it’s hard to imagine in that time and space a more spotlit debut.

Caen, for his part, was at the tail end of a nonpareil, nearly 60-year career. Six days a week, he two-finger-typed a thousand or so of the most-read words in San Francisco. “If he put your name in boldface, you’d get calls from everyone you knew saying, ‘I saw you in Herb Caen today,’” Jesse Hamlin, one of his former assistants, told me. “If your name wasn’t in there, you weren’t anybody,” longtime local press agent Lee Houskeeper added. In his columns, Caen called Harris “attractive, intelligent and charming.” He called her a “steadying influence” for Brown. And in December of 1995, when Brown was elected mayor, Caen called her the “first-lady-in-waiting.”

Brown, meanwhile, was one of Caen’s best friends, and his mayoralty would cap a lengthy career in which he proved to be one of the shrewder getters, keepers and users of political power of the last half of the 20th century. The dapper, hyper-connected bon vivant and unashamed showman wore pricey Brioni suits and drove fast, fancy cars. Brown didn’t want to talk to me for this story, but he once wrote: “Being able to cross over into the white community is essential for any black, female or male, to succeed as a political figure. I suggest black women lay the groundwork by looking to become active on the boards of social, cultural and, charitable institutions like symphonies, museums, and hospitals. It’s the way to get respect from a world that otherwise is content to eschew or label you. You have to demand the opportunities to enter these worlds.”

It’s hard to think honestly about the origins of the rise of Harris without grappling with the reality of the role of Brown. He helped her. He put her on a pair of state boards that required not much work and paid her more than $400,000 across five years on top of her salary as a prosecutor. He gave her a BMW. He helped her, too, though, in a way that was less immediately material but arguably far more enduringly important.

“Brown, of course, was the darling of the well-to-do set, if you will,” veteran political consultant Jack Davis, who managed Brown’s mayoral campaign, told me. “And she was the girlfriend, and so she met, you know, everybody who’s anybody, as a result of being his girl.”

“I met her through Willie,” John Burton, the former San Francisco congressman and chairman of the California Democratic Party, said in an interview. “I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie.”

“He was the guy that put her right in the ballgame,” said Dan Addario, the chief investigator for the district attorney whom Harris ultimately would topple.

“He made her,” Davis said.

Many people bristle at this, castigating such sentiments as tired, sexist and racist, rightly pointing out that Brown dispensed favors and counsel to hundreds of aspiring politicians and only one of them is currently a U.S. senator running for president near the head of the heap.

“Look,” Rebecca Prozan, Harris’ campaign manager in 2003, told me, “those of us that want to be in public service in an elected capacity can be used by people who are in public office, taken around town, and there’s a whole host of us that have had that opportunity, and it didn’t work out for us. There has to also be something special abouther.”

“Kamala Harris was plenty capable of impressing anyone she met … all on her own,” said P.J. Johnston, a consultant in San Francisco and a former Brown press secretary, “and did so frequently.”

Harris broke up with Brown shortly after he won the election to be mayor. “She ended it,” Brown told Joan Walsh, writing forSan Franciscomagazine in 2003, “because she concluded there was no permanency in our relationship, and she was absolutely right.” But in the society and gossip columns in theChronicle, in theSan Francisco Examinerand in theNob Hill Gazette, her mentions didn’t go down. They ticked up.

