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Ebeye

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Posts posted by Ebeye

  1. I was with AWS up until a few months ago (ProServe consultant), and I am 100% on board with the idea that Amazon is jacking around folks to help fire in place folks.  Morale on most teams was bleak.  They have been forcing folks to come back into the office, even if they are on fully remote teams.  They are not providing any relocation for folks that they are forcing  to move to be near offices.  

  2. Article: 

    Spoiler

    U.S. will share nuclear submarine technology with Australia as part of new alliance, a direct challenge to China 

    Biden announces new defense alliance with Australia, Britain to counter China
     and 
    Today at 5:24 a.m. EDT

    President Biden announced Wednesday the United States and Britain will share highly sensitive nuclear submarine technology with Australia, a major departure from past policy and a direct challenge to China in its Pacific neighborhood.

    Biden made the announcement alongside British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who joined the president virtually, as they unveiled a new three-way defense alliance, which will be known as AUKUS. Britain is the only other nation to share U.S. nuclear submarine propulsion technology, an agreement dating back decades and aimed largely at countering the old Soviet Union.

    “We all recognize the imperative of ensuring peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific over the long term,” Biden said Wednesday from the East Room of the White House. “We need to be able to address both the current strategic environment in the region and how it may evolve because the future of each of our nations, and indeed the world, depends on a free and open Indo-Pacific, enduring and flourishing in the decades ahead.”

     
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    None of the three leaders mentioned China in their remarks, but the objective of the new alliance was clear: challenging the country’s growing economic and military influence. The effort comes amid rising tensions with China over a range of issues including military ambitions and human rights, and Biden has made it clear he views China as the country’s most significant global competitor. The president spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week. Biden initiated that call, but one administration official said Wednesday that the Australian submarine plan was not discussed “in any specific terms.”

    China on Thursday slammed the agreement for “seriously undermining” regional stability and accused the three counties of inciting an “arms race.” At a regular press briefing in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian criticized the United States and Britain for “extremely irresponsible” behavior.

    The three countries will work over the next 18 months to hash out the details of submarine effort and will pay special attention to safeguards and nonproliferation measures, Biden said Wednesday.

     
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    Nuclear-powered submarines are faster, more capable, harder to detect and potentially much more lethal than conventional-powered submarines. The Chinese navy is thought to possess six nuclear attack submarines and many more conventional ones, with plans to expand the nuclear-powered fleet over the next decade.

    The United States sails its own nuclear-powered submarines in the Indo-Pacific region, and those and other U.S. ships regularly engage in cat-and-mouse interactions with Chinese vessels that U.S. commanders have long feared could lead to an unintentional conflict.

    The Navy’s three most powerful nuclear submarines were all deployed to the Pacific region over the summer. U.S. defense officials have warned of a Chinese naval buildup that challenges U.S. navigation in what the United States and its allies say is international water.

     
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    U.S. officials who spoke to reporters ahead of the announcement also avoided any direct mention of China and sidestepped questions about what message the United States was sending to its adversary with the new partnership. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the announcement ahead of the president’s remarks.

    “I do want to just underscore very clearly this partnership is not aimed or about any one country,” one senior official said. “It’s about advancing our strategic interests, upholding the international rules-based order and promoting peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific.”

    Biden declined to answer questions about China after he concluded his remarks.

    Countries “should not build exclusionary blocs targeting or harming the interests of third parties. In particular, they should shake off their Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice," Liu Pengyu, a spokesman at the Chinese embassy in Washington, told Reuters.

     
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    The announcement came as a surprise in Australia, where recent reports suggested France, not the United States, would be deepening military ties as it moved ahead with a plan to build $66 billion worth of diesel submarines for Australia. But then news broke late Wednesday in Australia that Morrison had convened top-secret cabinet meetings.

    The arrangement could also lead to damaged relations with France, with one former French ambassador to the United States saying on Twitter the countries “stabbed” France in the back.

    In a joint statement, the French minister of foreign affairs and minister of the armed forces said the decision was “regrettable” and “contrary to the letter and spirit of the cooperation that prevailed between France and Australia.”

    “The American choice to exclude a European ally and partner such as France from a structuring partnership with Australia, at a time when we are facing unprecedented challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, whether in terms of our values or in terms of respect for multilateralism based on the rule of law, shows a lack of coherence that France can only note and regret,” the leaders said.

     
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    In response to the announcement, one Australian politician is calling for an inquiry into the agreement, saying it raised questions around nuclear nonproliferation.

    “If it’s a U.S. submarine, they have highly enriched uranium in their reactors and that creates a proliferation issue in terms of Australia standing up saying, no one should have this sort of fuel available to them,” Australian Sen. Rex Patrick, a former submariner in the Australian navy, told his country’s ABC.

    Nuclear propulsion is different from nuclear weaponry, and Morrison said Australia remains committed to remaining a nonnuclear weapons state.

    “Let me be clear,” he said. “Australia is not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability, and we will continue to meet all our nuclear nonproliferation obligations.”

     
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    But some experts worry about how the new arrangement will impact the global nuclear power landscape.

    “I think if Australia goes down this route and builds nuclear-powered submarines and removes nuclear material from safeguards, it sets a very damaging precedent,” said James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

    Acton said he is particularly concerned about how Iran will react to the announcement and whether the country will attempt to skirt safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by saying it is using nuclear material to build a submarine. Before the U.S. announcement, Acton said he would expect China and Russia to vehemently oppose any efforts by Iran to take such actions, but he said the calculus could change after the United States shares nuclear propulsion technology with Australia.

     
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    “I do believe the damage to the nuclear nonproliferation regime will be very significant, and I strongly believe it will outweigh the defense benefits of Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines,” he said.

    The Biden administration said the United States has informed the IAEA about the announcement and will pay close attention to any nonproliferation implications from the effort.

    “I do want to underscore that the Biden administration remains deeply committed to American leadership in nonproliferation,” the senior official said. “This is nuclear propulsion. Australia has no intention of pursuing nuclear weapons, and Australia is, in fact, the leader in all nonproliferation efforts in the NPT and elsewhere.”

