As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
By ANDREW OSBORN
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.
"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."
At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.
Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.
For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.
The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
Write to Andrew Osborn at andrew.osborn@wsj.com

Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life
By WENDELL JAMIESON NY TIMES
MR. ELLMAN didn’t tell us why he wanted us to stay after school that December afternoon in 1981. When we got to the classroom — cinderblock walls, like all the others, with a dreary view of the parking lot — we smelled popcorn.
He had set up a 16-millimeter projector and a movie screen, and rearranged the chairs. Book bags, jackets and overcoats were tossed on seat backs, teenagers sat, suspicious, slumping, and Mr. Ellman started the projector whirring. “It’s a Wonderful Life” filled the screen.
I was not a mushy kid. My ears were fed a steady stream of the Clash and the Jam, and I was doing my best to conjure a dyed-haired, wry, angry-young-man teenage persona. But I was enthralled that afternoon in Brooklyn. In the years that followed, my affection for “It’s a Wonderful Life” has never waned, despite the film’s overexposure and sugar-sweet marketing, and the rolling eyes of friends and family.
Lots of people love this movie of course. But I’m convinced it’s for the wrong reasons. Because to me “It’s a Wonderful Life” is anything but a cheery holiday tale. Sitting in that dark public high school classroom, I shuddered as the projector whirred and George Bailey’s life unspooled.
Was this what adulthood promised?
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.
I haven’t seen it on a movie screen since that first time, but on Friday it begins its annual pre-Christmas run at the IFC Cinema in Greenwich Village. I plan to take my 9-year-old son and my father, who has never seen it the whole way through because he thinks it’s too corny.
How wrong he is.
I’m no movie critic, and I’ll leave to others any erudite evaluation of the film as cinematic art, but to examine it closely is to experience “It’s a Wonderful Life” on several different levels.
Many are pulling the movie out of the archives lately because of its prescience on the perils of trusting bankers. I’ve found, after repeated viewings, that the film turns upside down and inside out, and some glaring — and often funny — flaws become apparent. These flaws have somehow deepened my affection for it over the years.
Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.
Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.
And what about that banking issue? When he returns to the “real” Bedford Falls, George is saved by his friends, who open their wallets to cover an $8,000 shortfall at his savings and loan brought about when the evil Mr. Potter snatched a deposit mislaid by George’s idiot uncle, Billy (Thomas Mitchell).
But isn’t George still liable for the missing funds, even if he has made restitution? I mean, if someone robs a bank, and then gives the money back, that person still robbed the bank, right?
I checked my theory with Frank J. Clark, the district attorney for Erie County upstate, where, as far as I can tell, the fictional Bedford Falls is set. He thought it over, and then agreed: George would still face prosecution and possible prison time.
“In terms of the theft, sure, you take the money and put it back, you still committed the larceny,” he said. “By giving the money back, you have mitigated in large measure what the sentence might be, but you are still technically guilty of the offense.”
He took this a bit further: “If you steal over $3,000, it’s a D felony; 2 ½ to 7 years is the maximum term for that. The least you can get is probation. You know Jimmy Stewart, though, he had that hangdog face. He’d be a tough guy to send to jail.”
He paused, and then added: “You really have a cynical sense of humor.”
He should have met me when I was 15.
The movie starts sappily enough, with three angels in outer space discussing George’s fate. Maybe that’s what turned my dad off, that or the saccharine title. I’m amazed they didn’t spoil it for me in 1981, but I may not have been paying attention yet.
Soon enough, though, the darkness sets in. George’s brother, Harry (Todd Karns), almost drowns in a childhood accident; Mr. Gower, a pharmacist, nearly poisons a sick child; and then George, a head taller than everyone else, becomes the pathetic older sibling creepily hanging around Harry’s high school graduation party. That night George humiliates his future wife, Mary (Donna Reed), by forcing her to hide behind a bush naked, and the evening ends with his father’s sudden death.
Disappointments pile up. George can’t go to college because of his obligation to run the Bailey Building and Loan, and instead sends Harry. But Harry returns a slick, self-obsessed jerk, cannily getting out of his responsibility to help with the family business, by marrying a woman whose dad gives him a job. George again treats Mary cruelly, this time by chewing her out and bringing her to tears before kissing her. It is hard to understand precisely what she sees in him.
George is further emasculated when his bad hearing keeps him out of World War II, and then it’s Christmas Eve 1945. These scenes — rather than the subsequent Bizarro-world alternate reality — have always been the film’s defining moments for me. All the decades of anger boil to the surface.
After Potter takes the deposit, George flies into a rage and finally lets Uncle Billy know what he thinks of him, calling him a “silly, stupid old fool.” Then he explodes at his family.
If you watch the film this year, keep a close eye on Stewart during this sequence. First he smashes a model bridge he has built. Then, like any parent who loses his temper with his children, he seems genuinely embarrassed. He’s ashamed. He apologizes. And then ... slowly ... he starts getting angry all over again.
To me Stewart’s rage, building throughout the film, is perfectly calibrated — and believable — here.
Now as for that famous alternate-reality sequence: This is supposedly what the town would turn out to be if not for George. I interpret it instead as showing the true characters of these individuals, their venal internal selves stripped bare. The flirty Violet (played by a supersexy Gloria Grahame, who would soon become a timeless film noir femme fatale) is a dime dancer and maybe a prostitute; Ernie the cabbie’s blank face speaks true misery as George enters his taxi; Bert the cop is a trigger-happy madman, violating every rule in the patrol guide when he opens fire on the fleeing, yet unarmed, George, forcing revelers to cower on the pavement.
Gary Kamiya, in a funny story on Salon.com in 2001, rightly pointed out how much fun Pottersville appears to be, and how awful and dull Bedford Falls is. He even noticed that the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”
Now that’s scary.
I’ll do Mr. Kamiya one better, though. Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.
On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.
I checked my theory with the oft-quoted Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, and he agreed, pointing out that, of all the upstate counties, the only one that has seen growth in recent years has been Saratoga.
“The reason is that it is a resort, and it has built an economy around that,” he said. “Meanwhile the great industrial cities have declined terrifically. Look at Connecticut: where is the growth? It’s in casinos; they are constantly expanding.”
In New York, Mr. Moss added, Gov. David A. Paterson “is under enormous pressure to allow gambling upstate because of the economic problems.”
“We ease up on our lot of cultural behaviors in a depression,” he said.
What a grim thought: Had George Bailey never been born, the people in his town might very well be better off today.
Not too long ago I friended Mr. Ellman on Facebook. (To call him by his given name, Robert, is somehow still unnatural to me.)
I asked him about inviting us to stay after school to eat popcorn and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” He said it was always one of his favorite films, if a little corny and sentimental, and that he always saw staying late with us as part of his job. If anything, he said, there was just as much to learn after school as there was during it.