When she was still a deputy D.A. in Oakland, Harris joined the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. She was a member of the San Francisco Jazz Organization. She was a patron dinner chair for the San Francisco Symphony’s annual Black & White Ball. She was the executive director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium, and she was president of the board of directors of Partners Ending Domestic Abuse. She was on the board of a nonprofit called Women Count. “Few women,” gushed theGazette, “are more involved than (equally glamorous) attorney Kamala Harris.” In the outlet distributed specifically to the neighborhoods of the rich, she was featured in a fashion spread, shown wearing $565 boots, a $975 skirt and a $1,095 coat, all made by Burberry. In the descriptions of P.J. Corkery of theExaminer—who also ghost-wrote Brown’s book—Harris was “super-chic” and “super-smart” and “drop-dead elegant” and “very visible.” She was seen at Harry Denton’s Starlight Room. She was seen at Jeannette Etheredge’s Tosca. She went to a ball to benefit local arts museums at which celebrity event planner Stanlee Gatti’s elaborate set-up incorporated centerpieces of large balls of ice—and was spotted “sometime around midnight” trying to bowl the frosty orbs with Gavin Newsom, who was then a city supervisor as well as a friend and business partner of the Gettys. She went to the 25th anniversary showing of San Francisco’s “Beach Blanket Babylon” and was spotted slipping out of the afterparty for a dinner at Jardinière with Willie Brown and high societygrande dameDenise Hale. She went to a Ricky Martin concert in a limo with Hale and Denton and scenester Harry de Wildt. She went to the parties ofhaute coutureclothier Wilkes Bashford. She went to ladies’ luncheons at Pacific Heights homes. She had Sunday dinners with the Gettys.

“For society—and I hate that word—forthingsto continue to be exciting and interesting,” Vanessa Getty once toldVanity Fair, “circles have to keep expanding.”

“A lot of people think, ‘Those people are too rich for me, I can’t be part of their world—they’re out of my fucking league,’” a Harris friend said later inSan Franciscomagazine. Harris clearly didn’t think that. “She just kept showing up.”

By 2002, at the start of her campaign for D.A., she showed her packed, jumbled, leather-bound Filofax to Andrea Dew Steele, who was working at the time as Susie Tompkins Buell’s political and philanthropic adviser. Harris had organized her contacts in an inefficient and outdated way, Steele told me, but the list itself was formidable. “Definitely,” she said.

Recently, in the sitting room in the Pacific Heights house of socialite-turned-attorney Sharon Owsley, I visited with Owsley as well as Debbie Mesloh, a longtime Harris friend, and we talked about these inroads Harris was able to make.

“Kamala also comes from, you know, kind of an intellectually established family,” Mesloh said.

Owsley agreed. “A very fine family,” she said. “Her mother was east Indian and came to this country and became a renowned scientist, and her father came to this country and became a professor of economics. So, she has, you know, the genealogy to move in any circles. But I also have to emphasize that … you don’tneedthat—but she had it all right.”

The support from the crowds in the homes on the hills was the fuel, and Harris took it from there. She pulled in campaign contributions from “every ZIP code in the city,” she emphasized toWmagazine—and the share of her contributions from Pacific Heights got progressively smaller through 2003, down to 21 percent from January to June, 19 from July to September, 13 from October to November and 12 percent from November to December. “I walk very comfortably in a lot of communities in this city,” Harris told theChronicleas her campaign crescendoed. The newspaper endorsed her in October, saying she had “shown an ability to work with neighborhood groups from the Bayview to Pacific Heights—in essence, all of San Francisco.” Said Buell when we met: “That’s part of Kamala’s gift, I think, is that she can go into a room in any part of town, and she can act appropriate to that room.” There remained, though, no question which candidate San Francisco high society was behind. Joining those donors who maxed out at $500 before the end of 2002 (Bashford, Gatti, Billy and Vanessa Getty, Summer Tompkins Walker, Susan Swig, Steven Swig, Darian Swig, Mary Swig, Marjorie Swig, Roselyne “Cissie” Swig, and Ann Moller Caen, Herb Caen’s widow) now were Wilsey, her son Trevor Traina, toy tycoon John Bowes, Frances Bowes, Ann Getty, Peter Getty, George and Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, in addition to a slate of Fishers (founders of the Gap) and Schwabs (as in Charles).

“You have to have your feet in a lot of different communities in order to win citywide office in San Francisco. It is by no meansenough,” Jim Stearns, a top strategist on the ’03 Harris campaign, said of Pacific Heights. “It is just, you know—itishelpful in that it is a good community to raise money out of, and it is a good community to get some visibility.”

“The challenge with San Francisco politics, even more then than now, is that almost everybody agrees with everybody else on everything,” said Dan Schnur, a longtime Republican-turned-independent political operative who worked at the highest levels of state and presidential politics and lived in San Francisco from 1995 to 2002. “Up-and-comers are less likely to distinguish themselves by policy differences than the way they navigate these political-cultural-philanthropic-community circles.”