    The agreement also marks an expansion of U.S. military cooperation with Australia. The country has long been a close military ally, but it is now more on a par with Great Britain, America’s foremost military ally. The United States and Australia have an existing military and diplomatic partnership known as Ausmin, short for the annual ministerial level meetings among the four defense and foreign secretaries. Australia and Britain are also part of the select intelligence grouping known as the Five Eyes.

     
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    “This new architecture is really about deepening cooperation on a range of defense capabilities for the 21st century and again these relationships with Great Britain and Australia are time-tested, our oldest allies generally,” the senior administration official said. “This is designed not only to strengthen our capabilities in the Indo-Pacific but to link Europe and particularly Great Britain more closely with our strategic pursuits in the region as a whole.”

    Matt Pottinger, the former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration and chairman of the China program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, praised the new effort.

    “We are going to be pooling technological advances in important defensive capabilities,” he said, making “the sum of the alliance greater than its parts.”

    Pottinger, who was briefed by the White House ahead of the announcement, added the new alliance also fulfills Biden’s promise to make the Indo-Pacific region a priority of his foreign policy.

    “It adds more teeth to our collective deterrence and that helps give confidence to countries in the region to stand up for their sovereignty and push back against coercion from Beijing,” he said.

    Biden and Xi have only spoken twice since Biden took office, the second call taking place last week. The 90-minute call, which an administration official described as familiar and candid, did not yield any specific announcements, including whether Biden and Xi would hold an in-person summit later this fall.

    Both leaders had been expected to travel to Europe for a climate summit in Scotland, but whether Xi still plans to attend remains unclear. Biden has confirmed his attendance, which will come just after a Group of 20 meeting in Rome.

    Michael Miller in Sydney and Lily Kuo in Taipei contributed to this report.

     

    • Hook 'Em 1
  3. 17 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

    Paywall.  Copy paste if you please.

    https://outline.com/WfPd9P

    Spoiler
     Annotations 
     

    Linda Ronstadt Has Found Another Voice

    MICHAEL SCHULMAN MAY 28, 2019
     

    JanetDelaney--LindaRonstadt.jpg

    A new documentary, “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” looks back on the musician’s risk-taking career.

    Photograph by Janet Delaney for The New Yorker

    It’s been ten years since Linda Ronstadt, once the most highly paid woman in rock and roll, sang her last concert. In 2013, the world found out why: Parkinson’s disease had rendered her unable to sing, ending a musical careerthat had left an indelible mark on the classic-rock era and earned her ten Grammy Awards. Ronstadt’s earth-shaking voice and spunky stage presence jolted her to fame in the late sixties, and her renditions of “Different Drum” (with her early group, the Stone Poneys), “You’re No Good” (from her breakthrough album, “Heart Like a Wheel”), “Blue Bayou,” and “Desperado” helped define the California folk-rock sound. Along the way, two of her backup musicians left to form the Eagles.

    But Ronstadt, now seventy-three, didn’t rest on her greatest hits, experimenting instead with a dizzying range of genres. In the eighties, she starred in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway, recorded a standards album with the veteran arranger Nelson Riddle, and released “Canciones de Mi Padre,” a collection of traditional Mexican songs, which became the best-selling non-English-language album in American history. The record also returned Ronstadt to her roots. Her grandfather was a Mexican bandleader, and her father had serenaded her mother with Mexican folk songs in a beautiful baritone. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, close to the border—a place that has since become a political flashpoint.

    A new documentary, “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and opening September 6th, looks back on Ronstadt’s adventurous career. She spoke with The New Yorker twice by phone from her home in San Francisco. Our conversations have been edited and condensed.

    What is your day-to-day life like these days?

    Well, I lie down a lot, because I’m disabled. I do a lot of reading, but I’m starting to have trouble with my eyes, so that’s kind of a problem. It’s called getting old.

    What are you reading right now?

    I’m reading Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain.” I somehow got to be this age without having read Thomas Mann, and I’m trying to make up for it. I read “Buddenbrooks,” and I fell in love with his writing. His books are nice and long, so it takes a couple of days to get through them.

    Who do you spend most of your time with?

    My son lives here. My daughter comes over. I have really nice friends; they come over and hang out with me. It’s hard for me to get out. It’s hard for me to sit in a restaurant or sit up in a chair. It’s hard for me to stand around, so if there’s a situation where I’m liable to be caught in a doorway talking to somebody for five minutes, I tend to avoid that.

    What kind of music do you listen to?

    I love opera. It’s so terrible—I listen to it on YouTube. I’m an audiophile, but I’ve just gotten used to the convenience of being able to hear twenty-nine different performances of one role. I listen to other music, too. I found this Korean band that I thought was sort of interesting on Tiny Desk concerts, the NPR series. They get musicians to come in and play live in a really tiny little space behind a desk. It’s no show biz, just music. They have great stuff. They had Randy Newman. Natalia Lafourcade, who’s a Mexican artist that I love particularly. Whatever’s new. The Korean band I saw was called SsingSsing.

    Is it like K-pop?

    No, it’s based on Korean traditional singing. It was kind of like David Bowie bass and drums, and then this really wild South Korean traditional singing. It’s polytonal. It’s a different skill than we use, with more notes in it. And a lot of gender-crossing. It looked like I was seeing the future.

    In the documentary, you say, “I can sing in my mind, but I can’t do it physically.” That sounds either comforting or excruciating.

    Well, it’s a little frustrating when my family comes over from Arizona, because we would all sing together. That way we don’t have to talk about politics. It makes for harmonious—I don’t mean the pun—relations. But I can’t do that anymore, so I just invite the ones who are Democrats.

    When you sing in your mind, what do you hear?

    I can hear the song. I can hear what I would be doing with it. I can hear the accompaniment. Sometimes I don’t remember the words, so I have to look them up. It’s not usually my songs I’m singing. I don’t listen to my own stuff very much.