He reminded me that it was an actual film print we saw; this was before video took hold. And he also proved to be a close viewer. It was Mr. Ellman who pointed out to me how cruel George is to Mary the night they first kiss, and who told me to keep an eye out for Ernie’s vacant stare when George gets into the cab. He said he cried the first time he saw it.
I asked him if he’d continued those December viewings.
“In later years,” he wrote, “it became too difficult to get students to stay. We started doing a festival of student-written/student-directed one-act plays right after the end of the fall show. Everyone was too busy to stay and watch a movie.”
It’s a shame.
So I’ll tell Mr. Ellman a secret. It’s something I felt while watching the film all those years ago, but was too embarrassed to reveal.
That last scene, when Harry comes back from the war and says, “To my big brother, George, the richest man in town”? Well, as I sat in that classroom, despite the dreary view of the parking lot; despite the moronic Uncle Billy; despite the too-perfect wife, Mary; and all of George’s lost opportunities, I felt a tingling chill around my neck and behind my ears. Fifteen years old and imagining myself an angry young man, I got all choked up.
And I still do.

From The Times
The conman, the dream - and the sharp suit
Bernard Madoff is the latest in a line of brazen fraudsters. They find their victims among the brightest of people
Daniel Finkelstein
What you need to understand about Charles Ponzi's scheme is that when he started it, it wasn't a Ponzi scheme. It all just, well, it sort of got out of hand.
There's no denying that Ponzi was a crook. He'd been fired from his first job in America for short-changing the customers, he'd been jailed in Montreal for forging cheques and he'd gone back to prison in America almost immediately, this time for an illegal immigration scam. But in 1918 he came to Boston, married a nice Italian girl and tried to go straight. And that's when all the trouble started.
You see, Ponzi realised that there was good business to be done selling postal reply coupons. These coupons went for four times as much money in America as they did in Italy. So Ponzi sent off to a friend in the old country, and got him to send over a big batch of the coupons. And then he sold them for a profit.
Pretty soon he was attracting attention, and investors. He paid off the first few with real profits. But then the flaw in his plan became clear. The market for coupons - indeed the total number of coupons in circulation - simply wasn't large enough. As described in Joel Levy's invaluable little book The Con Artist Handbook, by July 1920 he was taking in £175,000 a day. To make a profit for all those investors there would have to be 160 million coupons in circulation. In reality there were just 30,000.
So what did Ponzi do? He started paying off existing investors with the money from new investors, something that requires an endless, growing supply of new investors. It couldn't last. And it didn't. Ponzi's scheme collapsed and in August 1920 he was indicted on 86 counts of fraud. He went to jail, of course. But, strangely enough, he still had a large number of fans who were outraged by his imprisonment and subsequent deportation to Brazil. In the Italian immigrant community he was, for some, still a hero.
The size, the sheer audacity, of Ponzi's fraud meant that his name became attached to the swindle. But his wasn't the first scheme of its kind - the whole thing had been tried, for example, just 20 years earlier by a book-keeper for a tea company known as William “520 per cent” Miller. And Miller had himself been uncovered by a savvy political fixer called T. Edward Schlesinger who said he knew what the book-keeper was up to, because he'd been doing it too. He got Miller to give him $240,000 to get the police off his back, then scarpered to Germany with the proceeds to live a comfortable life on the golf courses of Europe.
Which is a long way of telling you some of the things you need to know about the antics of which Bernard Madoff has been accused.
First, these kind of con jobs are nothing new; they've always gone on and they always will. Second, the conman is part knowing crook and part unwitting dupe. On the surface he is serene, authoritative, charming. At the same time he is increasingly helpless, sped along swiftly, arms flailing, on the current of their own fraud. And finally, the relationship between swindler and swindled, between the con artist and his mark, is complicated.
The common assumption about victims of confidence tricks is that they must be stupid. Not at all. In fact the bigger the con, the more essential it is that they not be stupid. A big con relies on a sophisticated mark who can see the advantage to them of the scheme. A common feature of confidence tricks is that the mark is, at the very least, keen on money. They are ready to cut corners and deal with others who cut corners. But to understand why this is worthwhile, or at least why it is theoretically worthwhile, they have to be bright.
In his classic book on confidence tricks, The Big Con, David Maurer writes: “It should not be assumed that the victims of confidence games are all blockheads. Very much to the contrary, the higher a mark's intelligence, the quicker he sees through the deal directly to his own advantage.” Carole Caplin's boyfriend, the conman Peter Foster, quickly realised that Cherie Blair was the perfect mark.
In other words, the conman finds it easy to explain to bright people how they might benefit. Maurer thinks that it would be too much to expect them also to realise that the whole situation may be a set-up. After all, great care has usually been taken with preparation. As it was with Madoff.
The key moment in the criminal career of Frank Abagnale - the conman played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me if You Can - came when he saw the way a Pan Am pilot in uniform was treated. He obtained a uniform and a fake ID card and set to work. It proved much easier to get money, girls, food, free flights when wearing a uniform. Want to know how Madoff managed to ply his trade without being properly questioned? Want to know why the regulators didn't bring him to book? He was dressed in the city equivalent of a pilot's uniform. The authority of his big company and his intimidating reputation clothed him.
But it was the maths that undid him. He chose the wrong con. Ponzi schemes collapse. It is almost mathematically impossible for them to keep going for ever. They are, incidentally, a particular feature of rising markets and come unstuck in downturns. Not all cons come unstuck like this. The mark doesn't like to be thought an idiot or greedy or a crook. So they often keep quiet or even side with the con artist. Even Ponzi himself kept some of his fans. I bet Madoff does too.
Before anyone is too censorious about the victims of this latest scam, consider this. The picture of Nicola Horlick accompanied many of the first Madoff stories. It was coupled with some words she doubtless now regrets. Last summer she said of Madoff: “He is very, very good at calling the US equity market. This guy has managed to return 1 per cent to 1.2 per cent per month, year after year after year.”
Ridiculous, no? How could anyone believe that such returns would go on year after year?
Well, anyone could really. You could, for instance. Or I could.
For the past ten years we have believed that the growth in our economy was magical, that it would go on for ever. It was different this time, we told ourselves, as Gordon Brown told you, me and Nicola Horlick that he had abolished boom and bust.
So we went merrily on our way, funding our public services by getting new entrants to the workforce to pay out benefits to existing members. A Ponzi scheme. And we're the mark.
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

West Palm Beach Journal
A Local Election’s Results Raise Major Questions on Race
By DAMIEN CAVE
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Officially, the Republican Party of Palm Beach County rejected Derek Black’s recent election as a committeeman because he failed to sign a loyalty oath.
