Wednesday, February 26, 2014

A00014 - Jackie Ormes, First African American Woman Cartoonist

Just listened to a report on Marketplace about the first African American woman cartoonist. It can be found at:
Then I looked her up on Wikipedia and read the following:
Jackie Ormes (August 1, 1911 – December 26, 1985) is known as the first African-American woman cartoonist, known for her strips Torchy Brown and Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger.
Jackie Ormes was born Zelda Mavin Jackson in the Pittsburgh area town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Ormes started in journalism as a proofreader for the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly African American newspaper that came out every Saturday. Her 1937-38 Courier comic strip, Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, starring Torchy Brown, was a humorous depiction of a Mississippi teen who found fame and fortune singing and dancing in the Cotton Club.
Ormes moved to Chicago in 1942, and soon began writing occasional articles and, briefly, a social column for the Chicago Defender, one of the nation's leading black newspapers, a weekly at that time. For a few months at the end of the war, her single panel cartoon, Candy, about an attractive and wisecracking housemaid, appeared in the Defender.
By August 1945, Ormes's work was back in the Courier, with the advent of Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger, a single-panel cartoon which ran for 11 years. It featured a big sister-little sister set-up, with the precocious, insightful and socially/politically-aware child as the only speaker and the beautiful adult woman as a sometime pin-up figure and fashion mannequin.
Ormes contracted with the Terri Lee doll company in 1947 to produce a play doll based on her little girl cartoon character. The Patty-Jo doll was on the shelves in time for Christmas and was the first American black doll to have an extensive upscale wardrobe. As in the cartoon, the doll represented a real child, in contrast to the majority of dolls that were mammy and Topsy-type dolls. In December 1949, Ormes's contract with the Terri Lee company was not renewed, and production ended. Patty-Jo dolls are now highly sought collectors' items.
In 1950, the Courier began an eight-page color comics insert, where Ormes re-invented her Torchy character in a new comic strip, Torchy in Heartbeats. This Torchy was a beautiful, independent woman who finds adventure while seeking true love. Ormes expressed her talent for fashion design as well as her vision of a beautiful black female body in the accompanying Torchy Togs paper doll cut outs. The strip is probably best known for its last episode in 1954, when Torchy and her doctor boyfriend confront racism and environmental pollution. Torchy presented an image of a black woman who, in contrast to the contemporary stereotypical media portrayals, was confident, intelligent, and brave.
Jackie Ormes enjoyed a happy, 45-year marriage to Earl Clark Ormes. She retired from cartooning in 1956, although she continued to create art, including murals, still lifes and portraits. She contributed to her South Side Chicago community by volunteering to produce fundraiser fashion shows and entertainments. She was also on the founding board of directors for the DuSable Museum of African American History.
Ormes was a passionate doll collector, with 150 antique and modern dolls in her collection, and she was active in Guys and Gals Funtastique Doll Club, a United Federation of Doll Clubs chapter in Chicago.
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