    Do you ever hear yourself on the radio in unexpected places?

    I listen to Mexican radio—the local Banda station out of San Jose. I mostly listen to NPR. I don’t listen to mainstream radio anymore. I don’t know the acts and I don’t know the music. It doesn’t interest me, particularly. There are some good modern people. I like Sia. She’s a very original singer.

    How do you cope with the frustration of not being able to do everything you want to do?

    I’ve just accepted it. There’s absolutely nothing I can do. I have a form of Parkinsonism that doesn’t respond to standard Parkinson’s meds, so there’s no treatment for what I have. It’s called P.S.P.—Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. I just have to stay home a lot. The main attraction in San Francisco is the opera and the symphony, and I make an effort and go out, but I can only do it a few times a year. It makes me sick that I’m ever not in my seat when Michael Tilson Thomas raises his baton, because he’s such a good conductor, and I miss hearing orchestral music. My friends come over and play music, and that’s where I like it best, anyway: in the living room.

    As you tell it, the first symptoms you noticed before you knew you had Parkinson’s were in your singing voice.

    Yeah. I’d start to do something and it would start to take the note and then it would stop. What you can’t do with Parkinsonism is repetitive motions, and singing is a repetitive motion.

    You broke onto the scene with such a powerhouse voice. What did it feel like, singing with that voice?

    Well, I was trying to figure out how to sing! And trying to be heard over the electric instruments. I had no idea that I sang as loud as I did. I always thought I wasn’t singing loud enough, because in the early days there were no monitors. You couldn’t hear yourself.

    In the documentary, you talk about growing up in Tucson, Arizona, and how culturally rich that was. How do the current politics around the border resonate with you?

    They’re devastating. I feel filled with impotent rage. I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, and the Sonoran Desert is on both sides of the border. There’s a fence that runs through it now, but it’s still the same culture. The same food, the same clothes, the same traditional life of ranching and farming. I go down there a lot, and it’s so hard to get back across the border. It’s ridiculous. It used to be that you could go across the border and have lunch and visit friends and shop in the little shops there. There was a beautiful department store in the fifties and sixties. My parents had friends on both sides of the border. They were friends with the ranchers, and we went to all their parties and their baptisms and their weddings and their balls.

    And now that’s gone. The stores are wiped out because they don’t get any trade from the United States anymore. There’s concertina wire on the Mexican side that the Americans put up. Animals are getting trapped in there. Children are getting cut on it. It’s completely unnecessary. In the meantime, you see people serenely skateboarding and girls with their rollerskates, kids playing in the park. And you think, We’re afraid of this? They’re just regular kids!

    I spent time out in the desert when I was still healthy, working with a group of Samaritans who go to find people that are lost. You run into the Minute Men or the Border Patrol every five seconds. The border is fully militarized. You meet some guy stumbling through the desert trying to cross, and he’s dehydrated, his feet are full of thorns, cactus, then you see this Minute Man sitting with his cooler, with all of his water and food and beer, and his automatic weapon sitting on his lap, wearing full camouflage. It’s so cruel. People are coming to work. They’re coming to have a better life. You have to be pretty desperate to want to cross that desert.

    You were talking about this back in 2013, when your memoir came out, before it became such a national wedge issue. Were people not paying enough attention before?

    Well, they didn’t live close to the border. They’d just go back to chewing their cud about it. It wasn’t their problem. I lived at the border then. I lived in Tucson for ten years. I saw what was going on. Putting children in jail—that’s not new. That was going on in the Bush Administration. Barack Obama tried to get immigration reform and Congress wouldn’t allow it. So people have been caught in this web of suffering, dying in the desert. They’re incredibly brave and resourceful, the people who make it. A C.E.O. of a big company once told me—when I said, “What do you look for in hiring practices?”—she said, “I look for someone who’s dealt with a lot of adversity, because they usually make a good business person.” And I thought, You should hire every immigrant who comes across the border.

    Why did you decide to move to San Francisco from Tucson?

    My children were coming home repeating homophobic remarks they heard at school. And they’d also heard other things, like, “If you don’t go to church, you’re going to go to Hell.” I thought, You know, I don’t need that. So I moved back to San Francisco. I wanted them to have a sense of what a community was like where you could walk to school, walk to the market. More of an urban-village experience. In Tucson, I was driving in the car for forty-five minutes to get them to school and then forty-five minutes to get them back, in a hot car. I didn’t want that life for them.

    I can tell that you have a real sense of mourning over what the border used to be.

    People don’t realize that there’s Mexican, there’s American, and then there’s Mexican-American. They’re three different cultures, and they all influence each other. And they all influence our culture profoundly. The cowboy suit that Roy Rogers would wear, with the yoke shirt and the pearl buttons and the bell-bottom frontier pants and the cowboy hat—those are all Mexican. We imported it. We eat burritos and tacos, and our music is influenced a lot by Mexican music. It goes back and forth across the border all the time.

    How did growing up in that hybrid Mexican-American culture shape you as a musician?

    I listened to a lot of Mexican music on the radio, and my dad had a really great collection of traditional Mexican music. It made it hard for me when I went to sing American pop music, because rock and roll is based on black church rhythms, and I wasn’t exposed to that as a kid. I could only sing what I’d heard. What I’d heard was Mexican music, Billie Holiday, and my brother singing boy soprano.

    So what drew you to folk rock in the sixties?

    I loved popular folk music like Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved the real traditional stuff, like the Carter family. I loved Bob Dylan. And I tried to copy what I could. When I heard the Byrds doing folk rock, I thought that was what I wanted to do.

    How did your recording of “Different Drum” with the Stone Poneys in 1967 come about?

    It was a song I found on a Greenbriar Boys record, and I thought it was a strong piece of material. I just liked the song. We worked it up as a kind of shuffle—it wasn’t very good with the guys playing guitar and mandolin. But the record company recognized that the song was strong, too, so they had me come back and record it with their musicians and their arrangement. And I was pretty shocked. I didn’t know how to sing it with that arrangement. But it turned out to be a hit.