But such technicalities hardly explain how a minuscule election — Mr. Black won 167 of 287 votes — has attracted the attention of hate groups nationwide and opponents like the Anti-Defamation League. This, rather, seems to reflect heightened sensitivity to issues of race in the age of Obama, and the intrusive power of history.
Palm Beach County after all, is a hive of Jewish retirees like Sid Dinerstein, 62, the county’s Republican chairman, while Mr. Black is more than just a gangly 19-year-old college student with a taste for politics.
He is also the son of Don Black, a former national grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. At age 11, he contributed a “kids page” to his father’s “white nationalist” Web site, Stormfront.org, where the message boards disparage nonwhites and have singled out Mr. Dinerstein, describing him as “another filthy stinking Jew.”
The younger Mr. Black denies being a white supremacist.
“I am a white person who is concerned about discrimination against white people,” he said in an interview at a local Starbucks. And yet, Mr. Black, speaking softly, wearing a black leather hat, boots and a sports coat a size too big, could not identify a single ideological difference with his father or the K.K.K.; nor could he bring himself to agree with the tenet that all men, regardless of race, are equal.
Last month, at a “Euro-American” conference in Tennessee organized by David Duke, one of the nation’s best-known white supremacists, Mr. Black gave a speech comparing his campaign to George C. Wallace’s resistance to desegregation in the 1960s. In an audio recording posted online, Mr. Black can be heard telling the crowd that he sees local Republican politics, “especially with the election of Obama, as the way white people will have to respond.”
“We can infiltrate,” he said, adding, “We could politically take the country back.”
Deborah Lauter, director of the civil rights division of the Anti-Defamation League, said that only a handful of other white extremists had tried (and mostly failed) in the last few years to join mainstream politics. She described them as “stealth candidates,” and Mr. Black acknowledged that his racial views were not a prominent part of his campaign.
In fact, Republican leaders here say they had never heard of him, or his family, until reporters from The Palm Beach Post told them he had won one of the party’s 111 seats in the Aug. 26 election.
Then the game changed. Mr. Duke, who was once married to Mr. Black’s mother, Chloe Hardin Black, appeared in West Palm Beach this month to broadcast a radio show describing Mr. Black as a victim of discrimination.
Residents responded with outrage. “It’s an ideology that should not be part of the fabric of this country,” said Michael Solomon, 64, a retired New York City police officer.
And as a result, local Republicans have found themselves trying to distance the party from Mr. Black without stirring up a conflict that would attract publicity.
So when asked, state and county leaders have said that Mr. Black’s associations appear to violate the oath he failed to sign, which requires that candidates avoid activities that are “likely to injure the name of the Republican Party.”
But at a meeting last week to seat newly elected committee members, Mr. Dinerstein focused solely on arcane procedure.
Mr. Black arrived early with a handful of supporters, and asked him why rules seemed to trump votes as a bank of television cameras jammed them closer together.
Mr. Dinerstein said he should ask the Republican Party of Florida, which issued the requirement. “It’s not my rule,” Mr. Dinerstein said. He insisted it was being applied indiscriminately, with others suffering a similar fate.
In the three hours that followed, neither he nor Mr. Black directly addressed prejudice. Not that they needed to. The auditorium, at a government building in downtown West Palm Beach, included many others willing to bring the racial subtext to center stage.
Mr. Black spoke three times. His first two monologues were interruptions to the agenda, and he was quickly shouted down by men in golf shirts and women with dyed hair. “He’s out of order,” shouted an older black man near the front, as Mr. Dinerstein banged his gavel. “Take off your hat!” yelled an older woman, who was white.
Mr. Black’s second effort attracted security guards who led him out of the room. In the hallway, he seemed uncertain. He said he was thinking of apologizing for the interruptions, and before returning, he stopped at the door and let out a large sigh.
Soon, the open comment period began. Joe Kaufman, chairman of Americans Against Hate, a Florida civil rights organization, broke the official silence, calling Mr. Black “a hatemonger.”
Mr. Black sat in the front row, smiling awkwardly. One of his supporters, a bald man with a round face, yelled in defense, “We love white people.” Mr. Black’s mother stood across the room, near a 10-foot-tall fake palm tree. “If he was black this wouldn’t happen to him,” she said.
In his final speech, he simply apologized. He said he eventually hoped to participate in party business, and did not respond to Mr. Kaufman’s accusations. After an unsolicited hug from an older white woman in dark sunglasses who smelled of alcohol, Mr. Black left peacefully.
Mr. Dinerstein seemed relieved. He had maintained his composure, and the payoff was loud applause from his fellow Republicans when the night concluded.
“I knew they would protect me,” he said. With that, he returned to a conversation about a coming event — a celebration of Abraham Lincoln.

The heartbreak of urban chicken husbandry
by Inara Verzemnieks
A Cock Crows in Portland
Time was running out for Fizzle the rooster. Four weeks ago, he had announced his sex to the world, or at least to his Portland, Oregon, neighborhood, crowing so vociferously that there was no denying his masculinity. And that was the problem, because while Portland law allows up to three hens in a resident’s backyard without a permit—making the city a particularly appealing place for those who wish to try their hands at the growing pastime of urban chicken-keeping—roosters are strictly prohibited because of the noise.
This left Fizzle’s owner, Jennifer Scott, in a bind (“Our neighbors love us dearly,” she said, “but not that much”). It also placed Fizzle firmly in an emerging urban underclass: the homeless rooster.
Questions of sustainability and food provenance and, to a lesser extent, fears about economic instability have motivated folks in more and more cities—places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Fort Collins, Colorado—to install chicken coops in their backyards, in the hope of reaping fresh eggs, free fertilizer, and organic pest control. Of course, introducing all these chickens into cities has had unanticipated consequences, flashes of red tooth and claw that interrupt bucolic fantasy: family pets gobbling up chickens; chickens gobbling up lead-based paint chips. But all this is nothing compared to the mysteries of chicken sexing.
Simply put, it’s not easy to size up a chicken’s true leanings, at least not right away. That’s a lesson many urban chicken owners learn the hard way, because no matter how attached they become to this creature they’re raising from an egg, even chicken-friendly cities such as Portland (where a tour highlighting the best in backyard avian architecture—think coops with eco-roofs and heated floors—attracted more than 600 people last year) draw a firm line at roosters. So the question becomes: How to get rid of them?
Turning them into dinner does not seem to be popular, sustainability benefits aside. Instead, other, more decidedly urban solutions have emerged. New postings pop up almost daily on Craigslist featuring roosters that need to leave Portland, pronto: “cute rooster who crows too loud for the neighbor. very sad to let him go, but we must until the city changes its mind.” Like personal ads for humans, many include descriptions of the ideal match, mentions of farm fantasies, and attempts to warn away the wrong partner: “Too small for a chicken dinner.”