A00013 - Toshiko d'Elia, Senior Marathon Champion

Toshiko d’Elia Dies at 84; Gritty Runner Was Champion in an Age Group

By 
    The marathoner Toshiko d’Elia, center, with her husband, Manfred, and daughter, Erica, in 1977. Lonny Kalfus
    Toshiko d’Elia, who emerged from the destitution of postwar Japan to achieve renown in the United States as a marathon runner, taking up the sport at age 44 in the 1970s when few older women were doing so, died on Wednesday in Allendale, N.J. She was 84.
    The cause was brain cancer, which was detected two months ago, her daughter, Erica Diestel, said. D’Elia, who died at her daughter’s home, lived in Ridgewood, N.J.
    At 100 pounds and a little over 5 feet tall, d’Elia was a powerful runner, and a resilient one. At 49, she completed the Boston Marathon in 2 hours 58 minutes 11 seconds, shortly before she was found to have cervical cancer. Eight months later she resumed training, and eight months after that, in the world masters championship in Scotland, she ran 2:57:20, the first time a woman 50 or older had bettered three hours.
    Over the years she broke many age-group records. Mary Wittenberg, the president of New York Road Runners, called her “our queen of the roads.”
    D’Elia was born Toshiko Kishimoto on Jan. 2, 1930, in Kyoto, Japan. Gail Kislevitz, a friend, said she spoke of difficult times after World War II, her country defeated and largely in ruins. Ms. Kislevitz quoted her as saying: “We starved. My mother would stand on food lines all day and come home with a cucumber to feed a family of six. I dreamed of being a bird so I could fly away.”
    Mrs. d'Elia running in the Ridgewood Run in 2006.North Jersey Masters
    Her path to the United States began with an accident at a Roman Catholic convent, where she was helping out as an interpreter. As she told The New York Times in 1977, one day an 18-year-old deaf youth who did odd jobs for the nuns fell from a ladder and began screaming in pain. Suddenly she realized he had a voice and took an interest in teaching the deaf.
    She went on to study special education for the deaf in Tokyo at Tsuda College, an institution for women, and won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Syracuse University, accepting the invitation despite her tradition-bound father’s refusal to help pay her way to the United States. As she recalled, he said he would rather spend money on a new automobile than a daughter’s education.
    She earned a master’s degree in audiology at Syracuse, married and had her daughter in the United States.
    Her husband soon left her, however, and she returned to Japan with the child, then 6 months old. Her father said her failed marriage had disgraced the family and told her to put her daughter up for adoption, but her mother gave her money to return to the United States with the baby.
    D’Elia went on to teach for many years at the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains.
    For years, d’Elia and her second husband, Manfred d’Elia, climbed mountains in the United States and around the world, including Fujiyama in Japan, Damavand in Iran and the Matterhorn in Switzerland. While climbing Monte Rosa in Switzerland, she tumbled into a crevasse, was hauled out by her fellow climbers and finished the ascent.
    She and her husband took up running to build climbing strength and endurance: for her, it was a mile every morning at 5 o’clock.
    Her serious running career also began by accident. The Ridgewood High School girls’ track team was preparing for a spring cross-country meet, and her daughter, Erica, the team’s captain, did not want any Ridgewood High runners to finish last.
    “So my daughter tricked me into running it,” d’Elia told an interviewer. “The kids took off real fast from the start. I paced myself, and I came in third. Erica, who finished first, was standing there, and I could hear her screaming, ‘Oh, my God, that’s my mother.’ ”
    Her first marathon was in 1976, in ice and snow in New Jersey. She had planned to run only the first half of the race; a friend’s husband was to pick her up at that point and give her a ride home. When he failed to show, she decided to finish the race, and she did so in 3:25, qualifying her for the Boston Marathon. By 1977, she was running 90 miles a week and winning long-distance races as well as sprinting events in 40-years-and-over competitions.
    Manfred d’Elia, a classical pianist and piano teacher, was an accomplished runner himself as well as a prominent conservationist in New Jersey and a founder of hiking groups and the Opera Society of Northern New Jersey. He died in 2000.
    Besides her daughter, d’Elia is survived by three grandsons, two stepdaughters and four step-grandchildren.
    Despite having open-heart surgery when she was 78, d’Elia kept running, until December, around when her brain cancer was diagnosed.
    “She was in the pool every day at 7 a.m.,” her daughter said on Wednesday. “She swam a mile and ran in the water for 45 minutes. Then there was a yoga class. Then she came home for lunch and a nap. Then, in the afternoon, she ran three to five miles. That was her day, until the day she couldn’t.”
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    A00012 - Maggie Estep, Slam Poetry Maven