    Do you remember hearing it on the radio for the first time?

    Yeah. We were on our way to a meeting at Capitol Records, in an old Dodge or something, and I was jammed in the back with our guitars. Then the engine froze, and the car made this horrible metal-on-metal shriek. We had to push it to the nearest gas station, half a block away. The man was looking at the car saying it’ll never run again, and we were saying, “What will we ever do in Los Angeles with no car?” And from the radio playing in the back of the garage we could hear the opening of “Different Drum.” We heard which radio station it was on, KRLA, so I knew it was a hit, if they played it on the L.A. stations.

    What are your memories of the Troubadour, in West Hollywood?

    That’s where you went to hang out. We would go to hear the local act that was playing, or there’d be someone like Hoyt Axton or Oscar Brown, Jr., or Odetta. Nobody was anything particular at the time. We were all aspiring musicians. The Dillards were there. The Byrds hung out there. And then it started to be people like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. Carole King would play there. When Joni Mitchell played, she played two weeks. I think I saw every single night.

    In your book, you talk about being with Janis Joplin there and trying to figure out what to wear onstage.

    Oh, I never could figure out what to wear. I grew up wearing Levi’s and a T-shirt or a sweater and cowboy boots or sneakers. And that’s what I left home with, and that’s what I wound up with. In the summer we’d cut the legs off the Levi’s and they were Levi’s shorts. When I got my Cub Scout outfit, that was a real change for me.

    You say that you and Janis Joplin couldn’t figure out how to fit in—you didn’t know whether to be earth mothers or whatever.

    We didn’t know whether we were supposed to cook and sew and embroider. Roles were being redefined. There were a lot of earth-mama hippie girls who knew how to do that stuff.

    There’s a clip in the documentary of you being interviewed in 1977, and you talk about how rock-and-roll stars become alienated and are surrounded by managers who are willing to indulge them, and that’s how people wind up with drug problems.

    They got involved with drugs because they felt isolated. Stardom is isolating. There are a whole bunch of people that you’re hanging out with who are trying to become musicians. And some were chosen and some were not, and it becomes a difficult relationship with the people who weren’t chosen. Sometimes they’re resentful, sometimes you feel uncomfortable. It’s like Emmylou Harris has in a song: “Pieces of the sky were falling in your neighbor’s yard but not on you.” The adulation made people feel disconnected. I also think that some people’s brain chemistry is more vulnerable to addiction. I was lucky. Mine was not.

    David Geffen says that you had an issue with diet pills.

    I had no issue with that. I just took them when I needed them. I didn’t like it. If I ate, I’d have to take a diet pill. It wasn’t something I did for pleasure.

    There’s been a lot of looking back this year at the summer of 1969, with these big anniversaries of the moon landing and Woodstock and the Manson murders. What do you remember about that summer?

    When Woodstock happened, I was in New York. I remember getting all the reports from people like Henry Diltz and Crosby, Stills & Nash. They’d come back with stories of everybody being in the mud. It sounded like a good thing to have survived, but I’m glad I didn’t go up there. Overflowing toilets and no food is not my idea of a fun time. I was playing some club—probably the Bitter End.

    When the Manson family came through, they managed to murder my next-door neighbor, Gary Hinman. I was lucky I wasn’t home that night—they may have come for me. We knew those girls, Linda Kasabian and maybe Leslie Van Houten, too. I lived in Topanga Canyon at the time, and they would hitchhike, and they would talk about this guy Charlie at the Spahn Ranch. But I didn’t know him personally. We knew it was kind of a bad scene. But, when we found out how bad of a scene it was, we were horrified.

     

    Tana French.

     

    Toni Morrison.

     

    Wendell Berry stands by piles of firewood.

     

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

     

    Robert Caro.

     

    A portrait of author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

    People must have been really scared before they were captured.

    Oh, everybody was freaked out. We weren’t sure at the time whether the Gary Hinman murder was connected to the other murders, but we found out soon enough.

    The music of that era was so intertwined with politics. How do you feel that compares with popular music these days? Is music addressing political upheaval?

    Oh, I think so. Especially hip-hop. But I wish there was a little bit more political activism. I’m waiting for the Reichstag to burn down, you know? Because I was interested in the Weimar Republic, I’ve always been aware that culture can be overwhelmed and subverted in a very short time. All of German intellectual history—Goethe and Beethoven—was subverted by the Nazis. It happened in a thirty-year span and brought German culture to its knees. And it’s happening here. There’s a real conspiracy of international fascism that wants to defeat democracy. They want all the power for themselves, and I think that suits Donald Trump right now. He’d like to be a dictator.

    In going through your history, I’ve noticed you’ve been selectively outspoken. There’s an interview from 1983 where a talk-show host in Australia asks you about deciding to perform in South Africa under apartheid, and you give this speech about how if you didn’t play anywhere with racism you wouldn’t be able to play in the American South or Boston. You also take shots at Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch. As a popular performer, was there a cost to speaking out?

    I never talked onstage for about fifteen years. But there were certain causes that we as a musical community united against, and one of them was nuclear power. We did a lot of No Nukes concerts—James Taylor, me, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt—and if it was a particular cause that I was in favor of. I did what I could to help, but I don’t think my focus was particularly political. If somebody asked, I was perfectly happy to give my opinion.

    I also found a clip from 1995 where you confronted Robin Quivers, Howard Stern’s co-host, on the “Tonight Show” about her association with Stern. Do you remember what upset you so much?

    Well, first of all, I never heard Howard Stern on the radio. I had no idea who he was. I didn’t have a television. I didn’t know who Robin Quivers was. But it had just been on the news that day, what he had said about—oh, the girl singer.

    Selena? He said “Spanish people have the worst taste in music” and played her music with gunshots in the background.