There is another option for Portland’s roosters on the run: about 40 minutes from downtown, just off the Mount Hood Highway in the town of Boring, sits Geren’s Farm Supply. The feed store has long operated a small, low-ceilinged shed called the Critter Korner, where farmers bring unwanted livestock. Geren’s then sells the animals. In recent years, however, city people have turned Geren’s into a kind of relocation center for banished roosters, according to Roz Rushing, the daughter of Geren’s owners. “I’ve had grown men in tears because they raised them as babies and they live in the city and can’t have a rooster,” Rushing says from behind the feed-store counter, where a dry-erase board keeps a running tally of Critter Korner’s population, and an orange cat named Mr. Dunn naps amid the day’s paperwork. “Then there’s some people, they’ve been spurred by their roosters, and they can’t wait to get rid of ’em. They say, ‘Take it away now. I never want to see it again.’”
Fizzle’s owner decided against making the trek to Boring. Although Geren’s sells the animals only for farm use, it obviously can’t guarantee that they don’t become someone’s dinner. Not willing to take this chance, Scott posted and reposted Fizzle’s details on the Internet, praying for a response—and the continued patience of her neighbors.
Finally, one day, Fizzle received an offer from a compatible suitor: he would be leaving Portland, his birthplace, for a rural community about 20 miles south. Perhaps best of all, from Fizzle’s perspective, anyway, he would become a breeding rooster. Life in the country, it seems, has its upside.

From The Times of London
The 100 greatest singers of all time (Rolling Stone)
Since Elvis transformed polite pop music into rock 50-odd years ago, thousands of vocalists have entertained, moved and inspired us. To identify the best, Rolling Stone magazine polled nearly 200 musicians and pundits. Here are the results, alongside tributes from their famous fans
Aretha Franklin is a gift from God, says Mary J Blige.
There’s something about a voice that’s personal, not unlike the particular odour or shape of a given human body. Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession you really can’t keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world.
The beauty of the singer’s voice touches us in a place that’s as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire, another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we’ve recovered our senses.
If a vocal performance that tenderises our hearts is a kind of high-wire walk, an act both breathtaking and preposterous, we can reassure ourselves that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer have at least dug the foundations for the poles and strung the wire themselves. Singers reliant on existing or made-to-fit material, such as Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston or Roger Daltrey, might just be birds alighting on someone else’s wire. Listening to them, we may derive a certain thrill from wondering if they find the same meaning in the lyrics they’re putting across that the lyrics’ writer intended, or any meaning at all.
This points to what defines great singing in the rock-and-soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it’s a bridge we’re never sure the singer’s going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production or the audience’s expectations. The simplest example comes at the moment of the style’s inception, ie, Elvis Presley: at first, listeners thought that the white guy was a black guy. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that when Ed Sullivan’s television show tossed this disjunction into everyone’s living rooms, American culture was thrilled by it but also a little deranged, in ways it hasn’t got over.
Ultimately, the nature of the vocals in post-Elvis, post-Sam Cooke, post-Ray Charles popular music is the same as the role of the instrumental soloist in jazz. If it isn’t pushing against the boundaries of its form, it isn’t doing anything at all. Etta James, Ray Davies, Mama Cass, Mark Kozelek, Levi Stubbs Jr – these might not all seem like protest singers, but they are always singing against something; whether in themselves, in the band backing them, in the world they live in or the material they’ve been given.
We judge pre-rock singing by how perfectly the lyric is served. That’s the standard Frank Sinatra exemplified. We judge popular vocals since 1956 by what the singer unearths that the song itself could never quite. It explains why voices such as Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris or Billy Joel never really seem to be singing in the contemporary idiom, no matter how much they roughen up their material or accompaniment, and why Elvis – or Dylan – is always rock, even singing Blue Moon. It also explains precisely why such virtuosic pipes as Aretha Franklin’s – or, yes, Karen Carpenter’s – function in the new tradition. No lyric written by them or anyone else could ever express what their voices needed to, and they weren’t going to wait for the instrumental solo, or for the flourish of strings, to put it across for them. They got it into their voice, and their voices got it out into the air, and from there it passed into our bodies.
HOW THE VOTES WERE CAST
Rolling Stone magazine assembled a panel of 179 judges from the ranks of musicians and singers, record company executives and music industry insiders, journalists and Rolling Stone staff. Each voter was asked to list his or her 20 favourite vocalists from the rock era, in order of their importance. Those ballots were recorded and weighted according to methodology developed by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, which then tabulated and verified the results for Rolling Stone magazine. Jonathan Lethem
THE TOP 10
1 ARETHA FRANKLIN by Mary J. Blige
You know a force from heaven. You know something that God made. And Aretha is a gift from God. When it comes to expressing yourself through song, there is no one who can touch her. She is the reason why women want to sing.
Aretha has everything – the power, the technique. She is honest with everything she says. Everything she’s thinking or dealing with is all in the music, from Chain of Fools to Respect to her live performances. And she has total confidence; she does not waver at all. I think her gospel base brings that confidence, because in gospel they do not play around – they’re all about chops. This is no game to her.
As a child, I used to listen to Aretha’s music because my mom played Do Right Woman and Ain’t No Way every single day. I would see my mother cry when she listened to those songs, and I’d cry, too. Then I discovered her on my own with the Sparkle soundtrack. I must have played Giving Him Something He Can Feel 30 times in a row; eventually, I connected the dots to that voice my mom was listening to.
When you watch her work, you can see why Aretha is who she is. When we did the song Don’t Waste Your Time on my album Mary, she just went in there and ate that record like Pac-Man. She could be doing a church vocal run, and it would turn into some jazz-space thing; something I never encountered before. You’d say, “Where did that come from? Where did she find that note?” It’s beautiful to see, because it helps people with a lack of confidence in their ability, like myself. I look at her and think, “I need a piece of that. Whatever that is.”
2 RAY CHARLES by Billy Joel
Ray Charles had the most unique voice in popular music. He would do these improvisational things, a little laugh or a “Huh-hey!” It was as if something struck him as he was singing and he just had to react to it. He was getting a kick out of what he was doing. And his joy was infectious. Ray started out wanting to be Nat King Cole. When Nat went down low in a song, like Mona Lisa, there was a growl in there that was kind of sexy. Ray took that to a whole other level. He took the growl and turned it into singing. He took the yelp, the whoop, the grunt, the groan, and made them music.
Also, he was a piano player. The piano is a percussion instrument. You put your body into it. Ray had a lot of unique body movements I didn’t know until I saw him. Before I saw him, I heard those movements as he sang. I heard his shoulder go up a little on the left side, the way he lifted himself off the stool. Then I realised the voice I was hearing was also playing that piano.