    Maggie Estep, Who Brought Slam Poetry to TV, Dies at 50

    By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
    Inside
      Maggie Estep presenting her work onstage in 1993. In addition to poetry she wrote several mystery novels set in New York. Kevin Mazur/MTV
      Maggie Estep, a novelist and spoken-word poet who helped popularize slam poetry on MTV, HBO and PBS in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Albany. She was 50.
      Ms. Estep (pronounced EST-ep) died two days after having a heart attack at her home in Hudson, N.Y., a friend, John Rauchenberger, said.
      An East Village bohemian when the neighborhood contained more discarded syringes than million-dollar condos, Ms. Estep became a regular at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, one of the incubators of the slam poetry movement. Slam poetry combines aspects of a live reading, a rap battle and stand-up comedy, as performers try to win over the audience with wit, braggadocio and, occasionally, nuance.
      Ms. Estep’s poetry was characterized by gritty honesty, black humor and a post-punk brand of feminism. She became one of the form’s breakout stars, performing in showcases like MTV’s “Unplugged,” the “Free Your Mind” spoken-word tour in 1993 and, in 1994, the music festivals Lollapalooza and Woodstock ’94.
      Her poems, which she delivered relentlessly, were a cascade of images, often tinged with absurdity, violence and innuendo. She performed one scathingly sarcastic poem, “Happy,” on the HBO show “Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam”:
      To hell with sticking my head in the oven
      I’m happy
      I’m ridiculously, vengefully happy
      I’m ripped apart by sunshine
      I’m ecstatic
      I’m leaping
      I’m cutting off all my limbs
      I’m doing circus tricks with forks
      She recorded two spoken-word albums with rock accompaniment, “No More Mr. Nice Girl” (NuYo/Imago, 1994) and “Love Is a Dog From Hell” (Mouth Almighty/Mercury, 1997). Her fame increased when a video for her song “Hey Baby” was mocked on “Beavis and Butt-head.” The song centers on Ms. Estep’s bizarre rejoinder to an amorous man on a New York street, and ends with this exchange:
      “What’s the matter, baby?
      You got something against men?” He asks.
      “No,” I say
      “I don’t have anything against men,
      just stupid men.”
      Margaret Ann Estep was born on March 20, 1963, in Summit, N.J. Her parents were racehorse trainers, and she grew up in Canada, France, Colorado and Georgia. She dropped out of high school in her late teens and moved to Manhattan.
      “I fell in love with New York City one day in 1971, when I saw dozens of people blithely stepping over a dead body on a sidewalk,” Ms. Estep wrote in “Think of This as a Window,” an essay about finally leaving the city.
      She worked briefly as a go-go dancer, joined the punk scene and became addicted to heroin. She took up fiction writing at a drug rehabilitation clinic in the mid-1980s.
      In 1986 she attended a class taught by William S. Burroughs at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo. She studied there for two years and eventually received a bachelor’s degree in literature from the State University of New York.
      She published several books, including mystery novels set in New York City and “Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals,” which includes her spoken-word work. She moved to Hudson from Brooklyn several years ago.
      Ms. Estep regularly kept a blog. Her final entry, about stripping and friendship, appeared on Feb. 7.
      She is survived by her mother, Nancy Murray; two half-brothers, Jon and Chris Murray; and a half-sister, Ellen Murray.
      Although Ms. Estep became famous as a performer, she said she always considered herself primarily a writer.
      “I was a writer long before I performed, and my work is very much for the page as well as the stage,” she told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994.
      “I sent my stuff out to the quarterlies and it came back with arrogant notes,” she added. “Now, they come to me.”
       
      ***
       
      Maggie Estep (March 20, 1963 – February 12, 2014) was an American writer and poet most well known for coming to prominence during the height of the spoken word and poetry slam performance rage. She published seven books and released two spoken word albums: No More Mr. Nice Girl and Love is a Dog From Hell.


      Biography[edit]

      Estep was born in 1963 in Summit, New Jersey. As a poet, she emerged in the early 1990s when grunge was the height of fashion and her "direct, aggressive and uncompromisingly modern"[2] poetry was highly accessible.
      Estep appeared on MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged,[3] PBS's The United States of Poetry,[4] and most recently on Season 3 of HBO's Def Poetry. Her video for her spoken word track "Hey Baby" received moderate rotation on MTV and was highlighted on MTV's Beavis & Butt-head. She also contributed vocals to two songs on Recoil's 1997 album Unsound Methods.
      Estep went on to write many novels, including Diary of an Emotional Idiot, the Ruby Murphy mystery trilogy, Gargantuan, Hex and Flamethrower, and Alice Fantastic. Hex was named New York Times Notable Book for 2003.[5] She had, for several years, been at work on The Angelmakers, a novel about 19th Century female gangsters and the founding of animal rights.
      Estep suffered a heart attack on February 10, 2014 and died from complications of it on February 12, 2014.[6] She was 50.

