Month: May 2020

If you add garlic to your guacamole, we have bad news: You’re not doing it right. Do you mince the onion? That’s also a no-no. And, please, leave the avocado lumpy.So says 97-year-old Diana Kennedy, a foremost authority on traditional Mexican cuisine. Over many decades, she has mastered, documented and become fiercely protective of the culinary styles of each region.  This summer, a portrait as zesty as her dishes comes in the form of the documentary ” Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy,” which marks director Elizabeth Carroll’s feature film debut.The documentary traces the unlikely rise of an Englishwoman who became one of the most respected authorities on Mexican food. She’s been called “the Julia Child of Mexico,” “the Mick Jagger of Mexican Cuisine” and even the “Indiana Jones of food.”Carroll’s camera follows Kennedy as she navigates Mexico in her trusty Nissan truck, walks through her remarkable garden, teaches professional chefs in a harrowing class in her home, and meticulously makes coffee — toasting her beans in an antique toaster.”It’s some of the best coffee I’ve ever had. I know that sounds like what I’m supposed to say, but it’s true,” said Carroll, laughing.The film includes various TV appearances by Kennedy during her career as well as interviews with notable chefs, including Alice Waters, José Andrés, Rick Bayless, Pati Jinich and Gabriela Cámara. It’s less a cooking lesson than a beautifully drawn character study.”I just felt really drawn to her and very comfortable with her, like there was some kind of unspoken understanding between us when we would look at each other,” said Carroll. “I think she’s somebody who operates a lot on instinct and I think that there was just an instinct of trust between us.”Kennedy, a culinary purist, arrived in Mexico in the late 1950s and has traveled thousands of miles throughout the country, often alone, seeking out regional foods.  She’s written nine cookbooks, faithfully acknowledging where and from whom the recipes were obtained. Kennedy has received the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government — the highest award given to foreigners for service to Mexico.”She saw a need for recording recipes that were potentially being lost by industrialization,” said Carroll. “Nobody was recording those recipes in an official way. She saw an opening there to take on a responsibility like that and she obviously devoted her life to it.”When Kennedy makes guacamole, she uses serrano peppers (“Keep your hands off the jalapeno, por favor!” she says in the film). Add salt, finely chopped tomatoes, but no lime. There is cilantro, and if some guests don’t like it she has this advice — “Don’t invite them.””She sees it as her responsibility to share and perfect the original way that things have been done. And that if other people want to deviate from that, they have to know the rules first,” said Carroll.Jinich, host and co-producer of PBS’ two-time James Beard award-winning “Pati’s Mexican Table,” said Kennedy’s outsider perspective helped as she documented the pillars of the cuisine.  “It’s no coincidence that this British woman had to come and see and recognize and be fascinated with everything that for us Mexicans was just our Mexican food,” Jinich said. “I feel like the entire country of Mexico is indebted to Diana Kennedy.”Kennedy and Carroll met in a serendipitous way in 2013. The filmmaker was in Austin, Texas, and beginning to research a film about how recipes and traditions are passed down. She soon realized she’d have to talk to Kennedy.But how? Kennedy lived in the mountains of western Mexico. Carroll looked around online for an hour, gave up and went to a bookstore. She pulled into the parking lot and looked up to see the marquee: “Book signing with Diana Kennedy tomorrow.””It was confusing and exciting and wild and special all at the same time,” said Carroll. “I was like, ‘OK. There’s some divine games happening here.'”  The film took more than six years to make and it captures a woman confronting her own mortality but still insistent that her work continue. “What are you going to do when I’m gone?” she asks in the film. “Who else is going to start screaming?”