“Particularly with candidates of color, you know, often they don’t have those kinds of networks,” Steele said, “so this was very, very important for her success … to have some funding stream for her first race, and subsequent races.”

Harris had put in the work.

“I could have met Kamala through Sharon,” Wilsey said. “I could have met her through Ann Getty, I could have met her through, you know, any one of those people.”

“We had mutual friends,” Cissie Swig told me. “If she was born in Oakland, she found her niche, perhaps, in San Francisco, and her expertise and her smarts served her well when she decided to come and be in San Francisco,” she added.

“She has a presence,” Owsley said. “She has a star quality.”

An “aura,” Wilsey added.

“Her strength. Her determination,” Frances Bowes said when I asked her what had attracted her to Harris. “She’s not scared of anybody.”

“Whyshouldn’twe have a fabulous D.A. like that?” Owsley asked.

“I think it started with the fact that people wanted to be able to say they’d met her and were supporting her because of this quasi-social network that we started with, and the more she raised, and the more she got traction, the more everybody else wanted to say they heard her, they talked to her, and were supportive,” Buell told me when we met for dinner. “I have to be careful here, because I still live in this town, but they were kind of professional socialites, and they wanted to help her. They saw it as a two-way street.”

***

This past spring,at a 2020 fundraiserat the house of one of her Pacific Heights neighbors, Dede Wilsey wanted to talk to Kamala Harris.

To thank her.

“She was very, very helpful,” Wilsey told me when I reached her in Newport, Rhode Island, where she’s been summering, “when my son was recently appointed ambassador to Austria. … And I said, ‘Kamala, I really wanted to be sure to come to this because I wanted to thank you for being so nice to Trevor.’ And she said it was the right thing to do. And I said, ‘But, Kamala, people don’t always do the right thing. And I want you to know how much I appreciate it.’”

The next day, I reached Traina, President Donald Trump’s pick to be the U.S. ambassador to Austria, in Vienna, where he’s been based since last May.

“Kamala is an old friend,” Traina told me. “We all kind of grew up together, you know, Gavin, Kamala and many others.”

He supported her when she was running for D.A. “And she was very nice and very supportive of me when I was going through my Senate confirmation process. And she was one of a number of different senators who put in a good word for me with the staffs at the Foreign Relations Committee, which I really appreciated. That was nice of her. And I think the proof was in the pudding because I was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.”

He, too, was at that Napa Valley Getty wedding, back in 1999.

“Great party,” he said.

Chris Cadelago contributed to this report.

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[davidoespailla]

Phil Spector’s Infamous SoCal Chateau Is This Week’s Most Popular Home

Realtor.com

A striking French-style chateau with a very complicated past is this week’s most popular home.

Built in 1925 by a French immigrant, Sylvester Dupuy, who was inspired by the grand French chateaus of his youth, the “Pyrenees Castle” stayed in Dupuy’s family for decades. After changing hands a couple of times, the distinctive home on a hill overlooking Alhambra, CA, was purchased by the music producer Phil Spector in 1998 for $1.1 million.

After a night out in 2003, Spector met Lana Clarkson and brought her back to the estate, where she was shot and killed. The music legend was convicted of her murder. During his trial in 2006, Spector met and married Rachelle Spector, who until recently was devoted to updating the mansion until her husband’s release.

“I won’t rest until my husband comes home to this house, where he belongs,” she said during her 2012 testimony against the city of Alhambra over a nearby construction project.

But that was then. Now Rachelle and Phil are in the midst of a contentious divorce, so the chateau is being sold and the proceeds split between the couple.

Rounding out this week’s list are a variety of incredible home remodels and an over-the-top Las Vegas mansion worthy of a second look. There’s also an impeccably maintained 1960s time capsule in Sacramento and two notable properties in Reno—one with a custom “Haunted Mansion” theme—generating plenty of clicks.