      Discography[edit]

      Bibliography[edit]

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      A00011 - Nancy Holt, Outdoor Artist

      Nancy Holt, Outdoor Artist, Dies at 75

      By
      Inside
        Nancy Holt on the water in New York City in 2005. Hiroko Masuike/Associated Press
        Nancy Holt, a pioneer in the land-art movement of the 1960s and ’70s and the creator of one of the era’s most poetic works — “Sun Tunnels,” four huge concrete culverts set in the Utah desert to align with the sun on summer and winter solstices — died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 75.
        The cause was leukemia, representatives of her estate said.
        Ms. Holt, who lived and worked for many years in Galisteo, N.M., was one of the few women to pursue monumental sculpture in the American West, a place whose wide-open spaces drew a generation of restless artists like Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, James Turrell and Robert Smithson, whom Ms. Holt married in 1963.
        A child of the Northeast, Ms. Holt described her first exploration of the West, around Las Vegas in 1968 with Smithson and Mr. Heizer, as transformative in her life as an artist; during the visit, she said, she did not sleep for four days.
        “It seemed to me that I had this Western space that had been within me,” she said many years later. “That was my inner reality. I was experiencing it on the outside, simultaneously with my spaciousness within. I felt at one.”
        “Sun Tunnels,” in Utah, one of Ms. Holt’s most famous works, on a summer solstice sunrise. Ravell Call/Deseret Morning News, via Associated Press
        She began her career writing concrete poetry and making photographs, films and videos. From the beginning she was interested in how perception is shaped, and she used the mediums of lenses, viewfinders and other structures to alter the way urban space, land and the firmament are experienced over time.
        “I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back down to human scale,” she once wrote about “Sun Tunnels.”
        Throughout her career Ms. Holt was underrecognized, in part because her best work — “Dark Star Park,” an installation on a once-blighted site in Arlington, Va.; “Sky Mound,” a partly completed earth sculpture and park made from a landfill in the New Jersey Meadowlands; “Up and Under,” a sinuous tunnel-and-berm construction outside a small city in Finland — could not be shown in museums or galleries. And she held a fairly dim view of the traditional art world anyway.
        “If work hangs in a gallery or museum,” she once said, “the art gets made for the spaces that were made to enclose art. They isolate objects, detach them from the world.”
        Ms. Holt also devoted considerable time to protecting the legacy of Smithson, who died in a plane crash in Amarillo, Tex., in 1973 while surveying a site for one of his earth works.
        In 2008 she helped rally opposition to a plan for exploratory drilling near the site of Smithson’s greatest work, “Spiral Jetty,” a huge counterclockwise curlicue of black basalt rock that juts into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah. After Smithson’s death, Ms. Holt never remarried. She told one interviewer, “My art was enough for me.”
        No immediate family members survive.
        Nancy Holt was born on April 5, 1938, in Worcester, Mass. An only child, she was raised in New Jersey, where her father worked as a chemical engineer and her mother was a homemaker.
        She studied biology at Tufts University and then moved to New York, where she quickly became involved with a group of prominent Minimalist and post-Minimalist artists including Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, Joan Jonas and Richard Serra. (She collaborated with Mr. Serra in 1974 on “Boomerang,” in which he videotaped her listening to her own voice echoing back into a pair of headphones after a time lag, as she described the disorienting experience.)
        nytimes.com
        She and Smithson had bought a small piece of land in Utah, and in 1974 she bought more: 40 acres for $1,600 in the Great Basin Desert, where she set about building “Sun Tunnels.” As she wrote later, installing the culverts — each weighing 22 tons — and documenting the process, required the help of “2 engineers, 1 astrophysicist, 1 astronomer, 1 surveyor and his assistant, 1 road grader, 2 dump truck operators, 1 carpenter, 3 ditch diggers, 1 concrete mixing truck operator, 1 concrete foreman, 10 concrete pipe company workers, 2 core-drillers, 4 truck drivers, 1 crane operator, 1 rigger, 2 cameramen, 2 soundmen, 1 helicopter pilot, and 4 photography lab workers.”
        “In making the arrangements and contracting out the work,” she wrote, “I became more extended into the world than I’ve ever been before.”
        Over the years, the work has attracted a variety of pilgrims: art lovers who camp out to see the sunrise perfectly aligned with the tunnels at solstice; latter-day pagans who come for the same reason; Burning Man-type celebrants who used the tunnels as a gathering place; hunters who use them for shooting practice. Occasionally, Ms. Holt would drive back to the site and invite observers to meet her for a free-form talk and viewing experience.
        The first retrospective of her work, “Nancy Holt: Sightlines,” opened in 2010 at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and traveled to several other venues in the United States and Europe. In a public talk in Santa Fe, N.M., during the run of the retrospective, she described the struggle of pursuing an art career largely out of doors, and decidedly on her own terms.
        “It was painful, because I had no product,” she said. “And especially a woman in the art world at that time, you had to have something to show.” She added: “I was just being. I was emphasizing being over becoming. And in the art world it’s a hard stance.”
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        Monday, February 24, 2014