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It may have been plagued with controversy after Oprah Winfrey pulled out as executive producer, but “On the Record” has moved on. The the new #MeToo documentary about rape accusations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons is a powerful look at one woman’s agonizing decision to go public, and an exploration of misogyny and sexual harassment in the music industry. Most importantly, though, it shines a light on the unique burden faced by women of color, who are often not believed or accused of being traitors to their own community if they come forward with accusations. The film premieres Wednesday on the new streaming service HBO Max.  There’s an elegant, almost poetic silence to one of the most compelling scenes of “On the Record,” a powerful new documentary about sexual violence that knows just when to dial down to a hushed quiet.In the early morning darkness of Dec. 13, 2017, former music executive Drew Dixon walks to a coffee shop and buys the New York Times. On the front page is the story in which she and two others accuse the powerful hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, her former boss, of rape. Dixon examines the article, carefully folds the paper back up, puts on a wool cap as if for protection — and crumples into silent tears.They are tears of fear, surely, about the ramifications of going public — but also, clearly, relief. It feels as if the poison of a decades-old toxic secret is literally seeping out of her.  “It saved my life,” she now says of that decision.”On the Record,” by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, provides a searingly intimate portrayal of the agonizing process of calculating whether to go public. Beyond that, it shines an overdue light on the music industry, where sexual harassment is “just baked into the culture,” in the words of Sil Lai Abrams, another Simmons accuser featured in the film.Most importantly, it puts a spotlight on women of color, and the unique and painful burden they often face in coming forward.The project also has been associated with controversy, of course, due to Oprah Winfrey’s well-documented withdrawal as executive producer just before the Sundance Film Festival, scuttling a distribution deal with Apple. Winfrey later acknowledged Simmons had called her and waged a pressure campaign, but said that wasn’t why she bailed.But the film has moved on. It opened at Sundance anyway to cheers and two emotional standing ovations, and was soon picked up by HBO Max, where it premieres Wednesday.For Dixon, vindication at Sundance was sweet.”Just standing there, on our own, and realizing that we were enough,” she said in an interview last week along with Abrams and accuser Sherri Hines, of the premiere. “That our courage was enough. That none of us waffled. None of us buckled. That we were strong enough to defend ourselves and each other.”Less than two years earlier, Dixon had been plagued by doubt. She’d expected that the film, which began shooting before she decided to go public, would be a general look at #MeToo and the music industry. But then the directors wanted to focus more on her journey.”The idea of being blackballed by the black community was really scary,” she says. “But I also felt this pressure, this responsibility to be brave, to highlight the experience of black women as survivors. The opportunity might never come again.”Dixon was in her 20s when she got her dream job at Simmons’ Def Jam Recordings. The daughter of two Washington, D.C. politicians — her mother, Sharon Pratt, was mayor — she attended Stanford University, then moved to New York to join the exciting world of hip-hop.As her star rose at Def Jam, she assumed that would immunize her from what she describes as Simmons’ constant harassment. He would come into her office, lock the door and expose himself.  But he wasn’t violent. Until the night in 1995 when, she says, he lured her to his apartment with the excuse of a demo CD she needed to hear. He told her to get it from the bedroom, she says, and then came in wearing only a condom, and raped her.Simmons has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.The film weaves together Dixon’s and multiple other accusations against Simmons with key voices of women of color like Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo movement, and law professor Kimberle Williams Crenshaw.”A lot of black women felt disconnected from #MeToo initially,” Burke says. “They felt, ‘that’s great that this sister is out there and we support her, but this movement is not for US.'”When black women do seek to come forward, they risk not only not being believed, but being called traitors to their community, both Burke and Dixon explain.”There’s this added layer in the black community that we have to contend with, like, ‘Oh you’re gonna put THIS before race?'” says Burke. “You let this thing happen to you, now we have to pay for it as a race? And we’re silenced even more.’Dick and Ziering, who’ve made several films about sexual assault, say they saw it as essential to go beyond the current #MeToo discussion and focus on the experience of black women.”Now you can come forward — but what about women of color? What do they face?” asks Ziering. “There are so many impediments.”For Dixon, coming forward was clearly worth it. It’s more complicated for Abrams. Even as the audience was applauding at Sundance, Abrams, who attempted suicide after her alleged rape by Simmons, was weeping next to her young adult son, worrying about him as he learned the full details for the first time, she says.  Abrams also says that “as a result of coming forward, my career has stalled. Everything just dried up.”Dixon says it remains to be seen whether she will be punished within the music industry. She says she recently was up for a job, things were going well, and suddenly all went quiet. “They must have Googled me,” she says.But she feels, most importantly, like she rescued a part of herself: her creativity, her drive, her very sense of who she is.For more than 20 years, she says, “I had banished the young woman who came to New York City prepared to work really hard in a man’s game, to prove she could do it, but not expecting that she would be raped.””In order to banish the pain I banished part of her light,” she says. “When I said it out loud, those parts of me lit up again.”Her message to any other survivors out there — and she hopes they will come forward: “Facing it frees parts of yourself that you don’t even know you’ve missed.”  