10. 408 Frazier Dr, Chattanooga, TN 

Price: $212,000 Why it’s here: Built in 1940 and sitting on nearly a half-acre in central Chattanooga’s Brainerd Hills neighborhood, it’s a charming three-bedroom cottage. It still has original hardwood floors and wood trim throughout. Plus, there’s a sun room and large deck overlooking the backyard for lounging and entertaining. The property surrounding the home is full of mature trees, including a fig tree and blueberry bushes.

Chattanooga, TN

realtor.com

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9. 923 Henry Clay Ave, New Orleans, LA 

Price: $1,325,000 Why it’s here: New in New Orleans! This historic home near NOLA’s Audubon Park was recently gutted down to the studs and rebuilt. The first of three levels includes a large living and family area, kitchen, wet bar, and breakfast area. The second level has a master bedroom suite, two additional bedrooms, and an oversized laundry room.

New Orleans, LA

realtor.com

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8. 10 Promontory Ridge Dr, Las Vegas, NV

Price: $7,995,000 Why it’s here: Located in a Las Vegas development known as The Ridges, this massive seven-bedroom home covers over 14,500 square feet. The home’s many amenities include views of the mountains and a golf course, a game room with bar, a 15-seat theater, a craft room, wine room, piano room, and gym.

Las Vegas, NV

realtor.com

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7. 1743 N. Pienza St, Visalia, CA

Price: $1,950,000 Why it’s here: A haven in Central California! Located in Visalia’s fanciest (only?!) gated community, Da Vinci at Bella Sera, this luxe home was built in 2007. Resembling an Italian villa, it boasts soaring ceilings, a gourmet kitchen, game room with fireplace, theater room, and a detached guesthouse with full kitchen and laundry. Outside, the home has an outdoor living area with fireplace, a pool with swim-up bar, and a sunken kitchen with television.

Visalia, CA

realtor.com

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6. 2290 Canehill Ave, Long Beach, CA 

Price: $500,000 Why it’s here: Absolutely no drama in the LBC. Built in 1953, this plantation-style four-bedroom home was fully remodeled. And no one has lived in the home since its renovation. It sits on a corner lot with lush, tropical landscaping and is close to local events and attractions.

Long Beach, CA

realtor.com

———

5. 635 S. Arlington Ave., Reno, NV

Price: $729,900 Why it’s here: This home’s listing describes a place with the best of all worlds—the character of a house built in 1905 combined with all modern conveniences. Located in the center of Reno, the three-bedroom home is move-in ready, with hardwood floors throughout, a large gourmet kitchen, and a bonus room upstairs. Outdoors, sit out on the front porch or on the deck out back, entertain a crowd around the bar, or just hang on the home’s grassy front lawn.

Reno, NV

realtor.com

———

4. 788 Royal Garden Ave, Sacramento, CA

Price: $449,500 Why it’s here: Built in 1962 and impeccably maintained by its owners, this three-bedroom time capsule is wow-worthy. The interiors have a fresh coat of paint and the dual-pane windows and roof have also been recently updated. The backyard and patio have been well maintained and offer a sweet outdoor retreat.

Sacramento, CA

realtor.com

———

3. 112 Ridge Rd, Homewood, AL

Price: $1,195,000 Why it’s here: Storybook looks in the South. From the outside, this four-bedroom home has appeal in all the right places. One step inside reveals a stylish residence filled with high-end details: vaulted, beamed ceilings, gorgeous hardwood flooring, show-stopping light fixtures and finishes, and a sound system throughout.

Homewood, AL

realtor.com

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2. 2395 S. Arlington Ave, Reno, NV

Price: $498,000 Why it’s here: This is the second home in Reno to make this week’s Top 10 list, and it’s a property in which someone invested an incredible amount of time, thought, and money. Built in 1953, the three-bedroom abode has been fully remodeled, but it’s the lower level that truly shines. The finished basement holds a theater carefully designed as a tribute to Disney’s “Haunted Mansion” and a soundproof room for band practice. It’s spooky … yet very cool.