    Selena, yeah. And it just offended me. As a Mexican-American, it just offended me that he would say such a horrible thing about someone’s dead daughter. I didn’t realize that Howard Stern made a career out of making unfortunate remarks about other people. And I didn’t know what Robin Quivers was like. I didn’t know anything about it. I just went, “Hey, that really offended me.” It made me angry. I didn’t realize what kind of a hornets’ nest I’d stepped into.

    Did you get any reaction from him after that?

    Oh, yeah. He said horrible things about me.

    Going back to your performing career, in the documentary, your former manager Peter Asher says that you would see people whispering at your concerts and imagine that they were saying, “She’s the worst singer I’ve ever heard.” Were you really that insecure?

    I just didn’t feel like I could quite sing well enough. It was best when I forgot about everything and just thought about the music, but it took me a long time to get there. I didn’t want to see people that I knew in the audience. I didn’t like to see the audience, actually. I couldn’t understand why they’d come. It’s a different relationship than singers like Taylor Swift have. I think it’s a little bit healthier that they embrace their audience and sort of feel like everybody’s on the same team. We were encouraged in the sixties to think of us and them. The hippies started that whole tribal thing, and it was the straights against the hippies. It was unhealthy.

    How did you overcome your self-doubt?

    I’d just say, “Breathe and sing.” As long as I pulled my focus back to the music, I was fine.

    Your relationship with Jerry Brown is covered in the documentary and in your book, but not your relationships with some other prominent people, like Jim Carrey and George Lucas. Is there a reason for that?

    I was writing about the music. They didn’t have anything to do with my musical process.

    What did Jerry Brown contribute to your musical process?

    Well, he was there when Joe Papp [the founder of the Public Theatre and Shakespeare in the Park] called saying that they wanted me for “H.M.S. Pinafore.”. But Jerry [gave me the message] wrong—it was actually “The Pirates of Penzance,” which I didn’t know.

    Do you keep in touch with him?

    Yeah. We’re friends. We’ve always been friends. He came over last Christmas.

    What do you talk about?

    Water in California. He said when he retires he wants to study trees and California Indians. I gave him my tree book, “The Hidden Life of Trees.” There’s a new history of water use in California that’s fantastic. It’s called “The Dreamt Land.” It’s like John McPhee-level writing. It’s really worth it for the writing alone.

    The press always made such a big deal about the fact that you never got married.

    I didn’t need to get married. I’m not sure that anybody needs to get married. If they do, I’m on their side. But I never needed to get married. I had my own life.

    I have to admit, I was born in the eighties and I discovered you through “The Muppet Show.” What can you tell me about working with Kermit?

    I had a crush on Kermit, so it was a problem because of Miss Piggy. He was her property. But we had a really good time on that show. There’s something extraordinarily creative about puppeteers. They’re fascinating, because when they do all their acting, they can’t let it go through their own body. I think they’re just loaded with talent. I loved watching them. It was a very coöperative experience. They let me help them with the story and the songs.

    What was your contribution to the story?

    This crush that I had on Kermit, they developed into a little storyline where Miss Piggy and I have a confrontation.

    She seems like a very formidable rival.

    She was. She was nasty! She locked Kermit in a trunk.

    Because you’re a singer but not a songwriter, so much of your artistic expression comes through your choice of material. How did you choose songs for “Heart Like a Wheel,” including the title songby Anna and Kate McGarrigle?

    I was just ambushed by that song. I was riding with Jerry Jeff Walker in a cab, and he said, “I was at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and I heard these two girls singing—they were sisters. They sang a really good song. You should hear it.” He sang me the first verse—“Some say the heart is just like a wheel / When you bend it, you can’t mend it / But my love for you is like a sinking ship / And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean”—and I just thought they were the most beautiful lyrics I’d ever heard. I said, “You have to send me that song.” And I get this tape in the mail, reel to reel, with just piano and a cello and the two girls singing their beautiful harmonies. The manager I had at the time said it was too corny. Somebody said it would never be a hit. And I don’t think it was ever a radio single, but it was a huge song for me. I sang it all the way through my career.

    Were you surprised by the songs from that album that became hits?

    I was surprised anything of mine was successful, because it always seemed so hodge-podge. I just tried different songs that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, but which expressed a real urgent feeling that I just had to express. “You’re No Good” was an afterthought. We needed to have an uptempo song to close the show with, and that was a song I knew from the radio.

    What were the biggest challenges in becoming a public figure?

    Not having the ability to observe other people, because people are observing you. I had to keep my head down all the time. It was kind of excruciating. I still feel that way. I don’t like to be on the spot. Also, relationships were hard, because I was always on the bus.

    In an interview from 1977, you said, “I think men have generally treated me badly, and the idea of a war between the sexes is very real in our culture. In the media, women are built up with sex as a weapon and men are threatened by it as much as they are drawn to it, and they retaliate as hard as they can.” Do you remember what you were talking about?

    No, I don’t! I have to say that when I look at my whole career, over all, what counted the most was whether you showed up and played the music. I saw it happen with Emmylou, and I saw it happen with Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell was threatening to everybody. She could play better. She could sing better. She looked better. She could just do it all. But it’s true, there was a certain amount of chauvinism.There weren’t a lot of girls in the business who were doing what I was doing, so my friendship with Emmylou Harris became so important.

    Did you find that there were things that were harder for you as a woman than for your male contemporaries?

    Well, I had to do makeup and hair. That’s a lot, because that’s two hours of the day that you could spend reading a book or learning a language or practicing guitar. Guys just shower and put on any old clothes. And then there were high heels. I have extra ankle bones in each foot, and high heels were agonizing. I used to wear them onstage, kick them off, hide my feet behind the monitors, and find my shoes again before I had to leave the stage.

    At the height of your rock-and-roll fame, you decided to do Gilbert and Sullivan. What drew you to that?

    My sister, when she was eleven and I was six, I guess, sang “H.M.S. Pinafore” in her junior high school. My mother had a book of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas on piano, and somehow I learned the songs. I heard my sister practicing them. So, when I heard of “The Pirates of Penzance,” I knew what Gilbert and Sullivan was.