The first Ray Charles I heard was Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. He’d had hits before that, the R&B stuff, like What’d I Say. But here is a black man giving you the whitest possible music in the blackest possible way, while all hell is breaking loose with the civil rights movement. When he sang You Don’t Know Me, I thought, “He isn’t just singing the lyrics. He’s saying, ‘You don’t know me. Get to know me.’”
Ray synthesised the blues into a language everybody could relate to. You can’t listen to Ray Charles and not say, “This is a man who felt deeply, who has lived this music.” He shows you his humanity. The spontaneity is evident. Another guy might say, “That was a mistake, we can’t leave that in.” No, Ray left it in. The mistake became the hook.
3 ELVIS PRESLEY by Robert Plant
There is a difference between people who sing and those who take that voice to another, otherworldly place; who create a euphoria within themselves. It’s transfiguration. And having met Elvis, I know he was a transformer. The first Elvis song I heard was Hound Dog. I heard this voice and it was absolutely, totally in its own place. The voice was confident, insinuating and taking no prisoners. He had those great whoops and diving moments, those sustains that swoop down to the note like a bird of prey.
I met Elvis with Zeppelin, after one of his concerts in the early Seventies. He wasn’t quite as tall as me. But he had a singer’s build. He had a good chest – that resonator. And he was driven. Anyway You Want Me is one of the most moving vocal performances I’ve ever heard. There is no touching Jailhouse Rock and the stuff recorded at the King Creole sessions. I can study the Sun sessions as a middle-aged guy looking back at a bloke’s career and go, “Wow, what a great way to start.” But I liked the modernity of the RCA stuff. I Need Your Love Tonight and A Big Hunk o’ Love were so powerful – those sessions sounded like the greatest place to be on the planet.
At that meeting, Jimmy Page joked with Elvis that we never sound-checked, but if we did, all I wanted to do was sing Elvis songs. Elvis thought that was funny and asked me, “Which songs do you sing?” I told him I liked the ones with all the moods, like that great country song Love Me – “Treat me like a fool/ Treat me mean and cruel/ But love me.” So when we were leaving, after a most illuminating and funny 90 minutes with the guy, I was walking down the corridor. He swung round the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing that song: “Treat me like a fool?” I turned around and did Elvis right back at him. We stood there, singing to each other.
By then, because of the forces around him, it was difficult for him to stretch out with more contemporary songwriters. When he died, he was 42. I’m 18 years older than that now. But he didn’t have many fresh liaisons to draw on – his old pals weren’t going to bring him the new gospel. I know he wanted to express more. But what he did was he made it possible for me, as a singer, to become otherworldly.
4 SAM COOKE by Van Morrison
If a singer is not singing from the soul, I do not even want to listen to it – it’s not for me. Sam Cooke reached down deep with pure soul. He had the rare ability to do gospel the way it’s supposed to be – he made it real, clean, direct. Gospel drove Sam Cooke through his greatest songs, as it did for Ray Charles, who came first, and Otis Redding. He had an incomparable voice. Sam Cooke could sing anything and make it work. But when you’re talking about his strength as a singer, range is not relevant. It was his power to deliver – it was about his phrasing, the totality of his singing.
He did a lot of great songs, but Bring It On Home to Me is a favourite. It’s a song that’s written to allow you to go wherever you can with it. A Change Is Gonna Come is another song I covered; it’s a great arrangement. Not many people can play this music any more, not the way Sam Cooke did it, coming directly from the church. What can we learn from a singer like him, from listening to songs like A Change Is Gonna Come? It depends on who the singer is and what they are capable of, where their head is and how serious they are. But Sam Cooke was born to sing.
5 JOHN LENNON by Jackson Browne
There was a tremendous intimacy in everything John Lennon did, combined with a formidable intellect. That is what makes him a great singer. In Girl, on Rubber Soul, he starts in this steely, high voice: “Is there anybody going to listen to my story?” It’s so impassioned, like somebody stepping from the shadows in a room. But when he comes to the chorus, you suddenly realise: he’s talking directly to her.
He had a confidence, a certainty about what he was feeling that carried over into everything he sang. One of the things about John Lennon and the Beatles that went by a lot of people was how unusual it was for people in their class, from Liverpool, to be catapulted into the higher reaches of entertainment and society without disguising their working-class roots and voices. It was such an audacious thing to do, not to change who they were. That was the heart of John Lennon’s singing – to say who he was and where he was from.
He didn’t sing very loud. I got that sense when I was learning Oh My Love from Imagine. That song has to be done quietly, which turns out to be a feat of strength. It’s ironic – to sing high and quiet, you have to be physically strong. In I’m Only Sleeping on Revolver he sounds sleepy, like he’s half in bed as he sings. Or I’m So Tired, on the White Album – there is an irritableness to it. These songs live in you because of the remarkable facility of the singer to inhabit those moments and portray them. Imagine is a masterful performance. He inhabits that idea – our innermost longing for a world in which peace is real – when he sings it. And it is sung with fearlessness, without erring on either side – polemic or sappy. It’s wonderful to have an idea expressed so well that everybody can sing it. That’s a song he made you want to sing.
The more he developed as a writer, he was able to show his voice in various contexts. There is a thrilling aloneness in the way he sings A Day in the Life. His singing on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is to the bone. He willed himself to express his pain: “Mother/ You had me/ But I never had you.” It’s a crushing depiction that stays with you for ever. Double Fantasy is less tortured – there is a lot of happiness there. The singing is just beautiful, perhaps more the product of singing at home, to his son. John Lennon went through a lot to have the life he had. He gave up some things to get others. And he died before a lot of those themes could be examined.
But it was a stunning thing – he always told the truth. He felt he had the right to talk about this stuff, and that gives his voice a singular identity. It’s not the chops of a heralded singer – no one goes on about his actual technique. He went right to what he felt, what he had to say.
6 MARVIN GAYE by Alicia Keys
There’s no sound like Marvin Gaye: the way he sang so softly, almost gently – but also with so much power. That came straight from the heart. Everything in his life – everything that he thought and felt – affected his singing. The first time I was really introduced to Marvin Gaye was the What’s Going On album, and I fell in love. It was so moving to hear him talk so desperately about the state of the world, on top of all that brilliant musicality. One of my favourite things he did was to follow the strings with his voice, or double things that the instruments are doing. There’s such a simple, subtle lushness to it that adds this whole other layer to the music.
These days we have a thousand tracks, and you can do different vocals on every track. But back then you really had to innovate, like the way Marvin answered himself in songs, or all that really distant backing work, where his voice is all the way in the back and echoing. It’s haunting; he delivered every single song with such clarity that it gave me chills. The live version of Distant Lover has to be one of the most incredible performances ever captured on tape. You can feel his confidence, his yearning – you can imagine his movements. The entire audience is hanging on his every word; he’s teasing them the whole time. That’s what makes Marvin Gaye immortal: the emotion that he evokes.