Reno, NV

realtor.com

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1. 1700 Grand View Dr, Alhambra, CA 

Price: $5,500,000 Why it’s here: This infamous property was the home of the music producer and convicted murderer Phil Spector. If a buyer can get past the home’s history as a crime scene, there’s plenty to enjoy. It sits on 2.5 wooded acres on a private knoll overlooking San Gabriel Valley. The walled and gated home has nine bedrooms and nearly 9,000 square feet of living space. Over-the-top features include a marble foyer, crystal chandeliers, hand-painted murals, two kitchens, a hair salon, and two offices.

Alhambra, CA

realtor.com

The post Phil Spector’s Infamous SoCal Chateau Is This Week’s Most Popular Home appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

Phil Spector’s Infamous SoCal Chateau Is This Week’s Most Popular Home

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CNN: Morocco's riad hotels: Private palaces for travelers

A classic riad is built around a central courtyard with a garden and fountain.

The interior often features lavish ornamentation — glazed ceramic tiles (zellij) in colorful geometric patterns on walls and floors, carved pierced white stucco work, painted wooden ceilings (zouakt) and shiny polished plaster walls (tadelakt).

“There is extraordinary diversity among Marrakech riads, whose aesthetics range from the ornate flourishes of traditional Moroccan style to ultra-modern interiors that wouldn’t look out of place in a New York City loft,” says Cyrus Bozorgmehr, a Briton who manages several riads in Marrakech.

“With owners living as far afield as Italy, Tahiti and the United States, each brings their own vision — so each riad has a unique identity, infused with the personality and history of the person behind it and their relationship with Morocco,” adds Bozorgmehr.

El Fenn

El Fenn, or “home of art,” was opened in 2004 by Vanessa Branson, sister of British entrepreneur Richard Branson.

As is fitting for a hotel owned by the founder of the Marrakech Biennale, it’s both a high-end hotel and a museum of contemporary art.

Says General Manager Willem Smit, “She’s a collector and used to have a gallery in London, so it’s very much about art. It connects all the things that we are about and that makes us stand out, I think.”

Behind an unassuming door in the Marrakech medina lies a 22-room property dotted with three inner courtyards.

After the frenetic world of the medina outside, Smit says, you’re greeted with “quietness and the birds chirping and singing, and then all these colors.”

“I remember the first time walking in here that it was one big surprise. And after every corner there was something to see and a whole new experience.”

El Fenn; Derb Moulay Abdullah Ben Hezzian, 2, Marrakech 40000, Morocco; +212 5244-41210; from $213

Riad de Tarabel

A few streets away from El Fenn is the Riad de Tarabel, an elegant oasis in a French colonial-style mansion.

It’s owned by French aristocratic couple Leonard Degoy and Rose Marie Fournier.

The mansion is decorated in muted shades of olive and cream and dotted with family heirlooms and bamboo and rattan furniture.

There are just 10 rooms, including three suites, along with a heated courtyard pool and a rooftop plunge pool.

Riad de Tarabel; 8, Derb Sraghna, Quartier Dar El Bacha, Marrakech Medina, Morocco; +212 (0)5 24 39 17 06; from $203

Royal Mansour Marrakech

When the King of Morocco decided to open the Royal Mansour Marrakech hotel in 2010 as the last word in opulence, he chose to build 53 brand new riads.

Each is a three-story, one- to four-bedroom jewel box, furnished in a riot of ornate zellij, carved stucco and wooden screens, painted wooden ceilings, silks and brocades in spare-no-expense fashion, with a private courtyard and roof terrace with pool and fireplace.

Giving riads the ultimate luxury twist, the recently opened Le Jardin adds 1.5 hectares of landscaped gardens, a swimming pool and a new restaurant from three-Michelin-star Paris chef Yannick Alleno, to add to the three there already.

The new dining spot serves Asian-influenced cuisine, while guests can enjoy Moroccan, gourmet French and Mediterranean food at the others.

There are also a 2,500-square-meter spa with 13 treatment rooms, two hammams, indoor pool, gym and Pilates studio, a library with a telescope for stargazing through a retractable roof and 24-hour room service and private butlers, who travel by underground tunnels for privacy.

Guests receive stationery with their names lettered in gold.