    Was part of you tired of being a rock star?

    Part of me was very tired of it. I was singing loud in halls that didn’t sound like they were built for music. I liked the idea of a proscenium stage. I think a proscenium has a lot to do with focussing your attention. A theatre is a machine built to focus your attention and allow you to dream. You’re hypnotized, in a way, and the person onstage is your champion, is telling your story. You find emotions you didn’t realize you had.

    Throughout the eighties, you experimented wildly with genre, everything from Puccini to the Great American Songbook to Mexican canciones. I’m sure your record label was surprised when you said, “I want to make an album of Mexican folk music.”

    Well, before that, I wanted to do American standard songs, and they said, “No, it won’t work.” In fact, Joe Smith [the chairman of Elektra/Asylum Records] even came to my house to beg me not to do it. He said, “You’re throwing your career away.” I’d been away so long working on Broadway.

    Were you worried that your fans wouldn’t go along with the standards, either?

    I didn’t worry about it until after we made the record [“What’s New”] and we were opening at Radio City Music Hall. And I realized, all of a sudden, people might not show up. They really might hate it. I was ordering matzo-ball soup from the Carnegie Deli next door, and it gave me the shakes so bad that I could barely stand when I got onstage. I was holding hands with Nelson Riddle in the wings—he was nervous, too. He said, “Don’t let me down, baby.” I said, “I’ll do my best.” He was the best of those arrangers—worked with Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. He wrote beautiful charts for me. I was really lucky to have him. I went back to my apartment that night and just smiled, because we had gotten away with an evening of American standard songs.

    When I see something now like Lady Gaga recording a standards album with Tony Bennett, it seems like she owes you a debt.

    Well, she owes me nothing. She’s got enough talent to make it on her own. But, up until then, attempts by female pop artists to go back and do standards had not been successful. And Joan Baez had tried to record in Spanish, and that didn’t work. It depends on what the audience is expecting of you. When I did Mexican songs, I brought in a whole new audience. I played the same venues, but it was grandmothers and grandchildren. People brought their kids. And the standards audience was older—they were in their fifties and sixties, which seemed impossibly old to me at the time.

    Is it true that you recorded “Canciones de Mi Padre” at George Lucas’s recording studio, Skywalker Sound?

    The second album, “Mas Canciones.” I chose it because they have a big scoring stage. It has good acoustics that you can tune with the wooden panels on the side. There was a lot of room ambience. Mariachi’s a folk orchestra, and it was a good orchestra sound. It’s hard to find.

    You also collaborated with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. Do you keep in touch with them?

    Emmy comes out to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which is a bluegrass festival here in San Francisco, so I see her about once a year. She comes over to my house. We used to sing together. Now she brings her laundry and we talk. When you’re on the road, you always have extra laundry.

    Have you kept up with Dolly?

    Emmy and I presented her an award recently, and I hadn’t seen her in a while. I don’t think she realized I’m as disabled as I am. She threw her arms around me, and I kept saying, “Dolly, watch out! You’re going to knock me down!” She thought I was kidding. I nearly fell down. I grabbed onto the podium that her award was on and knocked it to the ground. It was made out of glass and it broke. “Congratulations, here’s your award—smash! You get to take the pieces home.”

    If you could wave a magic wand and record one more album, what would be on it?

    It would be an eclectic mix. There’s a song called “I Still Have That Other Girl,” written by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, that I always wanted to record. And there’s a Mexican song called “Paloma Negra” I always wanted to record. I’d record all those songs that I didn’t get around to.

     

  4. Matt Brown from The Athletic agrees with you:  

    "Given the current lack of parity in the sport, it feels safer than ever to say the national champion will be one of Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson, Ohio State, Georgia and Texas A&M — and likely one of the first five."

     

    Spoiler

     

    Alabama is No. 1 but I voted for Georgia, and what the preseason AP Top 25 predicts about the season: Behind the Ballot

    COLUMBIA, SC - NOVEMBER 28: JT Daniels #18 of the Georgia Bulldogs hands the ball off to Zamir White #3 against the South Carolina Gamecocks at Williams-Brice Stadium on November 28, 2020 in Columbia, South Carolina. (Photo by Tony Walsh/Collegiate Images/Getty Images)
    By Matt Brown  Aug 16, 2021comment-icon@2x.png 94  save-icon@2x.png

    The preseason AP Top 25 for the 2021 college football season somehow feels familiar to a fault while also being fresh and unusual in places.

    Alabama is No. 1? Of course. The Crimson Tide, coming off yet another national championship, have been atop the preseason AP poll eight times now, including six under Nick Saban, and this is their record-shattering 14th consecutive season making a No. 1 appearance at any point. But Iowa State at No. 7? This is the first time the Cyclones have opened higher than 20th.

    Oklahoma, Clemson and Ohio State join Alabama in the top four? Of course. Those four have combined to take up 20 of the 28 bids to the College Football Playoff so far. But Cincinnati and North Carolina are also in the top 10? The Bearcats’ only previous preseason ranking was No. 20 a year ago, and the Tar Heels haven’t started or finished a season in the top 10 since 1997.

    Then there’s Indiana, ranked in the preseason for the first time since 1969.

    Chalk still mostly rules the day, but I made an attempt to shake things up slightly at the top. I was one of 16 voters who decided against voting Alabama and dared to drop the Crimson Tide to No. 3, behind Georgia and Oklahoma on my ballot.

    Preseason AP Top 25 vs. my ballot
    TEAM AP RANK MY VOTE DIFF.
    1
    3
    -2
    2
    2
    0
    3
    4
    -1
    4
    5
    -1
    5
    1
    4
    6
    6
    0
    7
    7
    0
    8
    13
    -5
    9
    12
    -3
    10
    11
    -1
    11
    8
    3
    12
    15
    -3
    13
    14
    -1
    14
    9
    5
    team-logo-252-50x50.pngUSC
    15
    10
    5
    team-logo-267-50x50.pngLSU
    16
    19
    -3
    17
    24
    -7
    18
    21
    -3
    19
    18
    1
    20
    17
    3
    21
    16
    5
    22
    22
    0
    23
    NR
    Out
    24
    20
    4
    25
    NR
    Out
    team-logo-187-50x50.pngTCU
    NR
    23
    In
    NR
    25
    In

    So what does the preseason poll say about how the 2021 season will play out? Here are some bold and not-so-bold predictions based on past data.