7 BOB DYLAN by Bono
I first heard Bob Dylan’s voice in the dark, when I was 13 years old, on my friend’s record player. It was his greatest-hits album, the first one. The voice was at once modern, in all the things it was railing against, and very ancient. It felt strangely familiar to an Irishman. We thought America was full of superheroes, but it was a much humbler people in these songs – farmers, people who have had great injustices done to them. The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the voice of a generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground – these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes – that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.
Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it’s full of wonder and worship. There is a voice for every Dylan you can meet, and the reason I’m never bored with Bob Dylan is because there are so many of them, all centred on the idea of pilgrimage. People forget that Bob Dylan had to warm up for Dr Martin Luther King before he made his great “I have a dream” speech – the preacher preceded by the pilgrim.
Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience’s face and said, “I dare you to think I’m kidding.”
8 OTIS REDDING by Booker T. Jones
The first time I saw Otis, I had no idea who he was. It was on the sidewalk at 926 East McLemore Avenue in Memphis, which was Stax Records. This guy was unloading equipment and suitcases from a station wagon, taking it into the studio. He was a driver for the singer Johnny Jenkins. I didn’t see him much the rest of the day until later, when he asked for his audition. He sang These Arms of Mine.
It was in B-flat. It didn’t seem like an audition at all. It was a performance. It wasn’t the size of his voice – we knew lots of people with vocal powers like that. It was the intent with which he sang. He was all emotion. It was like, “This guy is definitely not singing for the money.” I don’t think he ever did.
Range was not a factor in his singing. His range was somewhat limited. He had no really low notes and no really high notes. But Otis would do anything that implied emotion, and that’s where his physicality came in, because he was such a strong, powerful man. Backstage, he would be like a prizefighter waiting to get out there. Playing Respect live with him was just energy and relentless joy.
Without singing, Otis was more distracted, not sure of himself. He couldn’t make the same movements in the studio when he sang. He was more restricted. You got the impression, though. He would do that thing where he stomped the left foot, then the right. And we all played with more intensity around him. He had that magnetism – “I’m a man!” – and he knew it, too.
These Arms of Mine is still Otis’s signature song for me. It is so simple in its beauty and message. Here is a young man singing to a girl: “If you would even consider being with me, how happy I would be.” That’s such a basic emotion. That’s how he sang it, and that’s what got him over.
9 STEVIE WONDER by Cee-Lo
To me, Stevie Wonder’s voice always sounds like tears of joy – like he’s right on the verge of crying, but it’s out of glee and peace, as opposed to the pain of someone like a Sly Stone.
There’s a richness to his voice, a clarity to all of its inflections. That vibrato is so impactful and piercing, but he never loses that underlying straightforward singing voice. His lack of sight must heighten his other senses, his ability to imagine and feel. It makes his music very visual, very graphic.
The first time I remember hearing Stevie Wonder was when I heard him singing Fingertips in the movie Cooley High. I was in awe of this child’s ability to see himself so clearly and be so sure of himself so young. Then I had to go back and discover Stevie Wonder as a whole. My uncle had an album collection, so I had seen Talking Book and Innervisions, but I knew the covers before I knew the music. I got turned on to his amazing performances such as Superwoman, I Ain’t Gonna Stand for It and, of course, Ribbon in the Sky – that song is so simple, but it’s so significant. His voice has so much variation and such diversity.
His confidence and his sense of self are just supernatural. Stevie Wonder knows exactly who he is, what role and responsibility he’s been given. But he revels in being chosen, singled out, and that’s what makes him who he is. He’s like a miracle.
10 JAMES BROWN by Iggy Pop
For me, James Brown was never just the voice. It was the whole package. But the impact of that voice gave me hope, because it was a simple presentation and didn’t trade on range. And there was that scream. It was like an inner voice. It sounded like an assertion of rights of primitive man. He used to describe his dancing as “African nerve control”. He had a point. He was a terrific editor. The one that flipped me out – I still remember being in the car, hearing it – is I Can’t Stand It. He was down to f*** the chorus, f*** the melody. This is barely a riff. But he pushes the group along like the coxswain on a Roman galley: Stroke,motherf*****, uh!
He always has an edge in his ballads where he lets you know it’s real. There’s a lesser-known one called Mama’s Dead. It just kills me. At the end, after he’s sung all these heavy things, he just says, “Everybody got a mother, and you know what I’m talkin’ about.” Or in the chorus of It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World – a lesser artist would say, “It wouldn’t mean nothin’ without a woman.” Or “without a girl”. But they wouldn’t say both. And it’s not just a lyric. He is singing something primitive and basic. He tells you how society runs. Man makes this, this is how money works. Maybe that comes from being somebody who didn’t have many things when he started out. The part in his autobiography that always gets me is when he lived with his dad, tapping the pine trees for resin. You’re down to real poverty.
The big thing I got from him was, don’t just stand there and look at your shoe. F*** that. It had to be like something’s going on here. He always sounds like he’s breaking loose. Once you’ve made the decision to go out in front of people and start moving around, it frees up so many things. You’re now creating movement in a society that’s based on order. And within yourself, you feel different. That motion makes you make decisions as a vocalist, decisions that free you from the stilted stuff.
In those situations, music has a cathartic power, and the guys who do it, they know that. That’s why James Brown could call himself Soul Brother Number One – and nobody ever said he was bragging.
And the best of all the rest...
17 TINA TURNER
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw [Tina] perform,” says Beyoncé. “I never in my life saw a woman so powerful, so fearless.” Turner started touring with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue almost half a century ago; her breakthrough was their blazing 1971 cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary, which included the declaration that she never does anything “nice and easy”. “She was so direct, so raw,” says John Fogerty, who wrote the song. Age has only deepened the ache and grit in her powerhouse cries and moans during her long career as a solo artist. Melissa Etheridge says, “She can squeeze passion from any line.”
16 MICK JAGGER by Lenny Kravitz
I sometimes talk to people who sing perfectly in a technical sense who don’t understand Mick Jagger. But what he does is so complex: his sense of pitch and melody is really sophisticated. His vocals are stunning, flawless in their own kind of perfection. There are certain songs where he just becomes a different person. Take Angie: I’ve never heard that tone from him since, and it wasn’t there before. And I love when he sings falsetto, like on Emotional Rescue or Fool to Cry. I like him best when he’s singing super-raw. When I co-produced God Gave Me Everything, he did what he thought would be a scratch vocal. He barely knew the lyric – he was reading off a piece of paper. There were no stops, just one take. Bam! It ended up being the vocal we used on the record.