Five-meter-high walls surround the faux medina surrounding the Royal Mansour, a short walk from the Djemaa El Fna, the raucous square alive with snake charmers, magicians, potion, food and drink peddlers and storytellers at night.

CEOs and political leaders have stayed in its biggest riad, the four-bedroom, four-bathroom Riad d’Honneur, which sprawls over 1,800 square meters.

Royal Mansour, Rue Abou Abbas El Sebti, Marrakech; +212 529 80 80 80; from around $1,100

Riad Jaaneman

Opened in 2014, Riad Jaaneman juxtaposes Italian contemporary style, art deco furnishings, marble bathrooms, iPod docks and Boffi bathroom fixtures with Moroccan-patterned headboards and tadelakt walls.

In the five-suite riad’s Partenope suite, green marble from South America, track lighting and ebony tadelakt walls adorn the bathroom.

Dark brown Emperador marble from Spain and tobacco-colored tadelakt walls decorate the bathroom in another suite; the bedroom is decorated with African artifacts and has two walk-in dressing rooms.

An outdoor pool and hammam (traditional steam bath) are here, and riad staff organize day trips to the Atlas Mountains, skiing, cooking classes and yoga.

Owner Leonardo Giangreco, an Italian-born former investment banker in London, left finance in 2010 to “reinvent myself.”

He bought the riad in 2003 to live in, spent two years restoring it and plans to display part of his contemporary art collection here.

Riad Jaaneman, 12 Derb Sraghna, Dar El Bacha, Marrakech; +212 524 44 13 23; from $187

Riad El Amine

In contrast to Riad Jaaneman, Riad El Amine in Fez boasts traditional Moroccan craftsmanship.

It has two courtyards.

One features zellij-adorned columns flanking an aqua-tiled reflecting pool.

A second with a fountain strewn with rose petals in a nine-pointed star-shaped niche and geometric-patterned ceramic tiles.

One of the 11-room riad’s eight suites features a lavender-curtained four-poster bed with silk purple and gold pillows. Others have colored-glass arched windows.

Its owner, a Moroccan travel agent, purchased two riads in 2004 and had new tile and stucco work handmade to mimic the old.

“It was the restorations of these ancient courtyard houses — mostly by expats — that really saved the ancient poverty-stricken medinas from falling into complete disuse and slums,” says Joel A. Zack, president of Heritage Tours Private Travel in New York, which custom designs tours to Morocco.

“Fifteen years ago, they were very different places. It’s the perfect example of adaptive reuse that saved an entire historic quarter, and helped grow economy and tourism significantly.”

Riad El Amine, 94, 96 Bab Jdid, Bouajjara, Fez, +212 535 74 07 49; from $62

Riad Maison Arabe

The city’s first riad hotel was La Maison Arabe, a 26-room riad with a renowned Moroccan cooking school, which opened in 1997.

Marrakech’s first expatriate riad owner is believed to be oil heir J. Paul Getty Jr., who bought a deteriorated riad in the late 1960s and hired Bill Willis, an American interior designer, to decorate it.

The designer’s own Marrakech riad, an ultra-flamboyant Arabian Nights-style fantasy where he entertained guests such as the Rolling Stones and William S. Burroughs, has appeared in “Architectural Digest” and other design magazines.

Willis, who became the designer of choice for jet set Marrakech expats from Yves Saint Laurent to Fiat heiress Marella Agnelli, helped catapult Moroccan interior design to international attention.

“For those who truly want to experience authenticity, the right riad can be an amazing experience,” says Joel Zack of Heritage Tours Private Travel.

“Most do not offer the amenities of a full hotel, but they are gorgeous, each room is different, and they offer a magic and a sense of being in Morocco and its hospitality that is absolutely unbeatable.”

Riads have no windows facing the street — all face the courtyard. Entryways are often plain doors on a blank wall in a tiny alley in the medina.

These unremarkable exteriors offer absolutely no clue to the wonders within.

“You see the look of terror on their faces when guests often first arrive at a riad, at a sometimes unmarked door in a dark alley,” says Bozorgmehr.