        A00010 - Anne Heyman, Rwandan Orphan Rescuer

        Anne Heyman, Who Rescued Rwandan Orphans, Dies at 52

        By
        Inside
          Anne Heyman Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village
          When Anne Heyman learned in 2005 that the genocide in Rwanda had orphaned 1.2 million children, she saw a glimpse of salvation for the country in the experience of Israel.
          “It popped out of my head: They should build youth villages,” she told The New York Times last year.
          Ms. Heyman, a South African-born lawyer who had given up her legal career in New York to devote herself to philanthropy, was thinking of how Israel, as a new nation state in the late 1940s, had welcomed and cared for tens of thousands of children who had been orphaned by the Holocaust. The Israelis set up residential communities called youth villages to nurture them.
          “Israel had a solution to the orphan problem,” Ms. Heyman, a supporter of Jewish causes, told The Jerusalem Post last year. “Without a systemic solution, this is a problem that won’t solve itself.”
          Ms. Heyman knew no one in Rwanda and little about the country, but she plowed ahead, raising more than $12 million; recruiting expert help from Rwanda, Israel and the United States; winning the support of the Rwandan government; and acquiring 144 acres in a setting of lakes and hills in eastern Rwanda. She then built a village of 32 houses for orphaned teenagers, setting it high on a hill, she said, “because children need to see far to go far.”
          Anne Heyman, center, with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and the 2012 Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village graduating class. Jenna Merrin
          She died on Jan. 31 at a hospital in Delray Beach, Fla., after falling from a horse while competing in a masters jumper competition at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in Wellington, Fla. She was 52.
          The cause was cardiac arrest brought on by a head injury, said Marisha Mistry, a spokeswoman for Liquidnet, an Internet stock-trading company founded by Ms. Heyman’s husband, Seth Merrin. Ms. Heyman had homes in Florida, Manhattan, Westchester County, N.Y., and Israel.
          When the village for orphans opened in 2008, a long line of teenagers, alone and shattered, stood in the blazing sun holding paper bags containing all their possessions. Entire families of some had been wiped out, and they had no photographs. Some did not know their birthdays, or even what their real names were.
          At first, almost all who came had been orphaned by the genocide committed in 1994 by ethnic Hutus against the minority Tutsis and the Tutsis’ moderate Hutu supporters. Later, children of parents who had died of AIDS began arriving. Other vulnerable children were also taken in.
          Ethiopian Jews who had grown up at a youth camp in Israel were the first counselors. Housemothers were hired locally to make the houses into homes, often the first the youths had known. Many of the women had lost their husbands and children to genocide.
          Today the village houses about 500 youths, who go to high school, work on a farm, learn trades, record gospel music and, most of all, feel a sense of belonging.
          The camp was named Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. “Agahozo” is a Kinyarwanda word meaning “a place where tears are dried.” Shalom is Hebrew for peace. Reflecting this thought, residents do not identify themselves along tribal lines.
          Ms. Heyman, who made Hebrew the first language of her own children in New York, saw Agahozo-Shalom as an expression of her Zionist ideals.
          “It is a way for us to share those values with the non-Jewish world,” she told The Jerusalem Report in 2007.
          Emmanuel Nkundunkundiye, 21, a recent graduate of the village school, told the Jewish American newspaper The Forward, “The Holocaust is the same history that we face, the same tragedy.”
          Anne Elaine Heyman was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 16, 1961, the second of four children, and was raised in Cape Town. She moved with her family to Boston at 15 and became active in Young Judea, a Zionist youth movement. She spent a year of high school in Israel in a Young Judea program and met her future husband there.
          She is survived by him; their sons Jason and Jonathan; their daughter, Jenna; and her parents, Sydney and Hermia Heyman.
          nytimes.comTravel
          Ms. Heyman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, then spent another year in Israel before going to George Washington University Law School. In 1984, she transferred to Columbia Law School and graduated the next year. After two years of private practice, she became an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, prosecuting white-collar crime. She quit to devote herself to her family after her son Jonathan was born in 1994.
          Ms. Heyman began her career as an activist and philanthropist while at home with her children. She volunteered for Dorot, a Manhattan-based organization that serves the elderly, and became its chairwoman.
          One of her first steps in her Rwandan mission was linking up with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had set up youth villages in the Americas, Europe and Africa. Her principal model was the village of Yemin Orde, one of 50 youth villages in Israel. It has taken in orphans and other needy children from around the world.
          She also built one of the largest solar energy plants in sub-Saharan Africa; it contributes power to the rest of Rwanda as well.
          Ms. Heyman had plans to make the village self-sustaining, so that major western donors, like her husband’s company, would not always be needed.
          Called “Mom,” “Grandmother” and an angel by the youths, she came to the village four or five times a year, staying for several days or more.
          Agahozo-Shalom’s announcement of Ms. Heyman’s death quoted a Rwandan proverb: “Death is nothing so long as one can survive through one’s children.”
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          A00009 -Alice Babs, Ellington's Sacred Concert Singer