Mick is a disciplined artist, completely dedicated to his craft. His voice has changed somewhat and has a different texture, but it’s stronger now. One time the Stones were on tour, and during a two-week break Mick and I went on vacation in the Bahamas. In the evening he would go to the bottom floor of the place where we were staying and put on a Rolling Stones sound-check tape – just the band playing songs without him singing. He would stay down there, dancing and singing to keep himself in shape. Your voice is like a muscle. If you’re on the road and you stop for two weeks and then go back to do a show, you’re going to get hoarse. So he was down there every night practising. As a result, at 65 years of age, he’s stronger than ever.
28 JANIS JOPLIN by Melissa Etheridge
“She was shaking that shake that she did, and was screaming. I’d never seen anything like it,” says Melissa Etheridge of seeing Janis Joplin on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969. Joplin’s gravelly rasp, over the psychedelic blues of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the rough-hewn country soul on her later solo albums, represented a different approach for female vocalists: wild and uninhibited yet focused and deliberate. Her performances were more about passionate abandon than perfect pitch. “She would just kinda sing and scream and cry,” says Etheridge, “and she’d sound like an old black woman – which is what she was trying to sound like.”
60 BJÖRK by Chris Martin
When you land in Iceland, you feel like you’re somewhere a bit magical. Maybe it’s the volcanic activity, maybe it’s the dried fish, but something’s going on: everyone seems to be extraordinarily beautiful, and everyone appears to be able to sing. Their singers are so far ahead of everyone else – especially Björk. Her voice is so specific and such a new colour. Now that she’s been around for 20 years, everyone forgets quite how ­extraordinary she is. She could be singing the theme from Sesame Street, and it would sound completely different to how anyone else would do it, and ­completely magical.
She first crossed my radar on Big Time Sensuality, from that video where she’s on the back of a flatbed truck. I really got into her on Homo­genic, largely because there’s so much space left for the singing. On that album, there are strings and beats, but it isn’t very full musically, so she has to do all the dynamics and everything. If you really want to hear what she can do, listen to It’s Oh So Quiet, from Post: she can go from zero to 60 faster than any other vehicle in terms of singing. And then to angry.
In that movie Dancer in the Dark, she’s singing as a different person and it stills sounds completely genuine. She could be an opera singer or she could be a pop singer. Dulux has a catalogue that has all the colours you can buy of paint, right? That is how Björk’s voice is. She can do anything. In our studio, there are pictures on the wall of our favourite artists. I can see Mozart, Jay-Z, Gershwin, P.J. Harvey? and Björk.
32 BONO by Billie Joe Armstrong
I would describe Bono’s singing as 50 per cent Guinness, 10 per cent cigarettes – and the rest is religion. He’s a physical singer, like the leader of a gospel choir, and he gets lost in the melodic moment. He goes to a place outside himself, especially in front of an audience, when he hits those high notes. That’s where his real power comes from – the pure, unadulterated Bono. He talks about things he believes in, whether it’s world economics or Aids relief in Africa. But the voice always comes first. That’s where his conviction lies.
He has so many influences. You hear Joe Strummer, Bob Marley, Otis Redding, Elvis Presley, even John Lennon. And he has the same range as Robert Plant. It’s amazing, the notes he has to go through in the first lines of Sunday Bloody Sunday. But it’s filtered through this Irish choirboy. The Joshua Tree shows the mastery Bono has over his voice and what he learnt from punk, New Wave and musicians such as Bob Dylan. In the quiet moments of With or Without You, you can imagine him sitting under the stars. Then, when he comes back to the chorus, it’s a hailstorm.
A lot of Bono’s free-form singing comes from the band’s rhythms and the church-bell feeling of the Edge’s playing, the way the guitar sings in that delay. Bono can glide vocally through all of that. But it’s very natural. And he’s not afraid to go beyond what he’s capable of, into something bizarre like his falsetto in Lemon. I never had the feeling he was manipulating the power of his voice to show off. They say a submarine never goes in reverse. That’s Bono, always looking for a new way of singing something. That’s one thing I learnt from him: never rest. Keep learning and be a good listener. That’s the spirit of singing – and he definitely has it.
THE 100 GREATEST SINGERS
1 Aretha Franklin 2 Ray Charles 3 Elvis Presley 4 Sam Cooke 5 John Lennon
6 Marvin Gaye 7 Bob Dylan 8 Otis Redding 9 Stevie Wonder 10 James Brown
11 Paul McCartney 12 Little Richard 13 Roy Orbison 14 Al Green 15 Robert Plant
16 Mick Jagger 17 Tina Turner 18 Freddie Mercury 19 Bob Marley 20 Smokey Robinson
21 Johnny Cash 22 Etta James 23 David Bowie 24 Van Morrison 25 Michael Jackson
26 Jackie Wilson 27 Hank Williams 28 Janis Joplin 29 Nina Simone 30 Prince
31 Howlin’ Wolf 32 Bono 33 Stevie Winwood 34 Whitney Houston 35 Dusty Springfield
36 Bruce Springsteen 37 Neil Young 38 Elton John 39 Jeff Buckley 40 Curtis Mayfield
41 Chuck Berry 42 Joni Mitchell 43 George Jones 44 Bobby “Blue” Bland 45 Kurt Cobain
46 Patsy Cline 47 Jim Morrison 48 Buddy Holly 49 Donny Hathaway 50 Bonnie Raitt
51 Gladys Knight 52 Brian Wilson 53 Muddy Waters 54 Luther Vandross 55 Paul Rodgers
56 Mavis Staples 57 Eric Burdon 58 Christina Aguilera 59 Rod Stewart 60 Björk
61 Roger Daltrey 62 Lou Reed 63 Dion 64 Axl Rose 65 David Ruffin 66 Thom Yorke
67 Jerry Lee Lewis 68 Wilson Pickett 69 Ronnie Spector 70 Gregg Allman 71 Toots Hibbert
72 John Fogerty 73 Dolly Parton 74 James Taylor 75 Iggy Pop 76 Steve Perry 77 Merle Haggard
78 Sly Stone 79 Mariah Carey 80 Frankie Valli 81 John Lee Hooker 82 Tom Waits
83 Patti Smith 84 Darlene Love 85 Sam Moore 86 Art Garfunkel 87 Don Henley
88 Willie Nelson 89 Solomon Burke 90 The Everly Brothers 91 Levon Helm
92 Morrissey 93 Annie Lennox 94 Karen Carpenter 95 Patti LaBelle 96 B.B. King
97 Joe Cocker 98 Stevie Nicks 99 Steven Tyler 100 Mary J. Blige

After a life of crime, state's oldest inmate succumbs at 92
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff
He began his career in crime as a teenager in Florida, landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list twice, and committed his last offense at 78, when he tried to rob an elderly antiques storeowner in Brookline who beat him with a baseball bat.