“They don’t know if they’ll ever find their way back, until they get into their comfort zone. It’s the Islamic way — no ostentation outside the house, you show your wealth inside.”

La Maison Arabe, 1 Derb Assehbe Bab Doukkala, Marrakech; +212 524 38 70 10; from $190

Sharon McDonnell is a travel, history and food/beverage writer based in San Francisco.

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CNN: Morocco's riad hotels: Private palaces for travelers

A classic riad is built around a central courtyard with a garden and fountain.

The interior often features lavish ornamentation — glazed ceramic tiles (zellij) in colorful geometric patterns on walls and floors, carved pierced white stucco work, painted wooden ceilings (zouakt) and shiny polished plaster walls (tadelakt).

“There is extraordinary diversity among Marrakech riads, whose aesthetics range from the ornate flourishes of traditional Moroccan style to ultra-modern interiors that wouldn’t look out of place in a New York City loft,” says Cyrus Bozorgmehr, a Briton who manages several riads in Marrakech.

“With owners living as far afield as Italy, Tahiti and the United States, each brings their own vision — so each riad has a unique identity, infused with the personality and history of the person behind it and their relationship with Morocco,” adds Bozorgmehr.

El Fenn

El Fenn, or “home of art,” was opened in 2004 by Vanessa Branson, sister of British entrepreneur Richard Branson.

As is fitting for a hotel owned by the founder of the Marrakech Biennale, it’s both a high-end hotel and a museum of contemporary art.

Says General Manager Willem Smit, “She’s a collector and used to have a gallery in London, so it’s very much about art. It connects all the things that we are about and that makes us stand out, I think.”

Behind an unassuming door in the Marrakech medina lies a 22-room property dotted with three inner courtyards.

After the frenetic world of the medina outside, Smit says, you’re greeted with “quietness and the birds chirping and singing, and then all these colors.”

“I remember the first time walking in here that it was one big surprise. And after every corner there was something to see and a whole new experience.”

El Fenn; Derb Moulay Abdullah Ben Hezzian, 2, Marrakech 40000, Morocco; +212 5244-41210; from $213

Riad de Tarabel

A few streets away from El Fenn is the Riad de Tarabel, an elegant oasis in a French colonial-style mansion.

It’s owned by French aristocratic couple Leonard Degoy and Rose Marie Fournier.

The mansion is decorated in muted shades of olive and cream and dotted with family heirlooms and bamboo and rattan furniture.

There are just 10 rooms, including three suites, along with a heated courtyard pool and a rooftop plunge pool.

Riad de Tarabel; 8, Derb Sraghna, Quartier Dar El Bacha, Marrakech Medina, Morocco; +212 (0)5 24 39 17 06; from $203

Royal Mansour Marrakech

When the King of Morocco decided to open the Royal Mansour Marrakech hotel in 2010 as the last word in opulence, he chose to build 53 brand new riads.

Each is a three-story, one- to four-bedroom jewel box, furnished in a riot of ornate zellij, carved stucco and wooden screens, painted wooden ceilings, silks and brocades in spare-no-expense fashion, with a private courtyard and roof terrace with pool and fireplace.

Giving riads the ultimate luxury twist, the recently opened Le Jardin adds 1.5 hectares of landscaped gardens, a swimming pool and a new restaurant from three-Michelin-star Paris chef Yannick Alleno, to add to the three there already.

The new dining spot serves Asian-influenced cuisine, while guests can enjoy Moroccan, gourmet French and Mediterranean food at the others.

There are also a 2,500-square-meter spa with 13 treatment rooms, two hammams, indoor pool, gym and Pilates studio, a library with a telescope for stargazing through a retractable roof and 24-hour room service and private butlers, who travel by underground tunnels for privacy.

Guests receive stationery with their names lettered in gold.

Five-meter-high walls surround the faux medina surrounding the Royal Mansour, a short walk from the Djemaa El Fna, the raucous square alive with snake charmers, magicians, potion, food and drink peddlers and storytellers at night.

CEOs and political leaders have stayed in its biggest riad, the four-bedroom, four-bathroom Riad d’Honneur, which sprawls over 1,800 square meters.