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J.K. Rowling is publishing a new story called The Ickabog, which will be free to read online to help entertain children and families stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic. The Harry Potter author said Tuesday she wrote the fairy tale for her children as a bedtime story over a decade ago. Set in an imaginary land, it is a stand-alone story “about truth and the abuse of power” for children from 7 to 9 years old and is unrelated to Rowling’s other books. Rowling said the draft of the story had stayed in her attic while she focused on writing books for adults. She said her children, now teenagers, were “touchingly enthusiastic” when she recently suggested retrieving the story and publishing it for free.  “For the last few weeks I’ve been immersed in a fictional world I thought I’d never enter again. As I worked to finish the book, I started reading chapters nightly to the family again,” she said.  “‘The Ickabog’s first two readers told me what they remember from when they were tiny and demanded the reinstatement of bits they’d particularly liked (I obeyed).”The first two chapters were posted online Tuesday, with daily installments to follow until July 10.The book will be published in print later this year, and Rowling said she will pledge royalties from its sales to projects helping those particularly affected by the pandemic.  
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Stanley Ho, the man credited with transforming Macau from a sleepy former Portuguese colony into one of the world’s gambling meccas, has died at the age of 98. His daughter, Pansy, said Ho died Tuesday at a hospital in his native Hong Kong. The son of a once-influential and wealthy Hong Kong family who lost their fortune in the Great Depression of the 1930s, Stanley Ho escaped to Macau during World War Two when Japanese forces captured Hong Kong.  He built his fortune smuggling luxury goods from Macau to China, turning that into a successful trading company.  Ho’s gambling empire began when he successfully bid for a casino monopoly from Portuguese authorities in 1962.  He built a harbor to ferry high-stakes gamblers from Hong Kong to his casino, and also had stakes in numerous businesses in the enclave, including department stores, luxury hotels and horse racing tracks.   By the time China gained control of Macau and opened it to foreign competition in 2002, Ho had become notorious not only for his wealth but his flamboyant lifestyle, his love of ballroom dancing and the 17 children he fathered with four wives.  He was forced to restructure his business in 2012 after a legal battle broke out within the family. Ho was also dogged by allegations that he had ties to Chinese criminal gangs known as triads, which he denied.  
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Longtime broadcast news executive William J. Small, who led CBS News’ Washington coverage during the civil rights movement, Vietnam War and Watergate and was later president of NBC News and United Press International, died Sunday, CBS News said. He was 93. Small, whose career spanned from overseeing the news operation at a small radio station to testifying in Congress about press freedom, died in a New York hospital after a brief illness unrelated to the coronavirus, the network said. During a six-decade career, Small supervised, guided and in some cases hired generations of some of the best-known reporters and anchors in television news, among them: Dan Rather, Eric Sevareid, Daniel Schorr, Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer, “60 Minutes” correspondents Ed Bradley and Lesley Stahl and “Face the Nation” anchor Bob Schieffer. “He was heroic and steadfast, especially during Watergate, when it seemed we were getting angry calls from the White House every night,” Stahl said in a statement. “He made us want to be better — and nobody wanted to disappoint him.” Small hired the current CBS News president, Susan Zirinsky, to her first job at the network when she was 20. She remembered Small as a “hero to journalism” and said, “every one of us carries Bill Small’s legacy with us — it’s the core to who we are as journalists.” Picture showing the logo of the NBC Television in front of the Channel building in Burbank, Calif., Oct.11, 2006.Small, born in 1926 in Chicago, broke into broadcasting after fighting in the Army in World War II, including stints as news director at WLS-AM in Chicago and WHAS-TV in Louisville. Less than a year after he arrived, the Kentucky station was honored in 1957 as the nation’s top news operation by the organization that is now known as the Radio Television Digital News Association. Impressed by Small’s work in Louisville, CBS executives hired him in 1962 to be assistant news director of the network’s Washington bureau. He was promoted to bureau director within a year and “put together a TV News bureau the likes of which Washington had never known,” reporter Roger Mudd wrote in his 2009 book, “The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News.” JFK assassinationEarly in his tenure, Small presided over the network’s coverage of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, scrambling cameras to the White House and Capitol Hill and turning a station wagon into a makeshift broadcast truck so they could get live pictures from Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s home. Small didn’t leave the bureau for four days, “from the shooting to the burial,” he told The Associated Press in 2013. “When I finally got home, I asked my wife, What was it like?' She said,There was no one on the streets. Everyone was watching television.'” Kennedy’s assassination marked a seminal moment for television, then