Nick George Montos, the oldest prison inmate in Massachusetts and a man described by a former prosecutor yesterday as a "criminal through and through," died early Sunday at age 92, after being taken from MCI-Norfolk to a local hospital, said a Department of Correction spokeswoman. He had recently asked Governor Deval Patrick to commute his sentence because of poor health, but the Parole Board had not acted on the request.
"I'm happy that he died in prison," said Sonia Paine, 86, the owner of the Brookline antiques store who thrashed him with an aluminum bat after he tried to hold her up at gunpoint in 1995. "I would have been sick if somebody told me he got out. I have no sympathy for a person like this."
But Nancy W. Ahmadifar - a member of End the Odds, a volunteer group that advocates for prisoners' rights - lamented that the Parole Board never approved Montos's request to let him live his last days with an elderly sister in Port Richey, Fla.
Although she had never met Montos or spoken with him or reviewed his entire criminal record, she pushed for his release, primarily because of his age and the tens of thousands of dollars it costs each year to incarcerate him. "He was no longer a threat to society," she said.
Montos, who walked with a cane, suffered a heart attack a couple of weeks ago that prompted doctors at New England Medical Center to implant a pacemaker.
In a request for parole that was rejected by the Parole Board earlier this year, Montos wrote that he had triple bypass surgery in 2000, could walk no more than 10 to 15 feet because of shortness of breath, and had prostate cancer and other medical problems.
"I realize that my criminal record is extensive," he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was provided by Ahmadifar. "I suspect there may be some who will suggest I deserve no mercy or compassion. I can understand their feelings. But there is no way I am going to live to serve out my sentence."
He was serving 33 to 40 years for his convictions for the attempted robbery of the antiques dealer and a bank robbery six days earlier.
Terrel Harris, a spokesman for the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, said the Parole Board's executive clemency unit was gathering documents about Montos's commutation request when he died.
He died Sunday at 2 a.m. of natural causes at a hospital that Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the Correction Department, declined to identify.
He was the only nonagenarian among the 11,271 inmates in the prison system on Nov. 24.
The next oldest inmate is an 85-year-old man, Wiffin said.
Montos's sister, Sophie P. Walton of Port Richey, declined to comment.
Montos began a career in crime when he was only 14 years old, said John P. Benzan, a former assistant Middlesex district attorney who won a conviction of Montos in 1998 for the robbery of a Fleet Bank branch in Weston that he committed on July 12, 1995, six days before the failed antiques store holdup.
For more than 60 years, he crisscrossed the country, robbing banks and jewelry stores, stealing cars, and cracking safes, according to law enforcement officials. He was a small, compactly built man with several scars on his face.
He first landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list Sept. 8, 1952, in connection with a robbery in Georgia, said Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman for the bureau's office in Boston.
Two FBI agents arrested Montos in August 1954 in Chicago as the fugitive and a companion sat in a car waiting for a freight train to cross, said Marcinkiewicz.
In 1956, Montos escaped from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, and he was placed on the Ten Most Wanted list again on March 2 of that year, she said.
He was arrested 26 days later in a Memphis motel after someone recognized him as a fugitive.
His career in crime ended when he tried to rob Paine's store.
She mistakenly thought he only wanted his gun appraised, but then he called her an anti-Semitic epithet and tied her up.
Paine, wriggled free, pressed a silent alarm, and then grabbed a bat and swung at Montos, kneeling at the safe.
"I wish he'd come in again," said Paine, a grandmother of six. "I'd beat the hell out of him."
Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.

Betty James, Who Named the Slinky Toy, Is Dead at 90
By DENNIS HEVESI NY TIMES
Betty James, who came up with the name Slinky for the stair-walking spring that has delighted children for more than 60 years and who ran the toy company after her husband, the inventor, left it and his family in 1960, died Thursday in Philadelphia. She was 90 and lived in Hollidaysburg, Pa., where the company, James Industries, is located.
The cause was congestive heart failure, her son Tom said.
Paging through a dictionary in 1944, Mrs. James put her finger on the word slinky because she thought it best described the sinuous and graceful movement and the soft sound of the expanding and contracting metal coil her husband, Richard, had fashioned.
Mr. James was an engineer at a shipbuilding company in Philadelphia in 1943 when a torsion spring fell off a table and flipped end over end on a ship’s deck.
“I think I can make a toy out of this,” he told his wife.
The Jameses made 400 Slinkys and, just before Christmas 1945, persuaded Gimbels department store in Philadelphia to let them set up a ramp in the toy department. Not only could a Slinky perform serial somersaults down the ramp, but it could turn a child instantly into a faultless juggler. At $1 each, those first 400 sold out in 90 minutes.
So far, more than 300 million Slinkys, including rainbow-hued plastic models and Slinky Dogs, have been sold, enough to circle the earth about 150 times, if stretched, which they shouldn’t be.
Mrs. James was president of James Industries from 1960 until 1998, when the company was acquired by Poof Products of Plymouth, Mich., a manufacturer of foam sports balls. Ray Dallavecchia, president of what is now Poof-Slinky, would not disclose company revenue. Slinkys now cost $4 to $5; Slinky Dogs cost about $20.
Betty Mattas was born in Altoona, Pa., on Feb. 13, 1918, the only child of Claire and Irene Mattas. She attended Pennsylvania State University until she met and married Mr. James. They ran the company together for 14 years.
As successful as Slinkys have been for 63 years, there have been slumps. In 1960, with sales down, Mr. James joined what his wife considered a religious cult and moved to Bolivia, leaving her with six children and the company. Mr. James died in 1974.
To a degree, Slinky Dog came to the rescue. The original version — a waggling spring between a plastic head and tail — was quite successful.
Then, in 1995, a new Slinky Dog was bred. It was modeled after the version featured in the Disney computer-animated movie “Toy Story,” about toys that come to life to battle a bully who likes to torture toys. More than 800,000 of the new Slinky Dogs were sold that year, and revenue jumped 25 percent.
In 2001, Pennsylvania legislators named Slinky the official state toy, and Mrs. James was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame.
Besides her son Tom, Mrs. James is survived by two other sons, Christopher and Peter; three daughters, Elizabethe James, Susan Peoples and Rebekah Morris; 16 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Having raised six children largely on her own and also enjoying a gaggle of grandchildren, Mrs. James was adamant about keeping the original Slinky affordable. In 1996, when the price ranged from $1.89 to $2.69, she told The New York Times: “So many children can’t have expensive toys, and I feel a real obligation to them. I’m appalled when I go Christmas shopping and $60 to $80 for a toy is nothing. With 16 grandchildren you can go into the national debt.”