Royal Mansour, Rue Abou Abbas El Sebti, Marrakech; +212 529 80 80 80; from around $1,100

Riad Jaaneman

Opened in 2014, Riad Jaaneman juxtaposes Italian contemporary style, art deco furnishings, marble bathrooms, iPod docks and Boffi bathroom fixtures with Moroccan-patterned headboards and tadelakt walls.

In the five-suite riad’s Partenope suite, green marble from South America, track lighting and ebony tadelakt walls adorn the bathroom.

Dark brown Emperador marble from Spain and tobacco-colored tadelakt walls decorate the bathroom in another suite; the bedroom is decorated with African artifacts and has two walk-in dressing rooms.

An outdoor pool and hammam (traditional steam bath) are here, and riad staff organize day trips to the Atlas Mountains, skiing, cooking classes and yoga.

Owner Leonardo Giangreco, an Italian-born former investment banker in London, left finance in 2010 to “reinvent myself.”

He bought the riad in 2003 to live in, spent two years restoring it and plans to display part of his contemporary art collection here.

Riad Jaaneman, 12 Derb Sraghna, Dar El Bacha, Marrakech; +212 524 44 13 23; from $187

Riad El Amine

In contrast to Riad Jaaneman, Riad El Amine in Fez boasts traditional Moroccan craftsmanship.

It has two courtyards.

One features zellij-adorned columns flanking an aqua-tiled reflecting pool.

A second with a fountain strewn with rose petals in a nine-pointed star-shaped niche and geometric-patterned ceramic tiles.

One of the 11-room riad’s eight suites features a lavender-curtained four-poster bed with silk purple and gold pillows. Others have colored-glass arched windows.

Its owner, a Moroccan travel agent, purchased two riads in 2004 and had new tile and stucco work handmade to mimic the old.

“It was the restorations of these ancient courtyard houses — mostly by expats — that really saved the ancient poverty-stricken medinas from falling into complete disuse and slums,” says Joel A. Zack, president of Heritage Tours Private Travel in New York, which custom designs tours to Morocco.

“Fifteen years ago, they were very different places. It’s the perfect example of adaptive reuse that saved an entire historic quarter, and helped grow economy and tourism significantly.”

Riad El Amine, 94, 96 Bab Jdid, Bouajjara, Fez, +212 535 74 07 49; from $62

Riad Maison Arabe

The city’s first riad hotel was La Maison Arabe, a 26-room riad with a renowned Moroccan cooking school, which opened in 1997.

Marrakech’s first expatriate riad owner is believed to be oil heir J. Paul Getty Jr., who bought a deteriorated riad in the late 1960s and hired Bill Willis, an American interior designer, to decorate it.

The designer’s own Marrakech riad, an ultra-flamboyant Arabian Nights-style fantasy where he entertained guests such as the Rolling Stones and William S. Burroughs, has appeared in “Architectural Digest” and other design magazines.

Willis, who became the designer of choice for jet set Marrakech expats from Yves Saint Laurent to Fiat heiress Marella Agnelli, helped catapult Moroccan interior design to international attention.

“For those who truly want to experience authenticity, the right riad can be an amazing experience,” says Joel Zack of Heritage Tours Private Travel.

“Most do not offer the amenities of a full hotel, but they are gorgeous, each room is different, and they offer a magic and a sense of being in Morocco and its hospitality that is absolutely unbeatable.”

Riads have no windows facing the street — all face the courtyard. Entryways are often plain doors on a blank wall in a tiny alley in the medina.

These unremarkable exteriors offer absolutely no clue to the wonders within.

“You see the look of terror on their faces when guests often first arrive at a riad, at a sometimes unmarked door in a dark alley,” says Bozorgmehr.

“They don’t know if they’ll ever find their way back, until they get into their comfort zone. It’s the Islamic way — no ostentation outside the house, you show your wealth inside.”

La Maison Arabe, 1 Derb Assehbe Bab Doukkala, Marrakech; +212 524 38 70 10; from $190

Sharon McDonnell is a travel, history and food/beverage writer based in San Francisco.

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