    National championship

    The national champion will come from the top six. Since preseason No. 22 Auburn won the title in 2010, only one of the past nine national champions — No. 11 Florida State in 2013 — has come from outside the preseason top six. The only national champion in the Playoff era to come from outside the top five was No. 6 LSU in 2019. In the past 50 seasons, the AP national champion has started in the top two 18 times and the top six 31 times. It’s come from outside the top 10 on 10 occasions — though only two of the past 18.

    ap-champs.png

    Given the current lack of parity in the sport, it feels safer than ever to say the national champion will be one of Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson, Ohio State, Georgia and Texas A&M — and likely one of the first five.

    Alabama probably won’t win the national title. Though eight of the past 50 AP champions have been the preseason No. 1, the AP poll has correctly predicted the champion only once in the past 16 seasons, when Alabama failed to win the SEC West in 2017 but prevailed in the Playoff. Only three times has a school won the national championship one year, then started No. 1 and finished No. 1 in the AP poll the next year (2004 USC, 1975 Oklahoma, 1956 Oklahoma). It’s difficult to repeat, and it’s difficult to prove voters right and go wire-to-wire. Doing both is even rarer.

    Alabama and Oklahoma are safe bets to be contenders. Sure, Alabama may not win the title, but there’s little doubt that it will be one of the best teams in the country. Since the poll expanded to 25 teams in 1989, only one preseason No. 1 has finished unranked (2012 USC), while 28 of 32 have finished in the top 10, with 22 of the 32 in the top five. Take out 2012 USC, and the other 31 preseason No. 1 teams have had an average finish of 4.7.

    Alabama will have a great season; it probably won’t win the national championship. Oklahoma can be similarly confident in having a great season. A preseason top-two team has not finished worse than eighth in the CFP era, and 1994 Notre Dame is the only preseason No. 2 team to finish unranked since 1989, with 27 of 32 No. 2s finishing in the top 10 and 20 in the top five.

    Who will win the national title? My vote goes to Georgia, which is No. 1 on my ballot and No. 5 in the actual poll (two other voters tabbed the Bulldogs No. 1). Unlike the four 2020 Playoff teams, the Bulldogs have a returning starter quarterback in JT Daniels, a blue-chip recruit who showed enough potential down the stretch to make Georgia a plausible preseason No. 1 pick. The Bulldogs are in Year 2 of a revamped offense under Todd Monken, and they’ve recruited better than anyone, with the best average finish in the 247Sports Composite over the past four years — even slightly ahead of Alabama. Actually beating Alabama on the field is another matter, given that no former Saban assistant has done so as head coach, but Georgia has the talent across the board to beat anyone, giving it a chance to win its first national championship since 1980.

    I also thought hard about Oklahoma, which returns a rising star quarterback in Spencer Rattler and has its most complete roster in years thanks to improvement on defense. With so much QB turnover among the top teams, this may be Oklahoma’s best chance yet in the Playoff era.

    College Football Playoff

    Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson and Ohio State won’t all make the Playoff. In fact, two of Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson and Ohio State probably won’t make the Playoff. They’re all chalk picks, but straight chalk like that never happens, even if these dominant forces in their respective conferences have created an era with a historically low amount of parity. Last year was only the second time in 23 seasons of the BCS/CFP that three of the four teams in the preseason AP top four finished the regular season in the top four of the BCS/CFP rankings. All four of the preseason top four have never done so.

    On average, 1.52 of the preseason AP top four have finished in the top four of the BCS/CFP, with that average increasing to 2.0 since the start of the Playoff in 2014.

    Who will make the Playoff? My preseason ballot puts me firmly in the camp of Georgia and Oklahoma making the Playoff. It’s possible Alabama could give the SEC two CFP teams, but I’d bet on one of Clemson and Ohio State making it, plus one team from farther back. Six Playoff teams have started 10th or worse in the AP poll. Since 1998, an average of 1.26 teams have come from outside the top 10 in the preseason to inside the top four of the BCS/CFP at the end of the regular season, including two in 2015, one in 2016, one in 2017 and one in 2018, with Notre Dame coming from 10th last season.

    The solid bet is that one team will make that leap. My likeliest candidate is one of the three teams that I ranked in the top 10 but the poll did not: No. 11 Oregon, which is No. 8 on my ballot. The Ducks have the most talented team in the Pac-12, and an upset win against Ohio State would give them a great chance of ending the Pac-12’s Playoff drought that dates back to Washington’s 2016 appearance.

    I also ranked USC and Miami in the top 10, but I have a hard time seeing the Hurricanes beating Alabama in the opener and will maintain at least some healthy skepticism with USC, though Kedon Slovis, Drake Jackson and Drake London give the Trojans a strong foundation of talent. Beyond those teams, Washington is an interesting semi-sleeper in the Pac-12, and Penn State and Wisconsin are at least on the radar with bounce-back seasons in the Big Ten.

    Top 10

    At least one preseason top-10 team will finish unranked. Every preseason top-10 team has finished ranked as recently as 2019, but that’s not typical. Since 1989, at least one preseason top-10 team has finished unranked in 27 of 32 seasons, including three in both 2018 and 2020. An average of 1.63 preseason top-10 teams have finished unranked since the poll expanded to 25 teams. The preseason No. 9 team has finished unranked in four of the past seven seasons and 36.4 percent of the time since 1989. The next most common top-10 slots to plummet out of the poll: No. 10 (29 percent) and No. 8 (19.7 percent).