still in its nascence, as a source of news and solace — from CBS anchor Walter Cronkite’s tearful announcement of the president’s death to live, wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral procession to Arlington National Cemetery. There would be others on Small’s watch, including clashes over civil rights legislation, bitter divides over the Vietnam War and the 1972 Watergate break-in that prompted myriad legal and journalistic inquiries into President Richard Nixon’s involvement and ultimately led to his resignation. “Backed by the mystique of Murrow’s CBS and his own uncanny judge of talent, Small helped attract a stream of reporters, analysts and producers whose learning, talent, skill and experience were without precedent in news broadcasting,” Mudd wrote, calling him a “sophisticated judge of journalistic horseflesh.” Small remained in charge of the Washington bureau until 1974, when CBS moved him to a senior position at its New York headquarters. Testified before Congress in 1978The promotion put him next in line to become president of CBS News, but after he testified before Congress in 1978 urging strong limits on police entering newsrooms, the network instead assigned him to be its chief lobbyist in Washington. Small defected to NBC in 1979, becoming president of the network’s news division and hiring away several CBS reporters, including Mudd and Marvin Kalb. In 1982, he became president of the UPI wire service. Small and his late wife, Gish, had two daughters and six grandchildren. He is the author of two books on the role of the media in politics and society, taught communications and media management at Fordham University and was on the sociology faculty at the University of Louisville. Small spent the last decade of his career as chairman of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which hands out Emmy Awards for television news and documentaries, retiring in 2010. In 2014, the organization honored Small with its lifetime achievement award. In its presentation, it recognizing him as a television news icon whose work in Washington was “paramount in the dramatic evolution of network news that continues today.”  
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Jimmy Cobb, a percussionist and the last surviving member of Miles Davis’ 1959 Kind of Blue groundbreaking jazz album that transformed the genre and sparked several careers, died Sunday. His wife, Eleana Tee Cobb, announced on Facebook that her husband died at his New York City home from lung cancer. He was 91. Born in Washington, D.C., Cobb told The Associated Press in 2019 he listened to jazz albums and stayed up late to hear disc jockey Symphony Sid play jazz in New York City before launching his professional career. He said it was saxophonist Cannonball Adderley who recommended him to Davis, and he ended up playing on several Davis recordings. Cobb’s role as a drummer on the Kind of Blue jam session headed by Davis would forever change his career. That album also featured Adderley and John Coltrane. FILE – The “Kind of Blue” album cover is on display at Bull Moose record store in Portland, Maine, August 17, 2019, the 60th anniversary of the album’s release.Kind of Blue, released on Aug. 17, 1959, captured a moment when jazz was transforming from bebop to something newer, cooler and less structured. The full takes of the songs were recorded only once, with one exception, Cobb said. Freddie Freeloader needed to be played twice because Davis didn’t like a chord change on the first attempt, he said. Davis, who died in 1991, had some notes jotted down, but there weren’t pages of sheet music. It was up to the improvisers to fill the pages. “He’d say, ‘this is a ballad. I want it to sound like it’s floating.’ And I’d say, ‘OK,’ and that’s what it was,” Cobb recalled. The album received plenty of acclaim at the time, yet the critics, the band and the studio couldn’t have known it would enjoy such longevity. Cobb and his bandmates knew the album would be a hit but didn’t realize at the time how iconic it would become. “We knew it was pretty damned good,” Cobb joked. Kind of Blue has sold more than 4 million copies and remains the best-selling jazz album of all time. It also served as a protest album for African American men who looked to Davis and the other jazz musicians to break stereotypes about jazz and black humanity.  Cobb would also work with such artists as Dinah Washington, Pearl Bailey, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Wynton Kelly and Stan Getz. He’d also release a number of albums on his own. He performed well into his late 80s and played in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2017, as part of the New Mexico Jazz Festival. Jazz fans from throughout the American Southwest came to pay their respects in what many felt was a goodbye.  Cobb released his last album, This I Dig of You, with Smoke Sessions Records in August 2019. 
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Country music singer Morgan Wallen apologized Sunday following his weekend arrest on public intoxication and disorderly conduct charges.
Wallen, 27, was arrested Saturday night after he was kicked out of Kid Rock’s bar in downtown Nashville, news outlets reported.
Wallen said on Twitter that he and some friends were “horse-playing” after a few bar stops.
“We didn’t mean any harm, and we want to say sorry to any bar staff or anyone that was affected,” Wallen tweeted. “Thank you to the local authorities for being so professional and doing their job with class. Love y’all.”
Wallen’s hits include “Whiskey Glasses” and “Chasin’ You.” He competed on “The Voice” in 2014 and co-wrote songs for Jason Aldean and Kane Brown.
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