          Alice Babs, Who Sang for Ellington, Dies at 90

          By PETER KEEPNEWS

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            Alice Babs, a Swedish singer acclaimed for her work with Duke Ellington, died on Tuesday in Stockholm. She was 90.
            Her lawyer, Thomas Bodstrom, announced her death to the Swedish news media. 
            Ms. Babs, a soprano with a three-octave range, first performed with Ellington’s orchestra in Europe in 1963, and though she was never a full-time member, she worked with Ellington frequently. She first drew widespread praise from American jazz critics for her performances at his so-called Sacred Concerts.
            Reviewing one such concert, held at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan in 1968, John S. Wilson of The New York Times praised the “warmth and strength” of Ms. Babs’s voice and said that she “took her place among the top rank of Ellingtonians — those instrumentalists and singers who have brought special distinction to the Ellington ensemble and who have drawn unique inspiration from the Duke’s direction during the last 40 years.”
            She had already been a pop star in Europe for two decades when she first worked with Ellington, appearing in several movies and representing Sweden at the 1958 Eurovision Song Contest. In the late 1950s and early ’60s she worked with two Danish musicians, the violinist Svend Asmussen and the guitarist Ulrik Neumann, in the group Swe-Danes, which performed in the United States as well as Europe.
            In 1972 Ms. Babs was the first non-opera singer to be named Sweden’s royal court singer. She later became a member of the Royal Academy of Music. She continued to perform and record occasionally into the 21st century.
            Alice Babs was born Hildur Alice Nilsson on Jan. 26, 1924, in Vastervik, Sweden. Her survivors include three children. Her husband, Nils Ivar Sjoblom, died in 2011.

            *****

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v-0P5bpg54
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