    No. 1 Alabama and No. 2 Oklahoma are surely safe, as mentioned above. Any of the bottom four teams in the top 10 are candidates to fall out of the rankings. Iowa State has more talent than ever but still has a smaller margin for error than other top teams because it doesn’t have as much depth. Cincinnati has road dates with Indiana and Notre Dame and some tricky AAC games, headlined by UCF. There’s higher upside for Cincinnati than most Group of 5 teams, but if things go sideways, an unranked finish is on the table. Notre Dame has a handful of toss-up games that put 8-4 in play, and North Carolina has to replace two 1,000-yard rushers and a 1,000-yard receiver.

    One or two teams from that group will finish in the top 10, but one or two are likely to finish unranked.

    About six top-10 teams will finish in the top 10. The preseason No. 10 team has finished in the top 10 in only six of the past 32 seasons, so good luck to North Carolina. No. 9 is the only other top-10 spot that has fallen out of the final top 10 more than half the time in that span. Teams ranked Nos. 11, 12, 13 and 14 (and No. 20, somewhat randomly) in the preseason have all finished in the top 10 at a higher rate than No. 10.

    The preseason top five have all finished in the top 10 in each of the past two seasons, though that’s unusual. It may be hard to imagine any of the top five finishing out of the top 10, but until 2019, it hadn’t previously happened since 2001.

    It’s likely that two preseason unranked teams will finish in the top 10. Since 1989, an average of 1.94 teams that were unranked in the preseason Top 25 leaped all the way into the final top 10. That number has been just one each of the past two seasons — No. 10 Northwestern in 2020 and No. 10 Minnesota in 2019 —  but at least two have done so in 23 of the past 32 seasons, including three in 2018 and as many as four in 2013.

    TCU is the highest-ranked team on my ballot (23) that is unranked in the poll, so mark me down for the Horned Frogs as being among the teams with the best chance. They bring back a lot of experience, have a stellar defense and play a manageable nonconference schedule, though they travel to Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Iowa State. Win one of those trips, and 10-2 in the regular season with a spot in the top 10 is possible.

    Top 25

    An average of 15.8 preseason ranked teams have finished in the Top 25 since 1989. Typically, about 8-11 ranked teams drop out of the poll, including at least one team from the top 10 and three or four of the teams ranked from No. 21 to No. 25.

    Two teams that I’ll predict fall out: Louisiana and Arizona State, neither of whom I ranked. Louisiana was a difficult cut, but it has tough road games at Texas and Liberty and I could see slight regression that leaves one Sun Belt team, Coastal Carolina, finishing ranked. And I was buying Arizona State earlier in the offseason, but the recent run of bad news has me selling Sun Devils stock, especially in a Pac-12 that may be deeper than anticipated.

    ranked-finishes.png

    Which means about nine preseason unranked teams will crash the Top 25.I’ve already talked about TCU, which I have ranked but sits three spots outside of the actual poll. There’s little doubt that an unranked Group of 5 team or two will make that push. Given that I took a shot with Nevada at No. 25 on the ballot, I’ll say the Wolf Pack crash the Top 25 by the end of the season behind the arm of Carson Strong and a talented supporting cast. Others to watch: Boise State is never a bad bet, the American could easily produce a second ranked team (UCF? SMU?), Boston College combines returning experience with a beatable schedule and Michigan has Top 25 talent if it can rebound from last fall’s debacle.

    More AP Top 25 notes

    • Before Saban arrived at Alabama, Miami boasted the longest streak of seasons with an appearance at No. 1 in the AP poll at seven from 1986 to ’92, according to College Poll Archive. Now the Crimson Tide have doubled that streak at 14 and counting. Clemson can tie the Hurricanes if it reaches No. 1 at any point this fall.

    • Oklahoma (37), Alabama (30) and Ohio State (30) are the most familiar faces in the top five in the 72 seasons of the preseason AP poll. Clemson is in the top five for the eighth time (including each of the past six years), while this is actually only Georgia’s seventh preseason top-five appearance (though its fourth in a row).

    • With Iowa State and Cincinnati breaking in, 63 teams have now been ranked in the preseason top 10 at least once, according to College Poll Archive. Oklahoma leads the way with 51 preseason top-10 appearances.

    • After breaking the longest Power 5 final poll drought by finishing ranked for the first time since 1988, Indiana is in the preseason AP poll for the first time 1969, when it was ranked 14th. Among teams ranked in both the AP Top 25 and on my ballot, Indiana is the team I differ from other voters the most on. I have the Hoosiers 24th, compared to No. 17 in the poll. They get Iowa, Penn State and Michigan on the road while hosting Ohio State and Cincinnati, and some regression will be hard to avoid.

    • Coastal Carolina and Louisiana finished ranked for the first time last season, and now they start ranked for the first time. This is the 20th season of football in the Sun Belt, and the Chanticleers and Ragin’ Cajuns are the conference’s first two teams to be ranked in the preseason poll.

    • The SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 placed five teams each in the preseason poll. They’re followed by three each from the ACC and Big 12, two from the Sun Belt, one from the American and Notre Dame, which returns to independent status.

    • Michigan was ranked in the preseason poll every year but one from 1970 through 2007. This is the seventh time in the past 14 seasons that the Wolverines will start the season unranked. Nebraska was ranked in the preseason poll every year from 1970 through 2002. This is the 10th time in the past 19 seasons that the Cornhuskers will start the season unranked.

    • No. 3 Clemson vs. No. 5 Georgia in Charlotte on Sept. 4 will be the fifth time in the past 25 years that two AP top-five teams meet in their opening game. It joins 2017 Alabama-Florida State, 2011 LSU-Oregon, 2004 Miami-Florida State and 1999 Penn State-Arizona. Week 1 boasts four other ranked matchups: No. 19 Penn State at No. 12 Wisconsin, No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 14 Miami, No. 23 Louisiana at No. 21 Texas and No. 17 Indiana at No. 18 Iowa.

    (Photo of JT Daniels and Zamir White: Tony Walsh / Collegiate Images / Getty Images)

     

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